Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Bookish Quotes from 2022

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday is a freebie! I thought I’d share quotes that really resonated with me while I was reading in 2022… you might notice a common theme.

A menu is like a story. Appetizer, entrée, dessert. Beginning, middle, and a happy ending.

-Lisa Yee, Maizy Chen’s Last Chance

Some stories made you change your mind about yourself and other stories made you think differently about others. But what was important was that it changed something about you.

-Wendy Wan Long Shang, The Secret Battle of Evan Pao

When a story gets forgotten, a part of the world goes with it.

-Chantel Acevedo, The Curse on Spectacle Key 

Who does the story serve?

-Anne Ursu, The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy

Books are funny things. The ideas and knowledge contained in their pages have mass and velocity and gravity. They bend both space and time. They have minds of their own. There is a power in a book that surpasses even that of a dragon.

-Kelly Barnhill, The Ogress and the Orphans

Sometimes hate and fear are just two sides of the same coin.

-Celia C. Pérez, Tumble

I know stories can’t always have happy endings. But if there are chances for us to do better, we have to say out loud the parts that hurt the most.

-Donna Barba Higuera, The Last Cuentista

Why are people afraid to believe? Maybe it’s because if they believe in a better world, then they have to work to make that world happen.

-Tae Keller, Jennifer Chan is Not Alone

Silence is not protection… it’s just another form of control.

-Pablo Cartaya, The Last Beekeeper

I spent a lot of time last year thinking about the power of words and stories. I thought about the damage done by those seeking to silence BIPOC and LGBTQ voices in children’s literature. 2022 was a record-breaking year for censorship, with the American Library Association reporting the highest record of attempted book bans since they began compiling these lists more than 20 years ago. PEN America found that book bans impacted more than 4 million students last year:

Bar Graph Depicting Subject Matter of Banned Content by Percentages: 41% feature LGBTQ characters; 40% feature BIPOC characters. Data from PEN America Index of School Book Bans, July 2021-June 2022.

And it’s only getting worse. In the wake of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” Bill, a school district (in which less than 50% of students are reading on grade level) recently ordered teachers to remove almost all of the books from their classroom libraries. Some states even have tip lines that encourage the public to report “graphic” library books. Teachers and librarians can literally face felony prosecution for sharing diverse books or books that support social-emotional learning — felony charges that could lead to the removal of both their teacher license and their right to vote.

If that sounds like fascism, it’s because it is fascism.

Please, please fight for the freedom to read. Stay informed by signing up for Book Riot’s Literacy Activism Newsletter. Check out Book Riot’s new e-book, How to Fight Book Bans and Censorship. Keep track of 2023 legislation of concern and contact your electeds. Stand in solidarity against censorship!

There’s also a great training TONIGHT with PEN America at 7:30PM EST. Learn about new trends in censorship and tactics to fight back. Sign up here!

My words were sword and shield. Together our words can be an army.

-Joanna Ho, The Silence that Binds Us

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The Artsy Reader Girl currently hosts Top Ten Tuesday, an original feature created by The Broke and the Bookish. Every week TTT has a different topic, and everyone who links up has to create a link of ten items that fit that topic.

How do you keep track of your favorite bookish quotes? I don’t really have a great system and I’d love some ideas!