100 Beautiful Lines from Literature, Part 2

25 more lines from 25 more works, 50% of the way through 2025

images from Pinterest; collage by me

I have been collecting these lines (or, in some cases, passages) in my commonplace book since January 1st. The goal is to collect 100 beautiful lines in 2025, so if you missed Part 1 in March, check it out, and stay tuned for Part 3 in September, and Part 4 in December. For my methodology and a few details on how and why I keep a commonplace book, read to the end of the article.

Also scroll to the end for a super special 6 month anniversary giveaway for my subscribers !!! I love you guys, and I want to give you thank you presents!!

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1. “The commodity economy has been here on Turtle Island for four hundred years, eating up the white strawberries and everything else. But people have grown weary of the sour taste in their mouths. A great longing is upon us, to live again in a world made of gifts. I can sense it coming, like the fragrance of ripening strawberries rising on the breeze.” — Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer

2. “When nights are as dark as a raven’s wing, terrors swirl up from the ground to wrap around one’s ankles.” — Thirst, Marina Yuszczuk

3. “The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark” — To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

4. “He fit so perfectly in the love story I'd imagined for myself that I mistook him for the love of my life.” — Beach Read, Emily Henry

5. “And people are at their least forgiving when they themselves have behaved badly, as if crushing any sense of forgiveness would juice from the other the innocence and absolution they seek.” — Thunderhead, Miranda Darling

6. “But they can’t stop living and making wild concessions simply because they’re getting older. All life’s a risk. It’s merely a greater risk as one gets older.” — Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, Henry Van Dyke

7. “Because I want to know! Sometimes, you can use what you know, but that’s not what counts most. I want to know everything there is to know. Not because it’s any use, but purely for the pleasure of knowing, and now I demand that you teach me everything you know, even if I’ll never be able to use it. And don’t forget, I’m the youngest. On day I’ll probably be the last and I might need to know things for reasons I can’t imagine today.” — I Who Have Never Known Men, Jacqueline Harpman

8. “It was was only a kiss, and barely that, but it was, anyways, a crossing. When I was a child I witnessed a leaf unfurl in a single motion. One second it was a fist, the next an open hand. I never forgot it, seeing so much happen so fast. And this was like that—the end of one thing, the beginning of another: my life as a slut.” — The Love of My Life, Cheryl Strayed

9. “Treacherous though memory is, it seems to me the chief means we have of discovering how a child’s mind works. Only by resurrecting our own memories can we realize how incredibly distorted is the child’s vision of the world.” — Such, Such Were the Joys, George Orwell

10. “It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: it is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible for the sake of those coming after us.” — “Down at the Cross,” The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

11. “Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority, but to their inhumanity and fear.” — “My Dungeon Shook,” The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

12. “A minute means something to her, more than it means to us. We don’t know how long she has. I can give them to her. I can give her my minutes….What was I doing with them before?” — No One is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood

13. “Nothing you can take from me was ever worth keeping”— Sunrise on the Reaping, Suzanne Collins

14. “In a few hours the world will resume itself, but for now we’re in a pocket of silence. We’re in the plasmapause, a place of equilibrium where forces of the Earth meet the forces of the sun. I imagine it as a place of stillness where the particles of dust stop spinning and hang motionless in deep space.” — The Fourth State of Matter, Jo Ann Beard

15. “The lesson, which the US seems to have forgotten in the last few decades, is that implementation, not mere invention, determines the pace of progress.” — Abundance,

    Ezra Klein

16. “It isn’t action, he suspects, that lands a thief in prison. It’s hesitation” — The Art Thief, Michael Finkel

17. “And then I slap myself hard on the head over and over again in the hope that this will fix me, and make me normal, and knock all the nasty thoughts from my skull, but it simply makes my head hurt.” — She’s Always Hungry, Eliza Clark

18. “But he just sat there silently—and for some reason we were all convinced that he must be the smartest man in the room. I have gradually come to the conclusion that this tactic only works for men. If you are a woman who is silent then people assume you’re stupid and have nothing remarkable to say.” — The Night Guest, Hildur Khutsdottir

19. “My greatest wish for humanity is not for peace or comfort or joy. It is that we still die a little inside every time we witness the death of another. For only the pain of empathy will keep us human. There’s no version of God that can help us if we ever lose that.” — Scythe, Neil Shusterman

20. “Love was not something, I realized, that came to you from outside. I had always thought that love was supposed to come from people, and somehow, I was failing to catch the crumbs of it, failing to eat them, and I went around belly empty and desperate. I didn’t know the love was supposed to come from within me and that as long as I loved others, the strength and warmth of that love would fill me, make me strong.” — Margo’s Got Money Troubles, Rufi Thorpe

21. “It’s easy to tell the dirtiest minds—look for the cleanest fingernails.” — Eileen,

    Ottessa Moshfegh

22. “An arrogant head of state gives permission to all nature of hate as long as it feeds his ambition And the unfortunate truth is, people devour it. Society gorges itself and rots. Permission is the bloated corpse of freedom.” — Thunderhead, Neil Shusterman

23. “The human being is complex, and I find the vile acts, contradictions, and sublimities characteristic of our condition astonishing. Our existence would be an exasperating shade of gray if we were all flawless.” — Tender is the Flesh, Agustina Basterrica

24. “You can’t force a person to show up, but you can learn a lesson when they don’t” — Funny Story, Emily Henry

25. “Healing is a small and ordinary and very burnt thing. And it’s one thing and one thing only. It’s doing what you have to do. It’s what I did then and there. I stood up and got into my truck and drove away from a part of my mother. The part of her that had been my lover, my wife, my first love, my true love, the love of my life.” — The Love of My Life, Cheryl Strayed

I would love if you commented some of your favorite lines/passages you’ve read so far in 2025! And stay tuned at the end of September for Part 3! P.S. I know I cheated by including two quotes from The Love of My Life by Cheryl Strayed, but it was too hard to choose.

Keeping a Commonplace Book

The Masterclass on commonplace books defines them as follows:

“A commonplace book is a system for writing down and sorting all manner of tidbits: quotes, anecdotes, observations, and information gleaned from books, conversations, movies, song lyrics, social posts, podcasts, life experiences, or anything else that you might want to return to later. It’s called a commonplace book because you collect all of this in one common place—a central resource that makes it easy to find, re-read, and utilize each piece of wisdom you have obtained.”

Writers ranging from Joan Didion to H.P. Lovecraft to Marcus Aurelius to Virginia Woolf have kept commonplace books. If you want highly detailed accounts of how this is done, there are many existing articles on Substack about the practice.

But, for me, I prefer to keep it simple. I simply don’t have the energy to write down everything interesting I’m seeing or hearing in a day. So, my commonplace book only consists of quotes from physical books I’ve read. I refer back to it as a source of inspiration and instruction for my own writing. Keeping it was a new year’s resolution of mine for this year, and I’ve absolutely loved doing it. Here’s how I got started:

1. I bought a nice notebook and nice set of highlighters, pens, and sticky notes, that way everything I need is in one place.

   

   step 1

2. When I’m reading, I highlight stand-out lines/passages and mark the page with a sticky note from the aforementioned set. I do NOT stop and enter each quote into my commonplace book as I read as that would completely interrupt the flow of reading for me.

   

   step 2

3. When I finish a book, I flip back to each sticky-noted page. If the quote still strikes me, I copy it over into my commonplace book. Usually I only end up transferring about half of the quotes I highlighted. Every quote listed in the 25 quotes above is from my commonplace book.

   

   step 3

And that’s it! I think many people don’t start a commonplace book because it can sound like quite an overwhelming prospect! But in order to make it manageable for myself, I just narrowed the scope. That’s the great thing about commonplace books—they’re really just a way to collect inspiration, so do whatever works best for you!

100 Beautiful Lines from Literature, Part 1

Super Special 6 Month Anniversary Giveaway!

This coming Thursday I will be celebrating my six month anniversary on Substack!! Where does the time go?! When I joined Substack six months ago on January 3rd, I had no idea what to expect. And now, six months in, I can safely say that Substack has exceeded all of my expectations—and that is in large part because of you all, my subscribers. You guys believed in my writing, supported it, encouraged me, shared my work, and lifted me up. Because of you, I feel so creatively energized and inspired. I seriously cannot even explain to you how much your support means. As someone really trying to make it as a writer, every person reading my work feels like a gift. So in honor of six months and (nearly) FIVE THOUSAND of you, I want to give you all a gift!

I will be giving FIVE subscribers $25 gift cards to Bookshop.org as well as this special anniversary edition of my all-time favorite book, The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, a book of fairy tale retellings.

All you have to do enter is to make sure you’re subscribed, like this post, and comment below what book you would buy with the gift card if you won it!

I will do a randomized drawing of all the entrants on my official Substack anniversary this Thursday and announce the winners then!

*everyone is eligible to win the Bookshop.org gift card, but unfortunately if you live outside the US, I will not be able to ship you a copy of The Bloody Chamber.*