10 book quotes from my recent reads

I missed last week of  The Artsy Reader’s Top Ten Tuesday so here I am catching up. 🙂 Given that I do not have much to share about books with fall covers, please allow me to post about: Favorite Book Quotes (these could be quotes from books you love, or bookish quotes in general).

Suppose permission is granted, here are the lines that moved my heart from my most recent reads. 🙂

1. “Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.” ― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

2. “Remember: the quality of the answers we get in this life is based on the quality of the questions we ask.” ―  Charles R. Johnson, The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling

3. “No one wants to be alive when they’re forgotten.” ― Hieu Minh Nguyen, Not Here

4. “If you want to know why people sacrifice everything for love, you have to start by asking how they fell in love.” ― Stephen Westaby, Fragile Lives: A Heart Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table

5. “You have to have a home first to be uprooted from it. You have to know what love is to feel alone.” ― Etaf Rum, A Woman is No Man

6. “Life is all about small margins. A few inches here and there.” ― Fredrik Backman, Things My Son Needs to Know About the World

7. “Every time you sat down to create something your soul was at stake. Every page—indeed, every paragraph—had been a risk. Every sentence had been a prayer.” ― Charles R. Johnson, Night Hawks: Stories

8. “You know a bomb crater
can be made into a swimming hole.

You have learned
dark blood is better news
than bright.”
― Khaled Hosseini, Sea Prayer

9. “What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.” ― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

10. I thought about what I had lost, what I continued to lose, and I realized it was the same thing we had been losing for centuries, the ability to say “enough.” ― Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Children of the Land

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What are your favorite book quotes? Share them below with your TTT, too!

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10.06.2020
©2020 Rosemawrites@A Reading Writer. All Rights Reserved.
Photos via The Artsy Reader and Goodreads

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

10 books on my Fall 2020 TBR

Amidst the chaos and division happening, there is one thing I think we all can agree in. This year is challenging, physically, emotionally, spiritually, psychologically, and all the -ly’s I missed to write here.

As I try to look at the bright sides of life (to keep me sane as I near my 7th month aloneness in a foreign land as an expat), 2020 has been a productive year for my reading-self. My target was just to read 24 books and as of now, I have finished 47 books! Oh, and in case you want to know about the best reads (so far) for the year, you can find them here.

How will this year wrap-up in terms of the “reading” part of A Reading Writer? We’ll see today as this week’s The Artsy Reader’s Top Ten Tuesday is about Books On My Fall 2020 TBR (or spring if you live in the southern hemisphere).

I divided them into genres, for easier reference. 🙂

Category: Contemporary Fiction and a Re-read

I’ve read The First Phone Call from Heaven by Mitch Albom back in 2014. Currently, I am re-reading it via virtual storytelling sessions with my husband whom I last saw earlier this year because we’re stuck away from each other. #LoveInTheTimeOfCovid, that is. I read to him almost every night, one chapter per day. It will take time but sharing moments together despite the miles is a key to keeping the love alive, I guess. 🙂

Category: Classic

I have mentioned quite a lot of times that I am (forgive me) not a classic fan but Great Expectations by Charles Dickens is suggested by the husband, hence I am braving this 500+ pages novel and let’s see how it goes!

Category: Asian Writers (descent)

Aside from trying some classics this year (like Wuthering Heights), I also made a pact with myself to read more from Asian writers. The definition can be those who still live in this continent or Asian in terms of descent. I’ve read a couple this year and I am following them up with these three: The Leavers by Lisa Ko , A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza, and The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Category: Non-Fictions for my Writing Heart

As you may know by now, the half of “A Reading Writer” is a “poetry writer” and a corporate writer. Hence my interest towards the craft extends to my “reading”-half, too. Currently, I have The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling by Charles R. Johnson, On Writing
by Charles Bukowski and Why Poetry by Matthew Zapruder. I am excited to learn a lot from these amazing voices.

Category: Poetry

And this list will never be complete without poetry books. This time I want to celebrate the women poets! I have read Mary Oliver‘s Pulitzer-winning collection — Dream Work, and I was fascinated by how she uses concrete images, simple words, to convey deep emotions and realizations to her readers. So to cap of the list, here are Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems and West Wind both by Mary Oliver.

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Have you read any of these books? How do you think of each category? What books are in your TBR for the rest of 2020? Share them with your TTT!

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09.22.2020
©2020 Rosemawrites@A Reading Writer. All Rights Reserved.
Photos via The Artsy Reader and Goodreads

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.