Greedy Reader. (Or: What I've read this year.)

2011 is (much too) quickly coming to an end, so here's my annual book list! It was a pretty good reading year. Though I didn't spend half as much time reading this summer as I would have liked, (too much beaching and playing Scrabble..or wait, can you have too much beach and Scrabble? Nevermind). But I managed to conquer some of the ones on my list, all of which I'd highly recommend. Here I've pulled some of my favorite quotes for you to enjoy. Read on.


"Don't leave me, honey. You're warm. If you leave I'll have to put on a sweater."
-Lorrie Moore, Self Help

"We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright."
-Ernest Hemmingway, A Movable Feast

"I been silent so long now it’s gonna roar out of me like floodwaters...and you think this is too horrible to have really happened, this is too awful to be the truth! But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen."
-Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

"A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."
 -Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

 "I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't."
-Albert Camus, The Stranger

 "To be awake is to be alive."
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“You think when you wake up in the morning yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothing else.”
-Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men


"The Essex was going down. The whale, having humbled its strange adversary, disengaged itself from the shattered timbers of the hull and swam off, never to be seen again."
-Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea

“I'm always disappointed when I see the word 'Puritan' tossed around as shorthand for a bunch of generic, boring, stupid, judgmental killjoys. Because to me, they are very specific, fascinating, sometimes brilliant, judgmental killjoys.”
-Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

"It no longer seemed important to prove anything. I had found something outside myself that gave meaning to my life."

-Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi 

"‘Don’t you want to know,’ I raged, ‘whether you’re going to live or die? I’d be just a bit  curious myself!’”
-Lynn Barber, An Education

"Every window on Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco."
 -Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted