This weeks topic was super, super, super on brand for the community as a whole. We read and read and read. A lot of these books are soaked up and the words stay with us forever. Most of us collect words--either in what we read and store in our mind, what we annotate in our books, or what we jot down to remember in the future. 

Even the most simple of prose can catch onto us and live under our skin. 

Here's what make quotes memorable for me, personally: 

• They relate to a specific mindset I had while reading them. Whether that be describing an emotion, or emphasizing a personality trait, they feel as though they were written from my own mind. 
• Describing a mood or a reasoning or the way of the world. It's like seeing through new eyes. Actually, it's like going without a pair of glasses for a time and being unable to see the world from a distance, only to get some glasses and everything shifts into focus. 

While I could go all in on inspirational quotes, and what they spark within me, I decided to just mix things up a little bit. Some of these are less inspirational and merely relatable.

 "I am constantly searching for places that rekindle my sense of wonder."
--Gillian Anderson and Jeff Rovin, The Earthend Saga

"Time moved forward, but the mind was restless and stubborn, and it skipped to wherever it pleased, often to the past: backward, always backward."
--Edan Lepucki, California 

“I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”
--Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane 

“We're alive. We have words and shapes and ideas. We will throw them at you when you do not believe. We will throw our love and our hate and our failure and success. We'll split in two right in front of you and be our best and our worst. We'll lie and tell the truth.”

“The big occurrences in life, the serious ones, have for me always been nearly impossible to recognize because they never feel big or serious. In the moment, you have to pee, your arm itches, or what people are saying strikes you as melodramatic or sentimental, and it's hard not to smirk. You have a sense of what this type of situation should be like - for one thing, all-consuming - and this isn't it. But then you look back, and it was that; it did happen.” 

“Secrets have power. And that power diminishes when they are shared, so they are best kept and kept well. Sharing secrets, real secrets, important ones, with even one other person, will change them. Writing them down is worse, because who can tell how many eyes might see them inscribed on paper, no matter how careful you might be with it. So it's really best to keep your secrets when you have them, for their own good, as well as yours.”  

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.” 

“Life was a big thing to live without a map.”  

“Not everyone gets a true ending. There are two types of endings because most people give up at the part of the story where things are the worst, where the situation feels hopeless. But that’s when hope is needed most. only those who persevere can find their true ending.”