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Instead of writing a college thesis, I read cookbooks in bed. I flipped through culinary magazines and food memoirs, burying my head in the biographies of iconic chefs until the early hours of the morning. After obsessively researching recipes online, I kneaded bread dough on my kitchen counter and assembled fat cakes layered with fruit and cream. I cooked intricate Middle Eastern tagines and watched chocolate soufflés rise slowly in the oven. I was studying for my bachelor's degree in art history, but in my final years of college I thought of little but the stove. I knew what I wanted: to be a chef.

  —  Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of Smell and Found My Way (Molly Birnbaum)

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I wish I had a boyfriend. I wished he lived in the wardrobe on a coat hanger. Whenever I wanted, I could get him out and he’d look at me the way boys do in films, as if I’m beautiful. He wouldn’t speak much, but he’d be breathing hard as he took off his leather jacket and unbuckled his jeans. He’d wear white pants and he’d be so gorgeous I’d almost faint. He’d take my clothes off too. He’d whisper, “Tessa, I love you. I really bloody love you. You’re beautiful” – exactly those words – as he undressed me.

  —  Before I Die (Jenny Downham)

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There used to be many families like the Ziskinds, families where each person always knew that his life was more than his alone. Families like that still exist, but because there are so few of them, they have become insular, isolated, their sentiment that the family is the center of the universe broadened to imply that nothing outside the family is worth anything. If you are from one of these families, you believe this, and you always will.

  —  The World to Come (Dara Horn)

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“Honestly, Nicola.” Mrs Bruce regarded her elder daughter with the exasperated air of one who has very nearly reached the end of her tether. “I just don't know how you could do such a thing. I don't know how you could.”

  —  Hi There, Supermouse! (Jean Ure)

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A convenience store is a world of sound. From the tinkle of the door chime to the voices of TV celebrities advertising new products over the in-store cable network, to the calls of the store workers, the beeps of the bar code scanner, the rustle of customers picking up items and placing them in baskets, and the clacking of heels walking around the store. It all blends into the convenience store sound that ceaselessly caresses my eardrums.

  —  Convenience Store Woman (Murata Sayaka)

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Getting ready was a terrible business. After supper Frau Brechenmacher packed four of the five babies to bed, allowing Rosa to stay with her and help to polish the buttons of Herr Brechenmacher's uniform. Then she ran over his best shirt with a hot iron, polished his boots, and put a stitch or two into his black satin necktie.

  —  Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding (Katherine Mansfield)

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In the old days, in the years that have gone before us, the land and sea felt a great emptiness, a yearning. The mountains were like the poutama, the stairway to heaven, and the lush green rainforests were a rippling kakahu of many colours. The sky was iridescent paua, swirling with the kowhaiwhai patterns of wind and clouds; sometimes it reflected the prisms of rainbow or southern aurora. The sea was ever-changing pounamu, shimmering and seamless to the sky. This was the well at the bottom of the world and when you looked into it you felt you could see to the end of forever.

  —  The Whale Rider (Witi Ihimaera)

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Rebecca Winter, talented, cheerful, and poor, had arrived at the age of sixteen without once seeing a bomb go off. That was not hard to do; London, in 1882, was no more explosive than it is now; though it was not less explosive, either, dynamite being already a vigorous instrument of politics.

  —  The Tin Princess (Philip Pullman)

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At just before 5 P.M. on a weekday, the upper-track level of Grand Central Terminal looks much as it does at any other time of day: a striped gray landscape of long concrete islands stretching away from you into a dry, iron-smelling night, under the relentless fluorescent glow of the long lines of overhead lighting. Much of the view across the landscape will be occluded by the thirteen Metro-North trains whose business it is to be there at that time, and by the rush and flow of commuters through the many doors leading from the echoing main concourse to the twelve accessible platforms' ends. The commuters' thousands of voices on the platforms and out in the concourse mingle into a restless, undecipherable roar, above which the amplified voice of the station announcer desperately attempts to rise, reciting the cyclic poetry of the hour: “Now boarding, the five-oh-two departure of Metro-North train number nine-five-three, stopping at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, Scarsdale, Hartsdale, White Plains, North White Plains, Valhalla, Hawthorne, Pleasantville, Chappaqua...” And over it all, effortlessly drowning everything out, comes the massive basso B-flat bong of the Accurist clock, echoing out there under the blue-painted backward heaven, two hundred feet above the terrazzo floor.

  —  To Visit the Queen (Diane Duane)

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Call me Junior. My six grown kids do. Three are adopted nephews, three are my own. They call me Junior behind my back. They think I don't know that.

  —  Timequake (Kurt Vonnegut)

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There was a man and he had eight sons. Apart from that, he was nothing more than a comma on the page of History. It's sad, but that's all you can say about some people.

  —  Sourcery (Terry Pratchett)

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This is where the dragons went.

  —  Guards! Guards! (Terry Pratchett)

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For the first fifteen years of our lives, Danny and I lived within five blocks of each other and neither of us knew of the other's existence.

  —  The Chosen (Chaim Potok)

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Sunset blazed above Golden Ridge Valley in north Emelan, throwing shadows over a company of mounted riders. At the head of their train a banner-man carried the personal flag of Duke Vedris IV, ruler of Emelan. The duke himself rode behind the flag, surrounded and followed by his staff, guards, and friends. Smoke drifted through the air in veils, stinging everyone's eyes. They had been riding through it for two days, watching it stretch over pastures and fields. Now at last, as the company entered the forests that filled the northern half of the valley, they began to rise above the thick air.

  —  The Fire in the Forging (Tamora Pierce)

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Until two days ago, Lindy Gardner was my next-door neighbour. Okay, you're thinking, if Lindy Gardner was my neighbour, that probably means I live in Beverly Hills; a movie producer, maybe, or an actor or a musician. Well, I'm a musician all right. But though I've played behind one or two performers you'll have heard of, I'm not what you'd call big-league. My manager, Bradley Stevenson, who in his way has been a good friend over the years, maintains I have it in me to be big-league. Not just big-league session player, but big-league headliner. It's not true saxophonists don't become headliners any more, he says, and repeats his list of names. Marcus Lightfoot. Silvio Tarrentini. They're all jazz players, I point out. “What are you, if you're not a jazz player?” he says. But only in my innermost dreams am I still a jazz player.  In the real world – when I don't have my face entirely wrapped in bandages the way I do now – i'm just a jobbing tenor man, in reasonable demand for studio work, or when a band's lost their regular guy. If it's pop I want, it's pop I play. R&B? Fine. Car commercials, the walk-on theme for a talk show, I'll do it. I'm a jazz player these days only when I'm inside my cubicle.

  —  Nocturne from Nocturnes (Kazuo Ishiguro)

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"It's been a bit like the Stone Age, I suppose, really."

  —  Plague 99 (Jean Ure)

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Before you read another word, write your own FULL name in ever box on this page! Don't be afraid! Your Notebook™ is meant for writing in!

  —  Finding Cassie Crazy (Jaclyn Moriarty)