The staff of Book World reads a lot, but some moments stick with us more than others. These are some of the best, most quotable sentences we read throughout 2024 in books book new and old. There are omissions, of course, some of them because they're literally impossible to reproduce - most notably László Krasznahorkai's "Herscht 07769," a novel that consists of a single sentence that runs to over 400 pages - but we hope you'll find a little wisdom and a lot of wit in our selections.
- "We most of us begin our romantic careers by falling head over heels in love with love." - Clare Pollard, "The Modern Fairies"
- "The fact is, I did not appreciate until much later in my own life what subterfuge and sacrifice it took to be independent and undefeated by the pressures of reality." - Niall Williams, "This Is Happiness"
- "I am not lonely, but I can become addicted to being alone." - Zito Madu, "The Minotaur at Calle Lanza"
- "When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you." - Nora Ephron, "I Feel Bad About my Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman"
- "A living organism is a pocket of order, a cluster of chemical processes that maintains itself, self-perpetuates, keeps recreating its otherwise improbable organization." - Peter Godfrey-Smith, "Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World"
- "Terrible in life when you wanted to give everything and there wasn't anyone willing to receive you." - Susie Boyt, "Loved and Missed"
- "For all its fame, rosy-finger dawn leaves no prints." - Rachel Kushner, "Creation Lake"
- "At bottom, all experiences are ineffable, which is precisely why they are such a challenge to science." - Christof Koch, "Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It"
- "I hunkered down in Beirut's Commodore Hotel and spent a lot of money in the bar, where the parrot had learned to imitate incoming and outgoing gunfire." - John le Carré in an introduction to his novel "The Little Drummer Girl"
- "There's depth in not decisively agreeing." - Izumi Suzuki, translated from Japanese by Helen O'Horan, "Set My Heart on Fire"
- "And indeed, the long-term consequences of seeing someone again who you like very much, who doesn't really hand on heart seem to like you in the same way, while unrelatedly you're still grieving and feeling distraught about a recent death in your family, those consequences could be pretty bad, devastating even, in the long term, if you got to like her more and more and she understandably, due to your bad personality and looks, did not experience the same thing on her side." - Sally Rooney, "Intermezzo"
- "People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it." ― Elizabeth Strout, "Olive Kitteridge"
- "We make things that we hope will be bigger than us, and then we're desolate when that's what they become." - Richard Powers, "Playground"
- "It's hard to be knocked down when you're on all fours." - Miranda July, "All Fours"