The Underlined

For all the times I've underlined passages in books -- and then promptly forgot about them.

And what after all is a soul mate?”
“A soul mate is when you really think someone is great. You really like her a lot. You like when she explains things to you. You love her. That’s a soul mate.

—Nicholson Baker, HOUSE OF HOLES

Ain’t that the way it is sometimes,” Lila said. “You don’t know a damn thing about them and yet you love them to pieces.

—Nicholson Baker, HOUSE OF HOLES

Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it.

—Ann Patchett, STATE OF WONDER

I knew every inhale and exhale of my girlfriend, I knew the long pause every morning between sock and shoe on her left foot and sock and shoe on her right foot, as she dressed and contemplated the day to come. I knew her fears and quiet joys and she knew mine.

—Gabrielle Hamilton, BLOOD, BONES & BUTTER

Having an affair, no matter how enlightened and forward-thinking the feminist in you is, is still an act of hostility, usually retaliatory…I remember meeting a friend of Michele’s some years later, herself married, who said, with a puzzled look on her face, “But why would people who love each other hurt each other?” Possibly forty-five seconds of silence ensued before I erupted in the deepest belly laughter of my life.”

—Gabrielle Hamilton, BLOOD, BONES & BUTTER

But you’re bound to lose if you let the blues / get you scared to feel

—Joni Mitchell, “Willy”

“Heaven, Kiwi thought, would be the reading room of a great library. But it would be private. Cozy. You wouldn’t have to worry about some squeaky-shoed librarian turning the lights off on you or gauging your literacy by reading the names on your book spines, and there wouldn’t be a single other patron. The whole place would hum with a library’s peace, filtering softly over you like white bars of light…”

—Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

Hopes were like ladies, Mom told us. Hopes were wallflowers. Hopes hugged the perimeter of a dance floor in your brain, tugging at their party lace, all perfume and hems and doomed expectation. They fanned their dance cards, these guests that pressed against the walls of your heart.

—Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

Pennies. A lintlike currency, value that collected in corners…People thought the worst robbers stole the most, whole vaults. But it was the smallest denomination that you stole, he wrote later in the Field Notes, that was the real measure of your greed.

—Swamplandia! by Karen Russell