Inkspell by Cornelia Funke

But the happiness remained in his heart, soft and warm like a young bird's downy plumage.

"Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several time?" Mo had said when , on Meggie's last birthday, they were looking at all her dear old books again. "As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells . . . and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower . . . both strange and familiar."

The whole secret, Meggie," Mo had once told her, "is in the breathing. It gives your voice strength and fills it with your life. And not just yours. Sometimes it feels as if when you take a breath you are breathing in everything around you, everything that makes up the world and moves it, and then it all flows into the words."

Flipped by Wendelin Van Draanen

I probably wouldn't have told him about Mr. Finnegan or Uncle David or why the yard was such a mess if he hadn't asked me about moving. But since he had, well, I wound up telling him everything. And it felt like blowing a dandelion into the wind and watching all the little seeds float off, up and away.

Power Trip by Amanda Little

The article described [William Levitt] as foolishly overconfident: "At 43, the leader of the U.S. housing revolution is a cocky, rambunctious hustler with brown hair, cow-sad eyes, a hoarse voice (from smoking three packs of cigarettes a day), and a liking for hyperbole that causes him to describe his height (5 ft. 8 in.) as 'nearly six feet' and his company as the 'General Motors of the housing industry.'"

The best way to change the order of things, most believe, is not to complain that the old system doesn't work but to demonstrate the virtues of a new system. "Dr. King didn't build a movement by saying 'I have a complaint,'" said Van Jones.

The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg by Rodman Philbrick

He don't laugh that much, being a serious-minded person, but when he does, it feels like someone gave you a silver dollar, because it's bright and shiny and rings true.

Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

"If you take a book with you on a journey," Mo said when he put the first one in her box, "an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it . . . yes, books are like flypaper--memories cling to the printed page better than anything else." (p. 15)

It was dark, but the night was growing paler as if lifting her skirts a little way off to let the new morning appear. (p. 214)

Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver

I'm on a re-reading Barbara Kingsolver kick. This time I'm just lolling around in the metaphors.

The leaves shine like knife blades in the beam of his flashlight.

Men in uniforms decorated with the macho jewelry of ammunition.

And somehow Hallie thrived anyway--the blossom of our family, like one of those miraculous fruit trees that taps into an invisible vein of nurture and bears radiant bushels of plums while the trees around it merely go on living.

There are all the small things you love and despise about a parent: the disappointed eyes, the mannerisms, the sound of the voice as much as the meaning of the words, that add up to that singular thing--the way you are both going to respond, whether you like it or not.

She said, "You can't let your heart go bad like that, like sour milk. There's always the chance you'll want to use it later."

Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver

What a book! Reading this felt like bathing in metaphor upon metaphor.
The neighborhood tomcat, all muscle and slide, is creeping along the top of the trellis where Alice's sweet peas have spent themselves all spring.
Storm clouds with high pompadours have congregated on the western horizon, offering the hope of cooler weather, but only the hope.
Even a joke has some weight and takes up space, and when introduced into a vacuum, acquires its own gravity.
They are a planeload of people ignoring each other. Alice has spent her life in small towns and is new to this form of politeness, in which people sit for all practical purposes on top of one another in a public place and behave like upholstery.
Sympathizing over the behavior of men is the baking soda of women's friendships, it seems, the thing that makes them bubble and rise.
Kevin, the computer whiz, would say that Barbie is all output and no interface.
Please check out this amazing video from TED on metaphor.