She grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved, for what you are, not what you ought to be.
Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell
This book had me in pieces. I definitely want to get to see the play at the RSC.
There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.
Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens
I still haven’t seen the movie but I still love this book. I will re-read this book this year.
Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We’d pass out every time we saw— actually saw— a flower. Imagine if we only got to see a cumulonimbus cloud or Cassiopeia or a snowfall once a century: there’d be pandemonium in the streets. People would lie by the thousands in the fields on their backs.
Four Seeasons in Rome, Anthony Doerr
I love his writing almost as much as I love Italy. His Pulitzer prize-winning book All the Light We Cannot See is just beautiful but I love this memoir too as it is about writing and living in Italy with his young family.
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 distain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of the 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 on whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
One of my favourite books of all time (perhaps The… certainly for sentimental reasons) and I could have picked a romantic quotation but this sass from Lizzie is just brilliant.
That is your greatest responsibility. To live a life of breathless wonder, so that when it begins to fade from you, you will feel the shadow of its happiness still inside you and the blissful sense that you laughed the loudest, loved the deepest, and lived fearlessly, even as the specifics of it all melt away.
The Storm Keeper’s Island, Catherine Doyle
One of my favourite modern children’s books. It is just wonderful.
Notes From My Day 