Guys, A Very Large Expanse of Sea was released today and I’m so excited for you all to read it. This book is just something that is so needed in the YA community, and Tahereh Mafi finally got to write a book that she probably wanted when she was a teenager. She gives a voice to a population quite often silenced, and you should definitely check it out. If you need more convincing, go check out the review I wrote last week!
In order to celebrate the release of this beautiful book, I’ve compiled some of my favorite Tahereh Mafi quotes, mostly from her Shatter Me series, which you should also check out! These will give you just a taste of what you can expect if you delve into any one of her books (but really, go pick up A Very Large Expanse of Sea. You won’t be disappointed).
1. “Words, I think, are such unpredictable creatures. No gun, no sword, no army or king will ever be more powerful than a sentence. Swords may cut and kill, but words will stab and stay, burying themselves in our bones to become corpses we carry into the future, all the time digging and failing to rip their skeletons from our flesh.” –Ignite Me
2. “And we are quotation marks, inverted and upside down, clinging to one another at the end of this life sentence. Trapped by lives we did not choose.” –Ignite Me
3. “Hope is hugging me, holding me in its arms, wiping away my tears and telling me that today and tomorrow and two days from now I will be just fine and I’m so delirious I actually dare to believe it.” –Shatter Me
4. “I was stuck in another small town, trapped in another universe populated by the kind of people who’d only ever seen faces like mine on their evening news, and I hated it.” –A Very Large Expanse of Sea
5. “I am nothing but novocaine. I am numb, a world of nothing, all feeling and emotion gone forever. I am a whisper that never was.” –Shatter Me
6. “On the darkest days you have to search for a spot of brightness, on the coldest days you have to seek out a spot of warmth; on the bleakest days you have to keep your eyes onward and upward and on the saddest days you have to leave them open to let them cry. To then let them dry. To give them a chance to wash out the pain in order to see fresh and clear once again.” –Unravel Me
7. “It gives the bullies all the power. It would mean they’d succeeded at making me feel like who I was and what I believed in was something to be ashamed of.” –A Very Large Expanse of Sea
8. “Books are easily destroyed. But words will live as long as people can remember them.” –Unravel Me
9. “Raindrops are my only reminder that clouds have a heartbeat. That I have one, too.” –Shatter Me
10. “I spent my life folded between the pages of books. In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.” –Shatter Me