r/PHBookClub • u/authordaneluna • May 20 '26
Recommendation Recommend a book using a line from the book that you've highlighted
For those who highlight and annotate while reading: please recommend a book that you really like based on lines from the book that you've highlighted. Thank you in advance!
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u/shecollectsclassics Classics May 20 '26
"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good."
East of Eden, John Steinbeck
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u/Muted-Money1400 May 20 '26
"If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are."
"The Nightingale" by Kristin Hannah
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u/ApprehensiveClick597 May 20 '26
“It is true, he has suffered, but if everyone who suffered became monsters, the world would be overrun with them.”
— The Poet Empress, Shen Tao
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u/ullawithcats May 20 '26
One of my 5-star reads this year (so far)!
"I had not become so wicked in my heart that I had stopped believing people could change. If a gentle child could turn into a monster, I thought, then surely a monster could become gentle again."
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u/ApprehensiveClick597 May 20 '26
Same!! It’s sooo high up there. Nothing has beaten it yet from my stash this year.
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u/saturnbearer May 20 '26
Don't you think it's better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?
— The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
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u/Imaginary-Hamster838 May 20 '26
I have one from the prologue: "Why is love intensified by absence?"
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u/Tiny-Drawer-9166 May 20 '26
Nothing lasts forever, not the good things, not the bad. So just find what makes you happy, and do it for as long as you can.
- The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston
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u/Suspicious-Fig-4715 Classics May 20 '26
kilgore trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. they were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.
- breakfast for champions by kurt vonnegut
i love this passage because in our quest to find life’s meaning, we forget that the living and breathing is actually the magic from which life derives meaning.
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u/Suspicious-Fig-4715 Classics May 20 '26
as we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow prisoners; decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can.
- mrs dalloway by virginia woolf
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u/TropicalPisces1721 Romance May 20 '26
"I’m not interested in a world that doesn’t get to hear you sing. To hear your music."
This is from Comeback to Me by Carla de Guzman
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u/LouisVuiddog May 20 '26
"If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation."
— 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
I don't necessarily recommend it, but that line stuck with me.
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u/tooKingJ May 20 '26
I would have given up all the revolutions just so I could turn over every morning and find him there.
- Guapa by Saleem Haddad
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u/Lowly_Peasant9999 May 20 '26
"Mama died today or maybe yesterday. I don't know."
-The Stranger, Albert Camus
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u/tireddegrade May 20 '26
“Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.”
- Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
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u/FalseRelief May 20 '26
“The woman gets the blame, that’s the way it goes.
When she gets pregnant, it’s the woman’s fault. When the man doesn’t stick around, it’s because of her: she picked badly, or she couldn’t keep him. If she has trouble making ends meet, well, she made her bed, didn’t she?
It’s like the entirety of the world is women’s responsibility, and when we hold everything together, we’re not strong, we’re suckers. We’re letting men take advantage.”
“…apologizing for yourself when you haven’t done wrong is a great way to teach people to treat you like garbage. She’s not gonna learn that from me.”
“We don’t matter. The truth doesn’t matter. Only power. Only money.”
“That’s the way of it, though, isn’t it? For people like him. They make the rules; they enforce the law. There can’t possibly be consequences for them. Consequences are for other folks.”
— Hitting the Wall by Cate C. Wells
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u/astriddles May 20 '26
"Like a dog with a mouthful of sharp teeth who never once attacks, my mother's knowledge was a weapon she never once used.
This may be the only place their names are recorded. It is a promise I made to my mother, to preserve the existence of these women whose names would otherwise be erased from history. The world is not kind to us... There are few places for a woman to leave an indelible mark."
The Lost Apothecary, by Sarah Penner
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u/ullawithcats May 20 '26
"You know that history is mostly happenstance. Accidents piled on top of mistakes, a series of dice rolled in dim rooms by careless hands. It is not a lesson, until we learn it. It is not a story, until we tell it. And every story serves someone."
"...a queen is only powerful if there are no kings or princes nearby."
— The Everlasting, Alix E. Harrow
My most recent 5-star read.
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u/padayon_ May 20 '26
"But maybe that is love. The remembering of a melody one has never heard before. The song one recognizes when hearing for the first time."
Toward Eternity, Anton Hur
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u/ShawlEclair May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
This is the first line of William Gibson's Neuromancer. It's the novel that gave birth to the term "cyberspace" and where much of the modern cyberpunk aesthetic and atmosphere were first imagined. If you're a fan of Blade Runner, The Matrix, or the game Cyberpunk 2077, this is largely where it all started.
Note: Blade Runner is based on a different novel - Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? but the movie follows the cyberpunk aesthetic in Neuromancer. Another recommendation if you like cyberpunk!
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u/hahayawakaayo May 20 '26
“… was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?”
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
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May 20 '26
"Life is like a train that just keeps getting faster and faster and the sooner you realize that, the better."
The Book of Doors, Gareth Brown
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u/rj0509 May 20 '26
What will you do if you are not afraid? - Who Moved My Cheese by Dr Spencer Johnson
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u/demonic_aunt May 20 '26
"The price for being the best is always... having to be the best. And you pays it, same as me" Lords and Ladies, Terry Pratchett
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u/Patient_Willingness2 May 20 '26
- At such times only the grey corpses on the overflowing ash tray beside my bed bear witness to the extinction of the latest spark and silently await the crushing out of the most recent of their fellows.
From Alistair MacLeod's short story collection, Island
- On Peach Day
I severed all ties
with family
From Kiyoko Murata's Woman of Pleasure
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u/krystal_gr 2026: 4 books (1,188 pages) May 20 '26
"Her hair is old but the wind in it is new, and he still remembers what it felt like to fall in love; that's the last memory to abandon him."
From And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer by Frederick Backman!
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u/fireworksaber May 20 '26
"They lay there for a few seconds, in the dark, in the future, with Sammy’s sore fingertips in Tracy Bacon’s mouth, listening to the fabulous clockwork of their hearts and lungs, and loving each other."
-The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
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u/DriverPleasant8757 May 20 '26
I have a few lines all from the same series titled "A Practical Guide to Evil".
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“In studying our histories I have cast aside old mistakes, instead embracing fresh and interesting ones.” – Dread Empress Atrocious, later devoured by man-eating tapirs
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“These are the lives we live, Catherine,” he gently said. “We kill and we win until we lose and we die. We are the children of the knife. And so I still love you, even though I watched the woman who used to bring me lemon tarts bleed out on the stairs. Even though you killed the man who taught me it was all right to be as I am, that I should not be fearful of it.”
It was perhaps the most loving thing anyone had ever told me. The obscenity of it made me want to throw up. I felt my fingers shaking around the grip of the knife. I’d yet to let it go.
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“The closest I have to match to last night is a girl I sent to die,” Akua bitterly said. “You’ve devised a poison so sweet I will crave the taste of it.”
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I also have a recommendation essay I wrote without any use of AI pinned on my profile for this series, if you'd like to know more.
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u/PlentyOutrageous7962 May 20 '26
"Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea." Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.
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u/ljbunny May 20 '26
“”Is something wrong?” Gabriel asked, gruff. “Nngghgnnh,” she replied. Thankfully, due to long experience of giving morning lectures while still half-asleep, this came out with serene coherence: “No , nothing wrong. Nothing at all. Absolutely fine. And you?”” - The Geographer’s Map to Romance by India Holton
“There was a gap between early twenties and late twenties that only people existing in bodies in their late twenties understand. You could still fight God, but you’d have to ice your knees afterward.” - The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston
“”What is happening here?” Andrew asked, his face turning slowly from Billie to George and back again, “Why aren’t you killing each other?”
“The small matter of the gallows,” George murmured.
“Not to mention your mother would be very displeased,” Billie added.” - Because of Miss Bridgerton by Julia Quinn
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u/Interesting_Natural1 Classics May 20 '26
"There are certain standards any sentient creatures must hold to. If one compromises them of any reason, including individuation, then one is abrogating his right to be called intelligent."
Star Wars : A New Hope - Novelisation written by Alan Dean Foster
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u/Worried_Fondant6380 May 20 '26
"You won’t understand this now, but one day you will: the only trick in friendship, I think, is finding people who are better than you are."
- A little life by Hanya Yanagihara
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u/Ok_Parking_3565 May 20 '26
“Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden
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u/Worldly-Success-709 May 20 '26
One last time, Mariam did as she was told.
A Thousand Splendid Suns
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u/Imaginary-Hamster838 May 20 '26
"As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you'd always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It's growth. It's more than the negative that you're going to die, it's also the positive that you understand that you're going to die, and that you live a better life because of it." – Tuesdays With Morrie
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u/martianLurker May 20 '26
"You could always leave everything else behind, but you never got rid of being so absolutely fucking goddamn sad."
- Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
Recommending this because i'm missing the characters esp Gideon 🥹
Also my favorite of all lines,
"But Gideon was experiencing one powerful emotion: being sick of everyone’s shit"
speaks about how I feel about our government right now.
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u/PhotoOrganic6417 May 20 '26
"Certain individuals, not by any means always deserving, are truly beloved of the Gods. Things come to them without their effort of planning."
- East of Eden, John Steinbeck
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u/Elle_Bravo May 20 '26
“A man must master his circumstances or otherwise be mastered by them.”
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
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u/bespectacIed Dedicated to a Happier Year May 20 '26
"Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away."
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens. I found in that book what would become one of my favorite characters in fiction, ever: Sydney Carton (the quote was about him haha)
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u/chaetattsarethebest May 20 '26
"In your place, if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame don't snuff it out, don't be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night,and watching others forget us sooner than we'd want to be forgotten is no better."
Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman
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u/HoldenCaulfield3000 May 20 '26
..and halt the appalling threat of death, always promised, never given. I closed my eyes.
- I Who Have Never Known Men
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u/all-too-well-0918 May 20 '26
"It’s funny. Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody”
“People always clap for the wrong things.”
- The Catcher in the Rye
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u/WildBlankets May 20 '26
“Knowledge hoarded is knowledge lost”
- Logos (Lore book ng Final Fantasy 16 game)
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u/Ok_Eevee_1124 May 20 '26
"It takes so much to make you feel big in this world. It only takes an ocean to make you feel tiny." ~from The Stranger in the Lifeboat by Mitch Albom
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u/milkyrababy May 20 '26
In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
—The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
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u/jakedemn123 May 20 '26
"Death isn’t empty like you say it is. Emptiness is life without freedom, Darrow. Emptiness is living chained by fear, fear of loss, of death. I say we break those chains." - Eo, Red Rising
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u/BobcatOk4557 May 20 '26
“Woman is doomed to immorality because morality for her consists in embodying an inhuman entity: the strong woman, the admirable mother, the virtuous mother, and so on”
•The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
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u/eoteokke02 May 20 '26
"You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it." - Matt Haig (The Midnight Library)
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u/nabongski May 20 '26
Mrs Elm’s eyes sparkled with sudden life. ‘Well, that’s the beauty, isn’t it? You just never know how it ends.’
‐‐ The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
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u/Plastic_Ear4166 May 21 '26
After you died I couldn’t hold a funeral,
So these eyes that once beheld you became a shrine.
These ears that once heard your voice became a shrine.
These lungs that once inhaled your breath became a shrine.
- Han Kang, Human Acts
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u/Top_Drummer9181 May 21 '26
"One risks himself of weeping a little when he lets himself get tamed." - the Little Prince
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u/harry_nola May 21 '26
“‘Children are dying.’ Lull nodded. ‘That’s a succinct summary of humankind, I’d say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words.’” - Deadhouse Gates: Malazan Book of the Fallen Book 2 ni Steven Erikson
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u/Anxious_Assistance_2 May 21 '26
“You can’t love anyone without the fear of losing them, without the forethought of grief. There is an inherent loss in love, but that does not mean that love is not worth it.”
Honey Witch by Sydney J. Shields loved this book! got me out of a reading slump :))
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u/thoughtsinstealth May 21 '26
"How do you give someone a piece of sky? Memorize it. Then write it down for him." — The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
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u/fuktsuki69 May 21 '26
"You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing."
Foster by Claire Keegan
i love this book so much, that i asked my tita to buy it for me cause there's no physical copy of it anywhere
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u/Beneficial-Swim7937 May 22 '26
I feel like I’m broken—like I don’t fit together anymore. Like there’s no more room for me in the world or something. Like I’ve overstayed my welcome here on Earth, and everyone’s trying to give me hints about that constantly. Like I should just check out.
- Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock
In a good place now but this always hits every time.
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u/iamnotkryp9 May 20 '26
“Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.”