And just like that, 2024 is over. Thank you 2024 for all the memories and the lessons. We’ve successfully completed a 365-day revolution around the sun. As the old adage goes, with every end comes a new beginning. 2024’s conclusion comes with the opening of a new door. We are provided with 12 new chapters with 365 blank pages ]upon which to paint new memories. I hope that we will paint these blank canvasses with memories that we will cherish for a lifetime, may it be with the people we love or all by ourselves.
As has been the tradition in the past few years, I will be kicking off the new year by looking back to the previous year, its hits, and of course, its mishits. It is also an opportunity to take a glimpse of how the coming year is going to shape up. This book wrap-up is a part of a mini-series that will feature the following:
- 2024 Top 20 Favorite Books
- 2024 Book Wrap Up
- 2024 Reading Journey by the Numbers
- 2024 Most Memorable Book Quotes (Part I)
- 2024 Most Memorable Book Quotes (Part II)
- 2024 New Favorite Authors
- 2024 Beat the Backlist Challenge Wrap-up
- 2025 Books I Look Forward To List
- 2025 Top 25 Reading List
- 2025 Beat the Backlist Challenge
With 129 books completed, 2024 is my second most prolific reading year; it is just second to the 130 books I read in 2023. Wading through these It still feels surreal how I was able to complete one of my long-time goals and I was able to do it not just once, not just twice, but three years in a row. The pandemic pandemic years have been my most prolific reading years so far. From these 129 books, several quotes made a mark on me. Several books were wells of wonderfully crafted lines. Some provided amazing insights. As has been a tradition in the past years, I have rounded out some of the most memorable lines for this annual wrap-up series. Because of the sheer number of memorable lines, I have divided it into two. Without ado, here is the first batch of memorable quotes from the books I read in 2024.
Everyone dreams, but only some people are dreamers. The non-dreamers, by far more numerous, are those who see the world as it is. Then there are the few dreamers, who see the world as they are. The moon, the river, the train station, the sound of rain, and even something as mundane as porridge become something else with many layers. The world feels like an oil painting rather than a photograph, and the dreamers are forever seeing hidden colors where others just see the top shade. The nondreamers look through glasses, and the dreamers through a prism.
~ Juhea Kim, Beasts of a Little Land
For the original transgression of this land was not slavery. It was greed, and it could not be contained. More white men would come and begin to covet. And they would drag along the Africans they had enslaved. The white men would sow their misery among those who shook their chains. These white men would whip and work and demean these Africans. They would sell their children and split up families. And these white men brought by Oglethorpe, these men who had been oppressed in their own land by their own king, forgot the misery that they had left behind, the poverty, the uncertainty. And they resurrected this misery and passed it on to the Africans.
~ Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
Think of an object of great value sinking, slipping, moving through water. Sunken treasures have a way of rearranging the story. A ship at the bottom of the sea folds gently over into sand and barnacle and sea-creature ecosystems, losing its former worth and moorings, for a ship is built to float. Its sinking is kind of a failure – and yet, when someone finds the sunken thing, new value emerges. The shop changes forms when it goes from sailing the surface to wrecked at the bottom. The wreck changes forms after the dead people disintegrate and the cargo settles to sand.
~ Thrust, Lidia Yuknatvitch
We often forget that Christianity began as a revolutionary movement of the powerless facing down the cold fury of the Roman Empire. It was a movement of the poor and dispossessed finally rising up. Christians waged a spiritual war for centuries with God’s love as their only weapon. It was a faith built to defy an empire, and it was persecuted with barbarity. People were crucified and burned alive for holding fast to the love and mercy of Christ’s gospel. So is this not a miracle we’re seeing? People demanding their safety and dignity and value on a global scale? Is this not how God works? Forget about mysterious ways—His hand moves through us with galvanic purpose that only the truly blind cannot see.
~ Stephen Markley, The Deluge
I think some people slip time and enter a life wrongly—or, if not wrongly, at least formed differently, mismatched with the material conditions around them. I do not think any god with some odd intention put them where they are. I think that beings emerge and decompose endlessly, like cosmic or oceanic particles, so whoever we are and wherever we were emerges and dissolves endlessly, like all matter and energy.
~ Thrust, Lidia Yuknatvitch
People crowd the streets. White men wearing floppy hats coax horses down rutted roads turned to shell-lined avenues. White women with their heads covered usher children below awnings and through tall, ornate doorways. And everywhere, us stolen. Some in rope and chains. Some walking in clusters together, sacks on their backs or on their heads. Some stand in lines at the edge of the road, all dressed in the same rough clothing: long, dark dresses and white aprons, and dark suits and hats for the men, but I know they are bound by the white men, accented with gold and guns, who watch them. I know they are bound by the way they stand all in a row, not talking to one another, fresh cuts marking their hands and necks. I know they are bound by the way they wear their sorrow, by the way they look over an invisible horizon into their ruin.
~ Jesmyn Ward, Let Us Descend
All at once we were swimming in cobalt fire, every kick and stroke igniting the tempests of plankton swirling around us. I laughed, the sound rupturing the quiet, windless night, and then Willie joined me as well. We dunked our heads under the blazing sea and came up again, spluttering fire from our lips. Rivulets of blue flames streamed down Willie’s hair, his face. I touched my own cheek, felt it glowing; I scooped up handfuls of the sea, marvelling at the fire-snakes writhing down my arms. We grinned at each other with stupid, childlike glee. Our naked bodies were visible in the water, but what was there to be embarrassed about? We were nothing more than two insects preserved in amber, after all. Whenever the fire dimmed, we would scissor our legs and swing our arms, stoking the watery furnace.
~ Tan Twan Eng, The House of Doors
When he was alive there was a certain, I don’t know—aloofness about him, a sense that his feelings were elsewhere. Not cold or arrogant or anything—I’m not saying that. He was always kind and nice to us, but it seemed like he was not quite interested enough in the reality around him, and kept a certain distance between himself and others. “But after he passed away, after he became a soul, in other words, he’d look me straight in the eye and talk with me quite sincerely. His personality became livelier, with a kindness he hadn’t had up until then. It’s a strange—he became livelier in a human sense after he died, but it was like something important he’d kept hidden inside finally appeared once he was dead.
~ Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls
It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual fife upon another: each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his subject. Philosophically considered, therefore, the two passions seem essentially the same, except that one happens to be seen in a celestial radiance, and the other in a dusky and lurid glow.
~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
The future was a mystery, after all, that was true. Within its infinite folds it contained the possibility, however remote, that she might still be salvaged, her body, from the wreck of all her wasted years. In his arms, to be given life, yes, and to give life also. Impossible of course to think: and yet it happened all the time. May have been happening even then, concealed inaccessibly inside her breathing body. Each generation that had gone before, hundreds, thousands. The only answer to death, she thought: to echo back its name in that way, with all the same intensity and senseless, on the side of life. Why not allow him, why not allow herself, at least the idea, the image, the future, at once impossible and not, enveloping them both in its mystery in the dark stillness of her quiet bedroom, descending them both into the depths of sleep.
~ Sally Rooney, Intermezzo
We are all travelers crossing from this bank to that bank, from this world to nirvana. But the waters are rough. We must rely on something in order to make it over. That something could be the art or literature that you aspire to create. You will think that the thing you choose will serve as your boat or raft to carry you to that other bank. But if you think deeply about it, you may find that it does not carry you but rather you carry it. Perhaps only the student who truly savors this paradox will make it safely across. Literature and art are not simply what will carry you; they are also what you must lay down your life for, what you must labor over and shoulder for the rest of your life.
~ Kyung-Sook Shin, I’ll Be Right There
We’re caught in a universe of collision and drift, the long slow ripples of the first Big Bang as the cosmos breaks apart; the closest galaxies smash together, then those that are left scatter and flee one another until each is alone and there’s only space, an expansion expanding into itself, an emptiness birthing itself, and in the cosmic calendar as it would exist then, all humans ever did and were will be a brief light that flickers on and off again one single day in the middle of the year, remembered by nothing.
~ Samantha Harvey, Orbital
People might claim to believe in this or that, but in the four a.m. version of themselves, most possess no fixed idea on how society should be organized. When people face themselves, alone, the passions they have been busy performing all day, and that they rely on to reassure themselves that they are who they claim to be, to reassure their milieu of the same, those things fall away. What is it people encounter in their stark and solitary four a.m. self? What is inside them? Not politics. There are no politics inside of people. The truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, the significations of group and type, the quiet truth, underneath the noise of opinions and “beliefs,” is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is a hard, white salt. This salt is the core. The four a.m. reality of being.
~ Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake
Stories told on a battlefield, on a life raft, in a hospital ward at night. In a café that will disappear before morning. Someone overhears. Someone listens, attentive with all his heart. No one listens. The story told to one who is slipping into sleep, or into unconsciousness, never to wake. The story told to one who survives who will tell that story to a child, who will write it down in a book, to be read by a woman in a country or a time not her own. The story told to oneself. The fervent confession. The meandering, repetitive search for meaning in a gesture, in a moment that has eluded the speaker’s understanding for a lifetime. Stories incomprehensible to the listener yet received nonetheless – by darkness, by the wind, by a place, by an unperceiving or unperceived pity, even by indifference. What we give cannot be taken from us.
~ Anne Michaels, Held
Life was an endless string of miseries; if one came to an end there was another waiting around the corner, and if that misfortune became easier to bear, the next would strike harder, leaving creases on our faces that made us look alike. Even if misfortune came suddenly, we knew it had been there all along, lying in wait on the road in front of us, so we were always ready for it; when the new cloud of trouble descended on us we felt alone, hopelessly alone, inescapably alone, but still we dreamed of the happiness we might find if only we could find other people willing to share our misery.
~ Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book
There’s a cinematic sense of anticipation but maybe everyone feels this way nowadays. Life seems both monotonous and constantly interrupted, a punctuated heart monitor line of events, with maybe some befores and afters on either side of the peaks. Time doesn’t creep like a worm or fly like an arrow anymore. It erupts. It turns over. Shocks. Revolutions. Cycles. On TV, online, in the prosthetic minds we carry in our hands. It’s as if something immense or catastrophic is always on the cusp of happening. Everything feels asymptotically dramatic, on the verge, as if only a disaster could undo that universal first disaster: being born at all. We are all heroes of cataclysm now.
~ Namwali Serpell, The Furrows
I made a very deliberate decision not to put photographs in the book. There are two, the bookends. Writing the word-images inside book was my way of thinking about how to move beyond “bearing witness”—where the witness is always outside and bearing the burden of witnessing—and the act of looking is an unwieldy responsibility that’s put on that person, and it’s not a natural thing, it’s a weight. I’ve been questioning for a long time how to eliminate that. The photograph is a weapon, it’s a sign of power and it’s still being turned on people. Those who are looking are not the ones bearing anything. It is those depicted in the frame who hold the balance of the weight. How do we honor that, respectfully, and see ourselves in every image we make?
~ Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King
I’m a writer; I tell stories. I want to tell the stories of their lives. It doesn’t really matter where I start. We’re always in the middle; wherever we stand, we see only partially. I know also that everything is connected, the constellations of our lives moving together in harmony and disharmony. The past swirls along with and inside the present, and all time exists at once, around us. The ebb and flow, the harmonies and dissonance—the music happens, whether or not we describe it. A story is not a line; it is a richer thing, one that circles and eddies, rises and falls, repeats upon itself.
~ Claire Messud, This Strange Eventful History
They came from cities of the old world where the means to sustain life were hard to get or own. They were colonists and they were faced with a difficult choice: they had either to subdue this wild land or be subdued by it. We need but turn our eyes upon the imposing sweep of streets and factories and buildings to see how completely they have conquered. But in conquering they used others, used their lives. Like a miner using a pick or a carpenter using a saw, they bent the will of others to their own. Lives to them were tools and weapons to be wielded against a hostile land and climate.
~ Richard Wright, Native Son
Rather, I plead with you to see a mode of life in our midst, a mode of life stunted and distorted, but possessing its own laws and claims, an existence of men growing out of the soil prepared by the collective but blind will of a hundred million people. I beg you to recognize human life draped in a form and guise alien to ours, but springing from a soil plowed and sown by our own hands. I ask you to recognize laws and processes flowing from such a condition, understand them, seek to change them. If we do none of these, then we should not pretend horror or surprise when thwarted life expresses itself in fear and hate and crime.
~ Richard Wright, Native Son
I had already come to understand the tidiness of lies, the lesson learned from the stories told by white people seeking to justify my circumstance. I appreciated Voltaire’s notion of tolerance regarding religious difference and I understood, as absorbed as I was, that I was not interested in the content of the work, but its structure, the movement of it, the calling out of logical fallacies. And so, after these books, the Bible itself was the least interesting of all. I could not enter it, did not want to enter it, and then understood that I recognized it as a tool of my enemy. I chose the word enemy, and still do, as oppressor necessarily supposes a victim.
~ Percival Everett, James
Friendship is indispensable to man for the proper function of his memory. Remembering our past, carrying it with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it.
~ Milan Kundera, Identity
There ought to be a different word for it once you’ve been married for enough years. When you’ve long since passed the point where it stopped feeling like a choice. I no longer choose you every morning, that was a beautiful thing we said on our wedding day, I just can’t imagine life without you now. We aren’t freshly blooming flowers, we’re two trees with intertwined roots, you’ve grown old within me. When you’re young you believe that love is infatuation, but infatuation is simple, any child can become infatuated, fall in love. But real love? Love is a job for an adult. Love demands a whole person, all the best of you, all the worst. It has nothing to do with romance, because the hard part of a marriage isn’t that I have to live seeing all your faults, but that you have to live with me seeing them. That I know everything about you now. Most people aren’t brave enough to live without secrets. Everyone dreams about being invisible sometimes, no one dreams of being transparent.
~ Fredrik Backman, The Winners
You must not be angry with me for having been so sad yesterday; I was very happy, very content, but in my very best moments I am always for some reason sad. As for my crying, that means nothing. I don’t know myself why I am always crying. I feel ill and irritable; my sensations are due to illness. The pale cloudless sky, the sunset, the evening stillness – all that – I don’t know – but I was somehow in the mood yesterday to take a dreary and miserable view of everything, so that my heart was to fall any did the relief of tears. But why am I writing all this to you? It is hard to make all that clear to one’s own heart and still harder to convey it to another. But you, perhaps, will understand me. Sadness and laughter both at once! How kind you are really. You looked into my eyes yesterday as though to read in them what I was feeling and were delighted with my rapture.
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Poor People
No matter how old they get, we never want to cry in front of our children. We’d do anything for them; they never know because they don’t understand the immensity of something that is unconditional. A parent’s love is unbearable, reckless, irresponsible. They’re so small when they sleep in their beds and we sit beside them, shattered to pieces inside. It’s a lifetime of shortcomings, and, feeling guilty, we stick happy pictures up everywhere, but we never show the gaps in the photograph album, where everything that hurts is hidden away. The silent tears in darkened rooms. We lie awake, terrified of all the things that can happen to them, everything they might be subjected to, all the situations in which they could end up victims.
~ Fredrik Backman, Us Against You
Violence is the easiest and the hardest thing in the world to understand. Some of us are prepared to use it to get power, others only in self-defense, some all the time, others not at all. But then there’s another type, unlike all the others, who seems to fight entirely without purpose. Ask anyone who has looked into a pair of those eyes when they turn dark, and you’ll realize that we belong to different species. No one can really know if those people lack something that other people possess or if it’s the other way around. If something goes out inside them when they clench their fists or if something switches on.
~ Fredrik Backman, Us Against You
Natural talent is like an athlete’s strength. You can be born with more or less ability, but nobody can become an athlete just because he or she was born tall, or strong, or fast. What makes the athlete, or the artist, is the work, the vocation, and the technique. The intelligence you are born with is just ammunition. To achieve something with it you need to transform your mind into a high-precision weapon.” “Why the military metaphor?” “Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist’s life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one’s limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.
~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel’s Game
A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.
~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel’s Game
But these recurrences of desire force us to reflect that, if we wanted to meet these girls again with the same pleasure, we should have also to go back to the year in question, which has since been followed by ten others, in the course of which the girl has faded. We can sometimes find a person again, but not abolish time. All this up until that unforeseen day, sad as a winter’s night, when we are no longer seeking that particular girl, or any other, and when to find one would alarm us even. For we no longer feel we have sufficient attractions to please, or the strength to love. Not, of course, that we are, in the true sense of the word, impotent. So far as love is concerned, we would love more than ever. But we feel that it is too great an undertaking for the little strength that we preserve. Our eternal rest has already introduced intervals, in which we cannot go out, cannot speak.
~ Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain
Is it any weakness, pray, to be wrought on by exquisite music? — to feel its wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings of your soul, the delicate fibers of life where no memory can penetrate, and binding together your whole being past and present in one unspeakable vibration: melting you in one moment with all the tenderness, all the love that has been scattered through the toilsome years, concentrating in one emotion of heroic courage or resignation all the hard-learnt lessons of self-renouncing sympathy, blending your present joy with past sorrow, and your present sorrow with all your past joy?
~ George Eliot, Adam Bede
We break the ancient laws which echo within us and we believe that we may do with impunity. Surely man, on his road to greater freedom, on his road to his dreamed-of-heaven, should be permitted everything. We are all, each for himself and all together, pursuing the notion of earthly bliss and, in doing so, are piling guilt upon ourselves, even though we refuse to admit it. But what bliss can a man attain with a soul weighed down by guilt? His only way out is to kill the soul within him, and join the crowd of those who roam the world in search of something to fill the void which yawns within them after their soul is dead.
~ Ivan Klíma, Love and Garbage
To be a woman condemned to a wretched and disgraceful punishment is no impediment to beauty, but it is an insurmountable obstacle to power. Like all persons of real genius, her ladyship well knew what accorded with her nature and her means. Poverty disgusted her -subjection deprived her of two-thirds of her greatness. Her ladyship was only a queen amongst queens: the enjoyment of satisfied pride was essential to her sway. To command beings of an inferior nature, was, to her, rather a humiliation than a pleasure.
~ Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers
The winter cold has arrived and with it sleeting rain, I look at the leaden fjord and ask myself: What am I doing here? The ridges look back at me with cold eyes, I’m no more at home here than anywhere else, what am I doing here? She who has run away, will never find her way home again, why don’t I go somewhere I have never been and hide there? I go to the cabin on the barren ground and close the door, but the wind roars and buffets, the rain teems down and batters the roof, my thoughts spin and I writhe because I am alone. My heart aches, it trembles and flits, trapped behind my ribs. I made myself homeless and homeless I am, and my anguish will not be stilled. Hailstones lash the window and teeth gnaw at the walls, steel knuckles bang on doors, paws maul, creatures sigh, wanting to get in, the terror arrives, the great darkness rises from the forest and the sky hangs low over me like a stone.
~ Vigdis Hjorth, Mother Dead
If there was one thing I’d understood, it was that. A life is always complete in itself, always whole, no matter how long or short. Joar had once tried explaining to me that infinity wasn’t just infinity, there were different degrees of infinity. He said it had to do with set theory. I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about, surely infinity was unbounded, so how could there be different kinds, with different extensions? Exactly the opposite applied to life, it had occurred to me afterwards. Life was finite, not infinite, but even if it was bounded in time, time didn’t determine it’s boundaries — every life was complete in itself, none more complete than another.
~ Karl Ove Knausgård, The Wolves of Eternity
Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes much easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn’t through love, because love is hard. It makes demands. Hate is simple. So the first thing that happens in a conflict is that we choose a side, because that’s easier than trying to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. The second thing that happens is that we seek out facts that confirm what we want to believe—comforting facts, ones that permit life to go on as normal. The third is that we dehumanize our enemy.
~ Fredrik Backman, Beartown
As far as I understand it, and it’s impossible not to understand it, you yourself, at the beginning and then again, very eloquently — albeit too theoretically — have been developing a picture of a Russia covered with an endless network of knots. For their part, each of the active groups, by proselytizing and branching out ad infinitum, has the task, through systematic denunciatory propaganda of constantly undermining the authority of the local authorities, creating confusion in the villages, fostering cynicism, scandals and an utter lack of belief in anything at all, a burning desire for something better, and finally, using fires as a measure that appeals primarily to the common people, to throw the country, at a designated moment, if necessary, even into a state of despair.
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Devils
We say to the confused, Know thyself, as if knowing yourself was not the fifth and most difficult of human arithmetical operations, we say to the apathetic, Where there’s a will, there’s a way, as if the brute realities of the world did not amuse themselves each day by turning that phrase on its head, we say to the indecisive, Begin at the beginning, as if beginning were the clearly visible point of a loosely wound thread and all we had to do was to keep pulling until we reached the other end, and as if, between the former and the latter, we had held in our hands a smooth, continuous thread with no knots to untie, no snarls to untangle, a complete impossibility in the life of a skein, or indeed, if we may be permitted one more stock phrase, in the skein of life.
~ José Saramago, The Cave
His games have a deeper meaning and fascination that adults can no longer fathom and require nothing more than three pebbles, or a piece of wood with a dandelion helmet, perhaps; but above all they require only the pure, strong, passionate, chaste, still-untroubled fantasy of those happy years when life still hesitates to touch us, when neither duty nor guilt dares lay a hand upon us, when we are allowed to see, hear, laugh, wonder, and dream without the world’s demanding anything in return, when the impatience of those whom we want so much to love has not yet begun to torment us for evidence, some early token, that we will diligently fulfill our duties. Ah, it will not be long, and all that will rain down upon us in overwhelming, raw power, will assault us, stretch us, cramp us, drill us, corrupt us”
~ Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks
I opened my eyes; how could I keep them shut when I could not sleep? The same darkness brooded over me; the same unfathomable black eternity which my thoughts strove against and could not understand. I made the most despairing efforts to find a word black enough to characterize this darkness; a word so horribly black that it would darken my lips if I named it. Lord! how dark it was! and I am carried back in thought to the sea and the dark monsters that lay in wait for me. They would draw me to them, and clutch me tightly and bear me away by land and sea, through dark realms that no soul has seen. I feel myself on board, drawn through waters, hovering in clouds, sinking – sinking.
~ Knut Hamsun, Hunger
Right now, you and I are crossing a deep, dark river. Every time that enormous weight presses down on us and the waters of the river rise over our throats and we want to give up and slip beneath the surface, remember: as heavy as the load we shoulder is the world that we tread upon. Earthbound beings unfortunately cannot break free of gravity. Life demands sacrifice and difficult decisions from us at every moment. Living does not mean passing through a void of nothingness but rather through a web of relationships among beings, each with their own weight and volume and texture. Insofar as everything is always changing, so our sense of hope shall never die out. Therefore, I leave you all with one final thought: Live. Until you are down to your final breath, love and fight and rage and grieve and live.
~ Kyung-Sook Shin, I’ll Be Right There
The Pine-Scented Chronicles 