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 we will paint these blank canvasses with memories that we will cherish for a lifetime, whether 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 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 second batch of memorable quotes from the books I read in 2024.
This feeling the attic does not belong to the house but exists in its own right, an anteroom of shadow and disorder as though the place were the house of memory itself, seeing before her the remnants of their younger selves, the self folded, packed into boxes, bagged and discarded, lost in the disarray of vanished and forgotten other selves, the dust laying itself down upon the years of their lives, the years of their lives slowly turning to dust, what will remain and how little can be known about who we were, in the closing of an eye we will all be gone.
~ Paul Lynch, Prophet Song
I wanted to write what I want to read. Stories of people who find their own pace and direction, of people who believe in others and wait by their side as they go through difficult times, lost in worry. Stories of those who support others, who celebrate small efforts and resolve in a society that puts people – and everything about them – down once they take a fall. Stories that bring comfort, providing a pat on the shoulder for those who’ve lost the joy in life, having pushed themselves too hard to do well.
~ Hwang Bo-Reum, Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop
How can I describe my life in the years leading up to this moment except in shades of gray? All the scrape and grind of it, all the empty shelves and lost ambition, all the soot grown hard on windows, season after season the only black harvest. The bad news, the debts, the visa applications, the flesh of your arm humping white between a nurse’s fingers as she stuck you with a paltry twelve months’ protection against whatever new strain of disease, as if bankruptcy or homelessness or a weariness at aping at the motions of life weren’t more likely to kill you first.
~ C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey
Nevertheless, now that I have had more experience with both languages, I’m more sensitive to the uniqueness of Japanese. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the language for me is how its writing uses three kinds of signs: Chinese characters — which mostly function as ideograms — and two sets of phonograms. The resulting text contains an embarrassment of riches impossible to replicate in other languages. I’ll try to explain it. Let’s say you are reading a page describing a flower garden. Names of flowers jump out at you. They are rendered in complex Chinese characters that can’t help standing out as they are embedded in phonograms much simpler in form. And since flower names in ideograms usually have poetic connotations, looking at the page, it really seems as if you are looking at a garden filled with clusters of fragrant and beautiful flowers.
~ Minae Mizamura, Inheritance from Mother
You can’t see what has happened day by day, reading the newspapers, you must look at them for a whole year. Then everything comes rushing at you. You see how the year was a waste. Faster and faster the headlines come, one day has nothing to do with the next, suddenly someone has been killed or a nation is on the front page, the photographs change of people lying in the streets, the names change, everything goes up and down jiggling the eye. In the library I started sweating, so afraid. How can I live if the world is like this? The world can’t be lived, no one can live it right. It is out of control, crazy.
~ Joyce Carol Oates, them
We’re ghosts because we have to be because our lives depend on passing and being passed by. But we’re ghosts who see other ghosts often, who hold things and hug them and fuck them, too, in our bedrooms, doors closed. We love them too. Like you. Here, they call us mad. We go again. They strike us down. We choose again. They black off our lights. We learn the dark. We don’t die. We never die. We only love harder. We only see sharper. I can appear and disappear in seconds, at will. I can look like a not-sin, a non-outcast. People like us don’t need a club full of women to find who’ll go down if we look right. We know our signals, our codes. You’re only real when everyone can see you.
~ Eloghosa Osunde, Vagabonds!
You’re not more important because you’re alive or because you see this way up or because you walk with your legs and breathe from your face. That it’s the only way you know does not mean it’s the only way there is. You share this place with flesh and not-flesh; it’s just as much their city as it is yours. Don’t think that just because they forgive you all the time—for running into them, for bumping against them, for slamming their fingers into doors, for not answering when they call you, for stepping on them as they’re sunbathing on the road’s shoulder—they no longer exist, that their lives will not still touch your life. They are merely forgiving you. All that is mercy; they are only giving you chance.
~ Eloghosa Osunde, Vagabonds!
But if you are a sufficiently great and important person, it is necessary that you should be spared small annoyances. If a fly settles on your forehead again and again, maddening you by its tickling–what do you do? You endeavour to kill that fly. You have no qualms about it. You are important–the fly is not. You kill the fly and the annoyance ceases. Your action appears to you sane and justifiable. Another reason for killing a fly is if you have a strong passion for hygiene. The fly is a potential source of danger to the community–the fly must go. So works the mind of the mentally deranged criminal.
~ Agatha Christie, The A.B.C. Murders
I understood that I was close to total collapse. I put my hands against the wall and shoved to push myself away from it. The street was still dancing around. I began to hiccup from fury, and struggled with every bit of energy against my collapse, fought a really stout battle not to fall down. I didn’t want to fall, I wanted to die standing. A wholesale grocer’s cart came by, and I saw it was filled with potatoes, but out of fury, from sheer obstinacy, I decided that they were not potatoes at all, they were cabbages, and I swore violent oaths that they were cabbages. I heard my own words very well, and I took the oath again and again on this lie, and swore deliberately just to have the delightful satisfaction of committing such clear perjury. I became drunk over this superb sin, I lifted three fingers in the air and swore with trembling lips in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost that they were cabbages.
~ Knut Hamsun, Hunger
He completely lacked any ardent interest that might have occupied his mind. His interior life was impoverished, had undergone a deterioration so severe that it was like the almost constant burden of some vague grief. And bound up with it all was an implacable sense of personal duty and the grim determination to present himself at his best, to conceal his frailties by any means possible, and to keep up appearances. It had all contributed to making his existence what it was: artificial, self-conscious, and forced—until every word, every gesture, the slightest deed in the presence of others had become a taxing and grueling part in a play.
~ Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks
Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt. Some say that the main cause of this very serious difficulty lies in the fact that human beings are basically made of clay, which, as the encyclopedias helpfully explain, is a detrital sedimentary rock made up of tiny mineral fragments measuring one two hundred and fifty-sixths of a millimeter. Until now, despite long linguistic study, no one has managed to come up with a name for this.
~ José Saramago, The Cave
Is this what is called remorse of conscience or repentance? I do not know, and I cannot tell to this day. Perhaps this remembrance even now contains something pleasurable for my passions. No–what is unbearable to me is only this image alone, and precisely on the threshold, with its raised and threatening little fist, only that look alone, only that minute alone, only that shaking head. This is what I cannot bear, because since then it appears to me almost every day. It does not appear on its own, but I myself evoke it, and cannot help evoking it, even though I cannot live with it.
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Devils
They hated it when people spoke of “the condition,” because conditions are untouchable. They wanted to have a face, a perpetrator. They needed someone to drown under the weight of all the guilt, because otherwise they themselves would be dragged beneath the surface. They were so selfish, they know that, but when they didn’t have anyone to punish there was only the sky left to scream at, and then their rage was too great for any human being to bear. They wanted an enemy. Now they’ve got one. And now they don’t know if they ought to sit next to their daughter or hunt down the person who harmed her, if they ought to help her live or see to it that he dies. Unless they’re the same thing. Hate is so much easier than its opposite. * * * Parents don’t heal. Nor do children.
~ Fredrik Backman, Beartown
Man goes through the landscape, seeking hope and waiting for a miracle, waiting for someone to answer his questions. Some monk, pilgrim, enlightened Buddha, prophet or at least a talking bird, to tell him if he’s been endowed with a soul, whose existence would not be cut short even by death, of what matter that soul was woven, what there was above man, what order, what creature or being, in what kind of big bang time had its origin and where it was heading; man passes through the landscape, waiting for an encounter, or at least for a sign, without knowing its nature.
~ Ivan Klíma, Love and Garbage
Those slight words and looks and touches are part of the soul’s language; and the finest language, I believe, is chiefly made up of unimposing words, such as “light,” “sound,” “stars,” “music”—words really not worth looking at, or hearing, in themselves, any more than “chips” or “sawdust.” It is only that they happen to be the signs of something unspeakably great and beautiful. I am of opinion that love is a great and beautiful thing too, and if you agree with me, the smallest signs of it will not be chips and sawdust to you: they will rather be like those little words, “light” and “music,” stirring the long-winding fibres of your memory and enriching your present with your most precious past.
~ George Eliot, Adam Bede
It is no doubt the existence of our body, similar for us to a vase in which our spirituality is enclosed, that induces us to suppose that all our inner goods, our past joys, all our sorrows, are perpetually in our possession. Perhaps this is as inaccurate as to believe that they escape or return. At all events, if they do remain inside us, it is for most of the time in an unknown domain where they are of no service to us, and where even the most ordinary of them are repressed by memories of a different order, which exclude all simultaneity with them in our consciousness. But if the framework of sensations in which they are preserved be recaptured, they have in their turn the same capacity to expel all that is incompatible with them, to install in us, on its own, the self that experienced them.
~ Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain
I think you are talented and passionate. More than you think and less than you expect. But there are a lot of people with talent and passion, and many of them never get anywhere. This is only the first step for achieving anything in life. 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.
~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel’s Game
Nothing makes us believe more than fear, the certainty of being threatened. When we feel like victims, all our actions and beliefs are legitimized, however questionable they may be. Our opponents, or simply our neighbors, stop sharing common ground with us and become our enemies. We stop being aggressors and become defenders. The envy, greed, or resentment that motivates us becomes sanctified, because we tell ourselves we’re acting in self-defense. Evil, menace — those are always the preserve of the other. The first step for believing passionately is fear. Fear of losing our identity, our life, our status, or our beliefs. Fear is the gunpowder and hatred the fuse. Dogma, the final ingredient, is only a lighted match.
~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel’s Game
The worst thing we know about other people is that we’re dependent upon them. That their actions affect our lives. Not just the people we choose, the people we like, but all the rest of them: the idiots. You who stand in front of us in every line, who can’t drive properly, who like bad television shows and talk too loud in restaurants and whose kids infect our kids with the winter vomiting bug at preschool. You who park badly and steal our jobs and vote for the wrong party. You also influence our lives, every second.
~ Fredrik Backman, Us Against You
People say that leadership is about making difficult decisions, unpalatable and unpopular decisions. “Do your job,” leaders are constantly being told. The impossible part of the job is, of course, that a leader can carry on leading only as long as someone follows him, and people’s reactions to leadership are always the same: if a decision of yours benefits me, you’re fair, and if the same decision harms me, you’re a tyrant. The truth about most people is as simple as it is unbearable: we rarely want what is best for everyone; we mostly want what’s best for ourselves.
~ Fredrik Backman, Us Against You
I’d say that the quantity of boredom, if boredom is measurable, is much greater today than it once was. Because the old occupations, at least most of them, were unthinkable without a passionate involvement: the peasants in love with their land; my grandfather, the magician of beautiful tables; the shoemakers who knew every villager’s feet by heart; the woodsmen; the gardeners; probably even the soldiers killed with passion back then. The meaning of life wasn’t an issue, it was there with them, quite naturally in their workshops, in their fields. Each occupation had created its own mentality, its own way of being. A doctor would think differently from a peasant, a soldier would behave differently from a teacher. Today we’re all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward our work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time.
~ Milan Kundera, Identity
All the myths he believed in would crystallize into even greater mythology in future years and become weapons of war used by politicians and evildoers to kill defenseless schoolchildren by the dozens so that a few rich men spouting the same mythology that Doc spouted could buy islands that held more riches than the town of Pottstown had or would ever have. Gigantic yachts that would sail the world and pollute the waters and skies, owned by men creating great companies that made weapons of great power in factories that employed the poor, weapons that were sold cheaply enough so that the poor could purchase them and kill one another.
~ James McBride, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
A single act, like a shot from a sling, has travelled through their lives, through many years, and has now taken everything away from them. That one act had forced Nkechi, on whom he’d pinned his young heart, to get attached to his brother, and forced his brother, in turn, to come here. The single act has caused him to follow his brother into the most dangerous place in the world. And for what purpose? Why? Nkechi has married another man and is pregnant with the man’s child. And what is the fate of his crippled brother? Confined to a wheelchair in a war-torn country, with a people who are not his family, his life condemned to the fate of a ragtag army whose defeat at the hands of a superior enemy is only a matter of time. Again—why? The answer, he sees, is him: he is the cause of all this.
~ Chigozie Obioma, The Road to the Country
A disease that has never been seen before cannot be cured with everyday herbs. When we want to make a charm we look for the animal whose blood can match its power; if a chicken cannot do it we look for a goat or a ram; if that is not sufficient we send for a bull. But sometimes even a bull does not suffice, then we must look for human. Do you think it is the sound of the death-cry gurgling through blood that we want to hear? No, my friend, we do it because we have reached the very end of things and we know that neither a cock nor a goat nor even a bull will do. And our fathers have told us that it may even happen to an unfortunate generation that they are pushed beyond the end of things, and their back is broken and hung over a fire. When this happens they may sacrifice their own blood. This is what our sages meant when they said that a man who has nowhere else to put his hand for support puts it on his own knee.
~ Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God
I tried to remain with the song, but my mind was already telling me that something breaks when you’re away so long: ties and modes of being and days — the days themselves, they shatter in halves — and so much else I can’t describe. And other things are born too, but those become unkind to share, because they help only to remind us and those we have left of what has been erased in their place. And so you keep your mouth shut because you don’t want to admit how different you have become. This is why it is perfectly reasonable never to come back (don’t let anyone tell you otherwise), although I wish you would.
~ Hisham Matar, My Friend
What was joy, anyway. What was the worth of happiness that left behind a crater thrice the size of its impact. What did people who spoke of joy know of what it meant, to sleep and dream only of the whistle of planes and knocks at the door and on windows and to wake with a hand at one’s throat— one’s own hand, at one’s own throat. What did they know of not speaking for days, of not having known the touch of another, never having known, of want and of not having felt the press of skin to one’s own, and what did they know of a house that only ever emptied out. Of animals dying and fathers dying and mothers dying and finding bullet holes in the barks of trees right below hearts carved around names of people who weren’t there and the bloody lip of a sibling and what did what did she know— of what could she possibly know of what it—
~ Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep
For our species, the idea of art as ornament is a relatively new one. Our ape brains got too big, too big for our heads, too big for our mothers to birth them. So we started keeping all our extra knowing in language, in art, in stories and books and songs. Art was a way of storing our brains in each other’s. It wasn’t until fairly recently in human history, when rich landowners wanted something pretty to look at in winter, that the idea of art-as-mere-ornament came around. A painting of a blooming rose to hang on the mantel when the flowers outside the window had gone to ice. And still in the twenty-first century, it’s hard for folks to move past that. This idea that beauty is the horizon toward which all great art must march. I’ve never been interested in that. “As heaven spins, I fall into bedlam.
~ Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!
Booze worked that way sometimes, clarifying—briefly—what his mind couldn’t. It was like sitting in the optometrist’s office, booze flashing its different lenses in front of your face and sometimes, for a second, it’d be the right prescription, the one that allowed you to catch a glimpse of the world as it was, beyond your grief, beyond your doom. That was the clarity alcohol, and nothing else, gave. Seeing life as everyone else did, as a place that could accommodate you. But of course a second later it’d zoom past clarity through a flurry of increasingly opaque lenses until all you were able to see would be the dark of your own skull.
~ Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!
Places described by a lover are like no other places on earth. To learn a city in this way – boulevards curving, canals, cornices overhead – in the naked embrace, the luxury of listening while your skin is listening. The city slips into your body. And then, if you are fortunate enough to arrive there for the first time with that same lover, or more fortunate still to arrive there after many years with the same lover – then you will enter the place as if in a dream. Your body will recognise the canals, the cornices, the curving boulevards; memory before sight. And that is a great gift, because we arrive most often as strangers; this, of course, is its own pleasure. But this other pleasure – arrival into the memory of a place you’ve never been and yet know in your skin – is the same as arriving into love, that knowledge of something we do not yet know. The kind of love that is like a fatality. The one you never live beyond, no matter what else befalls you.
~ Anne Michaels, Held
Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once, it seems he’s about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere.
~ Samantha Harvey, Orbital
Then I resumed my efforts, moving to other parts of the wall. Chips fell, and, when large pieces of the wall began to come down, I kept on pounding, bleary-eyed, with an urgency that was far greater than the size of the iron bar, until the resistance of the wall (which seemed unaffected by the force of my repeated pounding) pushed me to the floor, frantic and exhausted. First I saw, then I touched, the pieces of masonry— they were smooth on one side, harsh, earthy on the other: then, in a vision so lucid it seemed ephemeral and supernatural, my eyes saw the blue continuity of the tile, the undamaged and whole wall, the closed room.
~ Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel
A period of isolation would bring about gradual changes in the collective gene pool of each isolated region. This would disrupt the genetic flattening caused by an overabundance of humans on the planet, leading to the formation of groups with their own distinguishing genetic characteristics. Eventually, through mutation within, or perhaps interbreeding between these different groups, there should appear a new humanity, with new genes, and the potential for further evolution.
~ Hiromi Kawakami, Under the Eye of the Big Bird
Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or—and the outward semblance is the same—crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more. The latter is perhaps the truest theory. She who has once been a woman, and ceased to be so, might at any moment become a woman again, if there were only the magic touch to effect the transformation.
~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
I thought, In spite of all my cunning and self-sacrifice, I’m finished. I thought, How poetic, to destroy my writings like that. I thought, It would have been better to swallow them, now I’m finished. I thought, The vanity of writing, the vanity of destruction. I thought, Because I wrote, I endured. I thought, Because what I had written, they will find me, they will hit me, they will rape me, they will kill me. I thought, The two things are connected, writing and destroying, hiding and being found. Then I sat down on the throne and shut my eyes. I fell asleep. Then I woke up again.
~ Roberto Bolaño, Amulet
If the cosmic calendar is in fact all of time, most of which has not yet occurred, in another two months any number of things could have happened to the cool marble of earth and none of them promising from a life point of view – a wandering star could throw the whole solar system out and earth with it, a meteor strike could cause mass extinction, the earth’s axial tilt could increase, the flexing and drifting of orbits could eventually eject some planets, and in all events it’ll be in roughly another four months, five billion years, that the sun will run out of fuel, expand to a red dwarf and consume Mercury and Venus. Earth, if it survives, will be scorched and arid, its oceans boiled dry, a cinder stuck in an interminable orbit of a white dwarf black dwarf dying sun until the whole show ends as the orbit decays and the sun eats us up.
~ Samantha Harvey, Orbital
Tales of boys and their fathers are the same in every age, in every place. We love each other, hate each other, miss each other, hold each other back, but we can never live unaffected by each other. We try to be men and never really know how. The tales about us who live here are the same sort of tales that are told about everyone, everywhere, we think we’re in charge of the way they unfold but of course that happens unbearably seldom. They just carry us wherever they want to go. Some of them will have happy endings, and some of them will end exactly the way we were always afraid they would.
~ Fredrik Backman, The Winners
The officials are very well educated, but only in a one-sided way; in his own department, an official will see a whole train of ideas behind a single word, but you can spend hours on end explaining matters from another department to him, and while he may nod politely he doesn’t understand a bit of it. Of course that’s all perfectly natural, you just have to think of the little official matters affecting yourself, tiny things that an official will deal with merely by shrugging his shoulders, you just have to understand that thoroughly, and then you will have plenty to occupy your mind all your life and never run out of ideas.
~ Franz Kafka, The Castle
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
Perhaps one may be out late, and had got separated from one’s companions. Oh horrors! Suddenly one starts and trembles as one seems to see a strange-looking being peering from out of the darkness of a hollow tree, while all the while the wind is moaning and rattling and howling through the forest — moaning with a hungry sound as it strips the leaves from the bare boughs, and whirls them into the air. High over the tree-tops, in a widespread, trailing, noisy crew, there fly, with resounding cries, flocks of birds which seem to darken and overlay the very heavens. Then a strange feeling comes over one, until one seems to hear the voice of someone whispering: “Run, run, little child! Do not be out late, for this place will soon have become dreadful! Run, little child! Run!” And at the words terror will possess one’s soul, and one will rush and rush until one’s breath is spent—until, panting, one has reached home.
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Poor Folk
A mother is standing outside a house. She’s packing her child’s things into a car. How many times does that happen while they’re growing up? How many toys do you pick up from the floor, how many stuffed animals do you have to form search parties for at bedtime, how many mittens do you give up on at preschool? How many times do you think that if nature really does want people to reproduce, then perhaps evolution should have let all parents grow extra sets of arms so they can reach under all the wretched sofas and fridges? How many hours do we spend waiting in hallways for our kids? How many gray hairs do they give us? How many lifetimes do we devote to their single one? What does it take to be a good parent? Not much. Just everything. Absolutely everything.
~ Fredrik Backman, Us Against You
The Pine-Scented Chronicles 