____“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”

____“Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”

___“As the hours crept by, the afternoon sunlight bleached all the books on the shelves to pale, gilded versions of themselves and warmed the paper and ink inside the covers so that the smell of unread words hung in the air.”

___“From the very beginning— from the first moment, I may almost say— of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.”

____Perhaps I've spent too long in the company of my literary romantic heroes, and consequently my ideals and expectations are far too high.”

____“All I wanted was a new life for my son to grow up free, and now you took the only thing that meant anything to me, I will never fly again, I will hang up my wings.”

____“The best love is the kind that awakens the soul and makes us reach for more, that plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds, and that's what you've given me.”

____“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”

____ “If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.”

____“I cannot think that your law could have such force that you, mere man, could negate the unwritten inviolable statutes of the gods.”

____“I knew that I had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.”

____ “I wish I had a thousand words for love, but all that comes to mind is the way you move against me while you sleep and there are no words for that.”

____ “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.”

____ “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”

____ “Even trained for years as they all had been in precision of language, what words could you use which would give another the experience of sunshine?”

A. The Things They Carried Tim O’Brien B. Fifty Shades of Grey E.L. James C. Daedalus Thrice D. “Antigone” Sophocles E. Story People Brian Andreas F. The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger G. Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen H. “A&P: Lust in the Aisles” John Updike I. The Giver Lois Lowry J. The Holy Bible Miscellaneous Authors K. The Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien L. The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde M. Shiver Maggie Steifvater N. The Notebook Nicholas Sparks O. Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy

But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you go forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.” -Martin Luther King Jr.