Top Ten favorite quotes (at least for the moment)

This week's Top Ten Tuesday theme is about your favorite quotes from books.  Also, for the writers, Adam Gaylord is doing a Writer's Tip Tuesday and this Tuesday I have a guest post!

My quotes are about happiness, seeing in new ways, love of books (of course!), questions for which there are no answer, faith, and creativity.

And then there's a few quotes on falling in love, the deeper love that comes much longer after the falling in love stage, and a love that you grow into instead of falling into. 

1. What does happiness feel like?

“Happiness. It was the place where passion, with all its dazzle and drumbeat, met something softer: homecoming and safety and pure sunbeam comfort. It was all those things, intertwined with the heat and the thrill, and it was as bright within her as a swallowed star.” from Daughter of Smoke and Bone, by Laini Taylor

2. Seeing in a new way

“These human eyes seemed weak to me at first," said Eskar, still staring away from me, scratching her short black hair. "They detect fewer colors and have terrible resolution, but they see things dragon eyes cannot. They can see beyond surfaces. I don't understand how that's possible, but it happened incrementally as I traveled with Orma: I began to see the inside of him. His questioning and gentle nature. His conviction. I'd glimpse it in something as incongruous as his hand holding a teacup, or his eyes when he spoke of you.” from Shadow Scale, by Rachel Hartman

3, Love of books (and libraries!)

“Libraries really are wonderful. They're better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.”  from Among Others, by Jo Walton

4. Unanswerable questions in life

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”   from The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula LeGuin

5. Faith, and doubt

“He said that doubt provided contour to faith, like shading in a drawing, that it allowed you to see what was really there.” from The Opposite of Hallelujah, by Anna Jarzab

6. Faith, and God's calling

“The place God calls us to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.” from Kisses From Katie, by Katie J. Davis

7. Creativity

“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”  from Ray Bradbury's book on writing

8. Falling in love

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”  from The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

9.  Growing into love

“There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.”  from Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton 

10. The deeper love that comes from time

“They had an ordinary life, full of ordinary things-if love can ever be called that.”  from Ruin and Rising by Leigh Bardugo

Bonus quote - this one is a bit long, but I love this one because it captures the frustration of the artist (or the writer, in my case): our desire to create something perfect and beautiful and how we always fall short, but the falling short is itself a beautiful thing for how to draws us onward, ever onward, to keep creating.

“This was not the perfect work that had existed in her mind. It was only the imperfect rendering that was the best her skill could manage. Yet Giulia was not dismayed. For she knew that she would try again – and again, and again, for as long as it took to gain the experience, the judgment, the understanding to get it right. And perhaps she never would get it right. Perhaps she would never attain that flawless blue, never create that perfect image, never find the ultimate point of balance between what she could accomplish an what she could dream. Yet wasn’t that the point? To be drawn onward, ever onward, in pursuit of your deepest passion? To look back at the end fo the race and knew that you had never done less than the most you could do?”  from Color Song, by Victoria Strauss