If you feel like reading some eloquent prose, fantastic dialogue that cuts right to the heart, descriptions so real you can see it as if it were right in front of you...read on.

Just excerpts from books that I love and will remember for a long time. I recommend them all! I realize that some of them are long, but just pick one to read, and really savor every word for what it's worth. Words have such an unnameable, intangible power to make me feel that I'll never understand. Maybe I don't need to.

1) Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
He hid his face in the covers of his daybook, as if the covers were his hands. He cried. For whom was he crying?
For Anna?
For his parents?
For me?
For himself?
I pulled the book from him. It was wet with tears running down the pages, as if the book itself were crying. He hid his face in his hands. Let me see you cry, I told him.
I do not want to hurt you, he said by shaking his head left to right.
It hurts me when you do not want to hurt me, I told him. Let me see you cry.
He lowered his hands. On one cheek it said YES backward. On one cheek it said NO backward. He was still looking down. Now the tears did not run down his cheeks, but fell from his eyes to the ground.
Let me see you cry, I said. I did not feel that he owed it to me. And I did not feel that I owed it to him. We owed it to each other, which is something different.
(pg 181)
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2) Swimming to Ithaca by Simon Mawer

She remembered Charteris. You are your memory, she thought: there is nothing else, just memory piled on memory, a fragile pyramid of record and remembrance that rises up to this summit that is you. She remembered walking with him across the Kinder Plateau, to the very edge of the Downfall where you could stand like this on the lip of the cliff. They had looked out over the waterfall and valley below, and the wind had blown in their faces and carried with it a breath of water, and there had been just the same mingling of exhiliration and fear, with the void mere inches from their feet, and Charteris saying, "I hope you're not thinking of jumping."
"Flying," she had replied. "I'm thinking of flying."
He had stood close behind her, his hands on her waist as though to hold her safe. "You'd only fall."
She turned. "But you don't feel like that, do you? You feel that you could step off and just fly, like one of those dreams." She was serious. She didn't smile, and neither did he. "Do you have flying dreams? I do. I step up and up and up and it's obvious really, easy, just a matter of doing it. Walking on air, I mean."
"And then you wake up."
"Of course. You always wake up."
(pg 233-234)
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3) A Year Of Endless Sorrows by Adam Rapp

Pretty Girl on a Train
I was on the downtown one and she was on the Number Two Express. The encounter happened during that strange, slow-motion interval when the express overtakes the local and you can peer across the gap and into the window of the other train with all of its amber, porch-like dream light.
That particular day, the day I ran out of socks and my feet itched sinisterly, I saw a young woman with dark curly hair and skin so pale it could have been ceramic. Her eyes were enormously sad and so smolderingly green that they looked as though they would warm my hands if I were to touch her face.
I normally wouldn't stare at anyone in a passing train. Perhaps it was her fire-polished skin, or those eyes, or the curls that emerged at her temples like a pair of perfectly positioned hat accessories.
All sounds seemed to momentarily fade: the thunder of the engine; the ruffling and popping of newspapers; the din of music trapped in earphones; the squealing of the train on its tracks.
I felt a strange peace during those three or four seconds. It was as if someone had turned off a small appliance that had been whirring in my head for several days.
After her train sluiced into the blackness, I realized that my hand was poised on the window, as if I were trying to reach through the glass and touch her.
(pg 84)
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4) The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

There was a chapter about how people used to talk with their hands, and the chapter about the man who thought he was made of glass, and a chapter I hadn’t read called “The Birth of Feeling.” Feelings are not as old as time, it began.
Just as there was a first instant when someone rubbed two sticks together to make a spark, there was a first time joy was felt, and a first time for sadness. For a while, new feelings were being invented all the time. Desire was born early, as was regret. When stubbornness was felt for the first time, it started a chain reaction, creating the feeling of resentment on the one hand, and alienation and loneliness on the other. It might have been a certain counterclockwise movement of the hips that marked the birth of ecstasy; a bolt of lightning that caused the first feeling of awe. Or maybe it was the body of a girl named Alma. Contrary to logic, the feeling of surprise wasn’t born immediately. It only came after people had enough time to get used to things as they were. And when enough time had passed, and someone felt the first feeling of surprise, someone, somewhere else, felt the first pang of nostalgia.
It’s also true that sometimes people felt things and, because there was no word for them, they went unmentioned. The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it--just to name it--must have been like trying to catch something invisible.
(Then again, the oldest feeling in the world might simply have been confusion.)
Having begun to feel, people’s desire to feel grew. They wanted to feel more, feel deeper, despite how much it sometimes hurt. People became addicted to feeling. They struggled to uncover new emotions. It’s possible that this is how art was born. New kinds of joy were forged, along with new kinds of sadness: The eternal disappointment of life as it is; the relief of unexpected reprieve; the fear of dying.
Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist. There are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written, or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom, or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feelings, the heart surges, and absorbs the impact.
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I'm always looking for book recommendations, so tell me what words affect you in a comment!