The Saucy Wenches Book Club

“Looking back on it, I sometimes think my life was like a Dickens novel, only with swearing.” ~ Stephen King, Later

That was the thing about best friends. Like sisters and mothers, they could piss you off and make you cry and break your heart, but in the end, when the chips were down, they were there, making you laugh even in your darkest hours. ~ Kristin Hannah, Firefly Lane

Life with a cheat code isn’t life. Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That’s what it is to be human — the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other. ~ Blake Crouch, Recursion

There was a Suli saying: The heart is an arrow. It demands aim to land true. Her father had liked to recite this when she was training on the wire or the swings. Be decisive , he’d say. You have to know where you want to go before you get there. Her mother had laughed at this. That’s not what that means , she’d say. You take the romance out of everything. ~ Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

What if there are more than two roads diverging in the wood? What if there are more roads than trees? What if there is no end to the choices you could make? What would Robert Frost do then? ~ Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

Once you saw it all, you could never go back. Everything was alive. Overwhelming. I was overwhelmed eventually. Overcome. Silvina wrote that even through the poisoned landscape, we must love it. We must love what has been damaged, because everything has been damaged. And to love the damage is to know you care about that world. That you're still alive. That the world is alive. ~ Jeff VanderMeer, Hummingbird Salamander

It came on the wind, the way wicked things must, for they are most often weighted down with spite and haven’t the strength to lift themselves. ~ Alice Hoffman, The Rules of Magic

Already the blue scilla are beginning to flower, the daffodils have their snouts above ground, the self-seeded forget-me-nots are creeping up, getting ready to hog the light. Here it comes — another year of vegetative hustling and jostling. They never seem to get tired of it: plants have no memories, that’s why. They can’t remember how many times they’ve done all this before. ~ Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“I hope you weren’t too free with your knowledge,” Father said. “A man expects to guide his wife in all things. Displaying too much cleverness can make a woman seem less appealing.” ~ C. L. Polk, The Midnight Bargain

If Blue were a scholar—and she has played one enough times to know she would have loved to be—she would catalogue, across all strands [of time], a comprehensive study of the worlds in which Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy, and in which a comedy. It delights her, whenever visiting a new strand, to take in a performance not knowing how it will end. ~ This is How You Lose the Time War , Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

“But seriously, why books. Because no other thing possesses that mystical faculty to make people see with other people’s eyes. The Library is a bridge of books between cultures.” ~ Janet Skeslien Charles, The Paris Library

“I wish for us to have the courage to go out into the world when we are ready, but to always be able to find our way back to each other. No matter what.” ~ Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Silver Flames

If he were a dog, his tail would be constantly wagging. ~ Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet

We all of us have a story—one we tell knowingly or not with our hours and our days. ~ Barbara Davis, The Last of the Moon Girls

All around me doors into other worlds began appearing but I knew the one I wanted, the one into which everything forgotten flows. The edges of that door were frayed and worn by the passage of old ideas leaving this world. ~ Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

This moment is perfect. And it’s all we’ll ever have. This moment, right now. We’re fools if we fail to cram all the living and loving we can possibly do into each and every one. ~Karen Marie Moning, Kingdom of Shadow and Light

A home isn’t always the house we live in. It’s also the people we choose to surround ourselves with. ~ T.J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth. This is how the girl who couldn’t speak and the man who couldn’t see fell in love. ~ Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin