Book Title Quotes

“Humans. For the most part, you are dull and blundering. But occasionally, you can be remarkably bright creatures.”
― Shelby Van Pelt, Remarkably Bright Creatures

“The thin how-to book belonging to Smittie had a dark and perplexing title—HOW TO COMMIT SUICIDE EFFECTIVELY EVERY TIME.”
― Jasun Ether, The Beasts of Success

“The Side Effects of Dying in Your Pants isn't really funny… Alright, it's a little funny.”
― John Green

“Lengo la jina la kitabu ni kuishawishi hadhira kusoma dibaji, na lengo la dibaji ni kuishawishi hadhira kusoma salio la kitabu kizima.”
― Enock Maregesi

“On Sunday, we slathered brioche with cultured butter, dolloped crème fraîche on daubes, and spooned a pudding of Aida's creation. The interior was so creamy it recalled the molten center of the earth. If the land of milk and honey produced no further milk, this meal proclaimed, then we would sup of the last like kings and queens.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“I'll be your fake boyfriend whether you kiss me or not."
His hand grazed the small of her back, the tension between them almost magnetic as he continued, "But I hope you will."
She licked her lower lip, and her breath faltered. "You're not wrong. I like you. You're kind. And you're weirdly sweet. And..." Her gaze fixed on his mouth, then flicked back to his eyes. "You have amazing lips."
"So do you," he replied, and stroked a lock of her hair off her face.
He grinned and leaned into her. "Kiss me, mi amor.”
― Alana Albertson, Kiss Me, Mi Amor

“It shouldn't be here. This sedge grass is decorative bullshit he imported from Northern Asia. The lab spent two years modifying it to slot into our ecosystem, all so that the mountain would literally smell of honey. Terra di latte e miele, she said, mockingly. Thank god my father went into business, not poetry. He's far too much of a romantic. I laughed, incredulous at this portrait of my stiff employer, and Aida reddened. It is romantic, if you think about it. He planted the grass for my mother. She's one of those Catholic Koreans, painfully devout. You know. The promised land, Canaan, found after forty years of wandering the desert. The land of milk and honey.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“The cake was not the one I'd baked as an afterthought. This was a foot high, silky yellow, sighing under the knife. Like nothing I'd tasted before. Part air, part kiss of milk and honey.
It's a soufflé cheesecake, Aida told a guest. Very popular in Asia.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“Georgia's fingers drifted to the charm at her throat, the four worn little clover leaves. She rubbed the metal edges, sending a prayer of gratitude heavenward. Faith, hope, love, and luck--- the recipe for a charmed life. Once Georgia had thought she could make it happen on her own by planning and striving, by attaining concrete measures of success. Now she saw how wrong she had been. The real recipe for a charmed life was simple. Not easy, but simple. To do the work that filled her with wonder and delight. To walk lightly through the world, giving generously to those around her. To love all in her care as best she could. That's what she had been seeking all along. And Georgia found that now her life, which had once seemed so bitter, tasted so very sweet indeed.”
― Rachel Linden, Recipe for a Charmed Life

“She looked up to see a knob of canary-yellow butter being carried towards her in a glass-lidded container.
'All this butter just for me, when there's a national shortage...'
Hearing Rika mumbling these words, the maitre d' smiled and lifted the lid of the dish.
'This butter had been flown in especially from overseas. Pleas help yourself to as much as you'd like.'
Confronted with an overwhelming selection of different kinds of bread on the trolley, Rika chose the simplest option she could see--- a piece of baguette. Once again, she thought that she should have come with Reiko. Reiko would have told her which to choose. Rika spread a thick layer of butter on the bread. The butter, of a firmness that would break apart slowly on the tongue, went sinking into the crumb of the baguette. That alone was enough to make Rika glad she'd come.
The next course to be served was a chilled dish of avocado and snow crab stacked delicately like layer cake, topped with a generous helping of caviar. The acidity of the pomegranate seeds that exploded juicily in her mouth accentuated the creamy richness of the avocado and the sweetness of the crab flesh. Their unabashed scarlet hue brought the color palette of the whole plate to life. Chased by the champagne, the taste of the crab and the caviar expanded like light suffusing her mouth.”
― Asako Yuzuki, Butter

“She melted the butter in the pan. She warmed the egg yolks by immersing them in a bowl of hot water and mixing them with vinegar, then pouring in the shining golden butter little by little. She moved the whisk ceaselessly, making the contents of the bowl whirl round and round. Having observed Chizu's troubles up close, and learned how to avoid them, she succeeded in producing the fine egg-colored foam relatively quickly. Her whole hand, from the wrist down, was dancing on a waltz.
The tigers in the book, whose desires had kept them spinning round and round until they transformed into butter, had ended up in the stomachs of Little Babaji's family. Even after their deaths, Kajii's victims continued to be exposed to and consumed by the curious gaze of the general public.
Rika had stopped believing that any blame lay with the victims themselves. Being sucked into the vortex of Kajii's ominous power, like she herself had been, was something that could happen to anybody. Thinking this, she went on single-mindedly whisking the butter.
Through her adventures with the quatre-quarts on Valentine's Day, she'd learned that waiting on the far side of all of this seemingly endless whisking was not stasis or evaporation, but emulsification. If she couldn't tear her eyes away from Kajii, if she couldn't stop herself from spinning round and round, then maybe all that was left to do was to grip on to Kajii with all her might, so as to ensure she wasn't shaken off.
'Done!' Rika said to herself and lifted up the whisk. The sauce of warm, bright yellow that came dripping off the whisk was smooth as cashmere.”
― Asako Yuzuki, Butter

“At the end of The Story of Little Babaji they make pancakes out of the tigers that have transformed into butter, and eat them. I think they mix the tiger-butter into the batter. Or put it on top. Maybe they even melt it in the frying pan.'
But Rika's words got lost amid the sound of the pancake mix being poured into the pan. She heard the noise of the pancake being flipped and sticking again to the pan. After a while, Makoto came over with a plate in his hand. The perfectly round, golden brown pancake was steaming, the maple syrup shining, and the knob of butter on top beginning to melt. She brought her hands together, and said, 'Itadakimasu.'
With a fork, Rika broke off a small piece of the pancake, revealing its bright yellow insides. The way that the batter with its structure of fine air bubbles and countless little pillars supported the surface layer, burnished to a deep brown, was proof that it had been well mixed. The butter slid around sluggishly. Rika put a tiny sliver into her mouth. She instructed her teeth to bite, and with some effort, succeeded in moving her mouth, chewing the soft, warm pancake into which the salted butter and syrup had been absorbed.”
― Asako Yuzuki, Butter

“I've asked you so many Golub words over the years." She looked up at him. Her eyes glistened. "But what's the Golub word for 'love'?"
"Love," he repeated. "Th-there's more than one word for love. There's friendship love---silan. Gratitude love---baya. Nostalgic love---ruman. There's... there are forty words for love."
"What if, hypothetically, you feel all those ways about someone?"
"Hypothetically?"
"No." She held his gaze. "Actually not hypothetically at all."
Looking into her eyes, Raf found himself unable to speak.
"I... I started working on that mural randomly. I didn't even plan it out properly. What did it matter? Not like anyone's given a crap about that mural since the storm came through. And what did I end up creating? The dolphins we swam with," she said. "The sandcastles we made together. Everything on there... Do you see it, Raf?"
There was Main Street---the movie theater. Tilted Tales, where they sat for hours on end reading comics. The entire street was there, but it was both of these locations that shone with a sheen of glitter. He took it all in.
"It's us," he said slowly. "You painted our places. Our favorite memories."
"I love you, Raf." Her voice quivered. "Silan---the friendship one. Baya, the gratitude one. Ruman. Nostalgia for what we were. All of it. I love you in all the ways I know.”
― Aisha Saeed, Forty Words for Love

“When I was a child, charlottes--- French desserts made traditionally out of brioche, ladyfingers, or sponge and baked in a charlotte mold--- were everywhere. Charlotte au chocolat wasn't the only variety, though being chocolate, it had the edge on my mother's autumn-season apple charlotte braised with brioche and poached in clarified butter, and even on the magnificent charlotte Malakoff she used to serve in the summer: raspberries, slivered almonds, and Grand Marnier in valleys of vanilla custard.
But it is charlotte au chocolat, being my namesake dessert, that I remember most, for we offered it on the menu all year long. I walked into the pastry station and saw them cooling in their rusted tin molds on the counter. I saw them scooped onto lace doilies and smothered in Chantilly cream, starred with candied violets and sprigs of wet mint. I saw them lit by birthday candles. I saw them arranged, by the dozens, on silver trays for private parties. I saw them on customers' plates, destroyed, the Chantilly cream like a tumbled snowbank streaked with soot from the chocolate. And charlottes smelled delightful: they smelled richer, I thought, than any dessert in the world. The smell made me think of black velvet holiday dresses and grown-up perfumes in crystal flasks. It made me want to collapse and never eat again.”
― Charlotte Silver, Charlotte Au Chocolat: Memories of a Restaurant Girlhood

“The charlottes cooled in their tin molds while she squeezed lemons and crushed strawberries to flavor her Sicilian ices. The juices trickled into the rectangular tins she stored them in. Then she split off a sheet of foil and smoothed it out on top of the tins; the foil crackled beneath her hands.
Later on, the names of the desserts she made got printed in dark green cursive on the backs of the menus: Raspberry Fool. Queen Mother's Cake with a shot of Rum. Mocha Ice Parfait in a Bitter-Chocolate Tuille. And, of course, Charlotte au Chocolat.”
― Charlotte Silver, Charlotte Au Chocolat: Memories of a Restaurant Girlhood

“To me, nothing showed how much times had changed more than the disappearance of the charlotte au chocolat. (It still appeared at weddings and special events, but was no longer available on the regular menu.) This came about when my mother stopped baking the desserts herself and hired a procession of young pastry chefs. These pastry chefs had gone to culinary school, and apparently they didn't understand charlotte au chocolat. It was an old-fashioned dessert, whose beauty spoke for itself; it didn't need any frills. But the pastry chefs liked embellishing desserts with frills now: star-shaped cookies and chocolate cigarettes and spun sugar that looked like golden spiderwebs. Now, whenever I ordered dessert, I chose from clementine granita with red-wine-poached pears, almond cake trimmed with candied orange rind, or triple-crème cheesecakes, soft and dripping with huckleberry sauce. Charlotte au chocolat was gone.”
― Charlotte Silver, Charlotte Au Chocolat: Memories of a Restaurant Girlhood

“We'd hardly stepped three feet outside when Bee gasped, pointing to the garden to our right.
"Henry!" she exclaimed, surveying hundreds of delicate light green leaves that had pushed up from the soil in grand formation, showcasing a carpet of tiny lavender-colored flowers, with dark purple centers.
Bee looked astonished. "How did they... where did they come from?"
Henry shook his head. "I noticed them two weeks ago. They just appeared."
Bee turned to me, and upon seeing my confused face, she offered an explanation. "They're wood violets," she said. "I haven't seen them on the island since..."
"They're very rare," Henry said, filling the void that Bee had left when her voice trailed off. "You can't plant them, for they won't grow. They have to choose you."
Bee's eyes met Henry's, and she smiled, a gentle, forgiving smile. It warmed me to see it. "Evelyn has a theory about these flowers," she said, pausing as if to pull a dusty memory off a shelf in her mind, handling it with great care. "Yes," she said, the memory in plain view. "She used to say they grow where they are needed, that they signal healing, and hope.
It's ridiculous, isn't it, Henry, to think that violets can know," Bee continued.
Henry nodded. "Harebrained," he said in agreement.
Bee shook her head in disbelief. "And to see them in bloom, in March of all months..."
Henry nodded. "I know."
Neither took their eyes off the petals before them, so fragile, yet in great numbers stalwart and determined.”
― Sarah Jio, The Violets of March

“Through a break in the willows, if the fog isn't too heavy, you can see the edge of what everyone around here calls the Waters, where a sort of island rises up, accessible by a bridge three planks wide, strung between oil barrels floating on the watery muck. There, under the branches of sycamores, oaks, and hackberries, the green-stained Rose Cottage sinks on the two nearest corners so that it appears to be squatting above the bridge, preparing to pitch itself into the muck. Beyond the cottage, the trees give way to a mosquito-infested no-man's-land of tussocks, marshes, shallows, hummocks, pools, streams, and springs a half mile wide between solid ground and the Old Woman River. This is where Herself harvested wild rice, cattails, staghorn sumac, and a thousand other plants.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“Instinctively, her fingers drifted to the four-leaf clover charm on the delicate chain at her throat, and she rubbed the little leaves. Long ago, her mother had told her that the four leaflets on the clover stood for faith, hope, love, and luck.
"Those four elements are the recipe for a charmed life, Georgia May," her mother had promised her.”
― Rachel Linden, Recipe for a Charmed Life

“The swell of these feelings is too intense for such men to hold in their hearts without an object to attach it to, so each man has turned the sensation into love and affection for Rose Thorn and both her daughters, and even Hermine Zook, who people say is still alive. This allows them to maintain the love as a living thing, creating more space for teaching their daughters and sons, more tolerance for their spouses, even sometimes a forgiveness for themselves. They feel that love most purely and powerfully, though, when they are near the Waters.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“If someone had told Shang he'd be happily married with a son he adored, another bun in the oven, a restaurant he could call his own, and a team he'd do anything for, he would have rolled his eyes. He thinks about all the different choices that brought him here, all the different steps he took like those of a complicated recipe. He's a different man than he was a few years ago, and he suspects it's all thanks to her.
In the end, it didn't matter how much he sharpened his knives or how well he seasoned his dishes. He realizes now that he was missing a secret ingredient all along: a little dash of love.”
― Katrina Kwan, Knives, Seasoning, & A Dash of Love

“We collected our things from our quarters---the ones that had been assigned to us and the ones we had adopted--- and I gathered up all my notes that would slowly metamorphose into The Extinction of Irena Rey. Maybe Grey Eminence was right that writing has to be an engine of extinction. But the first to inhabit a traumatized landscape are often fungi, lichen, slime molds, and species of plants known as "ruderal," a word that derives from the Latin word for "rubble." Maybe the extinction of Irena Rey made the space for a ruderal art, like a book about what happened to her translators.”
― Jennifer Croft, The Extinction of Irena Rey

“The butter should still be cold. Remove it from the fridge just before. Superior-quality butter should be eaten when it's still cold and hard, to truly luxuriate in its texture and aroma. It will begin to melt almost immediately with the heat of the rice, but I want you to eat it before it melts fully. Cool butter and warm rice. First of all, savor the difference in their temperatures. Then, the two will melt alongside one another, mingle together, and form a golden fountain, right there inside your mouth. Even without seeing it, you just know that it's golden--- that's the way it tastes. You'll sense the individual grains of rice coated in butter and aromatic fragrance as if the rice were being fried will ascend to your nose. A rich, milky sweetness will spread itself across your tongue...”
― Asako Yuzuki, Butter

“She took the butter from its box and opened up its foil wrapper. It was hard and cold. She didn't want to create more washing-up than necessary and she still hadn't located a chopping board, so she sliced it on top of the paper and placed it on the scale. There was a tiny fragment left over on the knife, which she raised to her mouth. The lack of salt meant it coasted across her tongue like a placid midwinter wave, leaving her with an impression of silkiness and concentrated fat.”
― Asako Yuzuki, Butter

“She floated unsteadily over to the dairy section, and found her eyes immediately directed to the small packet with its crisp navy logo exerting enough power to eclipse all the other products around it.
To think that a regular supermarket such as this one would stock Échiré butter! Checking the price, she saw it was less than a thousand yen. Not just that, either, but there was a whole assortment of different kinds of butter filling the display: cultured, aged, salted, unsalted... Until just a few months ago, it was difficult to find. Things changed at such speed. For a while, Rika stood still, bathing in the white light of the dairy section.”
― Asako Yuzuki, Butter

“Soon after, Rika heard the sizzle of butter melting in a hot frying pan. It smelt to her like life itself. Maybe because it was animal fat, there was rough, raw depth and fragrance to its smell, which you didn't get with vegetable oil or margarine.”
― Asako Yuzuki, Butter

“For a year or so the group stays intimate and exclusively feminine. But then, after Marie coins the term "contes de fées," or fairy tales, the fame of these "Modern Fairies" begins to spread too fast--- though it is flattering in a manner, of course.”
― Clare Pollard, The Modern Fairies

“The nurse looked around at the jars of water in the corner, the dirt scattered on the floor, the iron and dogwood bark that Luann had brought from the cabin crowding the nightstand. She stared at them as if they were nuts, the ones that couldn't be helped. The kind of strange folk you had to give up on.”
― Alli Dyer, Strange Folk

“There once was a girl of the Moth Folk, dark-winged, strong, and fearless. Her eyes were like the starlit sky; her footfall soft as shadow. And although she was lovely, love had no place in her heart, for hers was the tribe of the Moth King, who had waged a war on love, for ever and ever.
But love, like all forbidden things, was fascinating to her. Every night of the clear full moon, she would go to the Moonlight Market and watch the traders sell their wares: printed books of every kind; pomegranates of the south; wines from the islands; gems from the north; flowers that bloomed only once in their lives. But she only had eyes for the sellers of charms and glamours. Here, there were spells for a broken heart, or to spin dead leaves into gold, or to rekindle a memory, or to summon the western wind. Most of all, there were love spells: tiny bottles of colored glass with stoppers worked in silver filled with potions made from the heart of a rose, or the tail fin of a mermaid. Here were glamours to melt a lover's heart: candles of every color; tokens of remembrance; silk-bound books of poetry.
But among all the love-knots and bonbons and pressed flowers and handkerchiefs, the Moth girl never truly saw the nature of her enemy, for it seemed to her that Love was weak, and simpering, and faithless. She told herself she was too strong to fall for its blandishments. Until one day, at the Market, she saw a boy with a glamorie-glass in his hand, standing by a display of books, and stories, and legends, and memories.”
― Joanne Harris, The Moonlight Market

“She looked down and saw in surprise an elegant pattern of flowers and vines that wove around her fingers, and in the center of her palm, an open eye.
"This is so you will see yourself as I see you," Nour said, her eyes prickling with tears.
Dina stood and turned to face the mirror. For a moment she did not recognize her reflection. That woman was beautiful, glowing, beaming a smile, kindness and joy radiating from her. That woman was Dina. That's me.
The hex had felt insurmountable, impossible to break, even once she had known she was the cause of it. It was one thing to be told she needed to love herself to break the curse, but quite another to do it in practice. But as Dina looked at herself, everything fell into place. Her family accepted her for who she was. And if she told herself that she was worthy of love, then it was true. And if it was true, there was no need for the hex anymore. No need for that wall that she had built between herself and others to keep them from seeing her as she truly was. Scott loved her, and she loved him. And they would be okay.
She shuddered in a breath as the insidious magic of the hex began to dissipate, like ashes blowing away after a fire's gone out. Then her ears popped, and the hex was gone.
Dina looked across at her mother, smiling through her tears.
"It's gone," she cried. "Mama, I'm free.”
― Nadia El-Fassi, Best Hex Ever