Collections: Beautiful, Meaningful Words

BuzzFeed has a post of 51 of the Most Beautiful Sentences in Literature and it inspired me. I keep a journal of my favorite lines from books I've read. Here are some words that I have collected where I found deep, personal meaning and connection.


"I was a New Yorker, and if you are a real New Yorker, you don’t leave. You want to leave all the time but you don’t. That’s something fake New Yorkers do. The same way that if you’re really part of a family, you don’t leave it. To leave a family physically felt more drastic. Like leaving a self behind."

Fiction Ruined My Life, a memoir, by Jeanne Darst

"Once my family’s strong, predictable safety net, I now felt like the trapeze artist himself, flying from bar to bar, grasping at any line that might swing my way in hopes of staying afloat."

Househusband, by Ad Hudler

"I’d always thought confidence was as permanent as eye color or earlobe size, but it had become clear to me that it was as fragile as cornchips."

Househusband, by Ad Hudler

"It takes time to find the courage to display the parts of yourself that aren’t bright and shining. But you have to see them, have to know they’re inside you, because they will resonate in the landscapes you control."

Sebastian, by Anne Bishop

"I have not survived against all odds. I have not witnessed the extraordinary. I have not lived to tell. This, this is my story."

Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, by Amy Krouse Rosenthal 

"It seems we humans so want to divvy the world up into clean little packages that fit neatly together. But in reality, each package seeps into the next, affects the next. And the pile forever shifts. And, as far as I can tell, no one understands where the contents in the packages came from to begin with. I certainly don’t. It seems to me now that the point of living is less to understand, more to not become dulled to the miracles that are everywhere."

Madapple, by Christina Meldrum

"I don’t know how to rest in myself very well, how to be content staying put. But mother knows how to be at home and, really, to be in herself. It’s actually very beautiful what she does."

Travelling with Pomegranates, by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor

"The two most powerful impulses of my life have been the urge to create and the urge to be – a set of opposites – and they have always clunked into each other."

Travelling with Pomegranates, by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor

"I began to realize how hard it was to separate out all the voices to hear the single one that came just from me."

Savvy, by Ingrid Law

"Memories and experiences become part of who we are. Kansas seeps into our cells, reconfigures our DNA, claims us as its own. If we leave, it follows."

Flyover People, by Cheryl Unruh

"We never lose this sense of being grounded, of knowing who we are and why we're here, of being nurtured by the soil and the grass and the stars."

Flyover People, by Cheryl Unruh

"I am homing in on forty years old. Another twenty years and I’m looking at sixty, and these days, twenty years seems like next Tuesday. I feel young but pressed for time. I am beginning to get a sense of all I will leave undone in this life. It makes my breath go a little short. I’m not desperate, just hungry to fill the time I am allowed."

Truck: A Love Story, by Michael Perry

"There is nothing further from calm than a shelf full of books. For these are the screams and the shouts and the moans of humanity, quiet only on the outside."

Harvey & Eck, by Erin O’Brien

"But for those hardy tempers who could love great spaces, where one spot was no more important than another, experience of the sea of grass was glorifying. On the Great Plains, a man of strong identity stood always at the center of his world – a king of infinite space."

Kansas Ghost Woman, by James S. Barnett

"It is true I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell."

The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver

"Some people have an inner voice. I have an inner to-do list. And since I'm a glass-half empty type of guy, my list is entitled "Things That Are Wrong With Matt." Whenever I am in danger of feeling too good about myself, that list starts flashing in my head."

American Shaolin, by Matthew Polly

"Who is the real person, I wonder—the ten-year-old being dragged or the sixty-year-old going round full of admiration and appreciation? How many other characters can I expect to be before I die?"

No, I Don’t Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a 60th Year, by Virginia Ironside