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Groups1001 Books to read before you die, Tea!, The Brontës

Favorite authorsJane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Truman Capote, Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Pat Conroy, Theodore Dreiser, Laura Esquivel, William Faulkner, William Golding, Thomas Hardy, John Irving, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Norman Mailer, W. Somerset Maugham, Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison, Boris Pasternak, Anne Rice, Tom Robbins, John Steinbeck, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Colm Tóibín, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Voltaire, Edith Wharton (Shared favorites)

About me"The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude." ~Kate Chopin

"But when she was there beside the sea, absolutely alone, she cast the unpleasant, pricking garments from her, and for the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air, at the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that invited her. How strange and awful it seemed to stand naked under the sky! how delicious! She felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known." ~Kate Chopin

"That she held herself well was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well, considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore..... this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing-nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible, unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway." ~Virginia Woolf

"Being with Paul Tanner, that night, was the deepest experience Ella had with a man; so different from anything she had known before that everything in the past became irrelevant." ~Doris Lessing

"In ancient time the patriarch Ibrahim came into this valley with Hagar and Ismail, their son. Here, in this waterless wilderness, he abandoned her. She asked him, can this be God's will? He replied, it is. And left, the bastard. From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable. He moves in mysterious ways: men say." ~Salman Rushdie

"She rang him once more, a few weeks later, and by now the unspoken precedents had been set; she didn't ask for, he didn't give his whereabouts, and it was plain to them both that an age had ended, they had drifted apart, it was time to wave goodbye." ~Salman Rushdie

"Violets are blue, roses are red,
I've got her right here in my bed." ~Salman Rushdie

"A woman is a funny animal" ~James M. Cain

".....all is for the best....For it's impossible for things not to be where they are. For all is well." ~Voltaire

"I loved him as we always love the first time: with idolatry and wild passion." ~Voltaire

"With the aid of medicines and bloodlettings, Candide's illness became serious." ~Voltaire

"....such things are exactly as they should be...." ~Voltaire

"....we must cultivate our garden." ~Voltaire

"For as far as she knew anything about herself, she knew that her passions, once aroused, were sure." ~E. M. Forster

"I eat in pink restaurants......... " ~Margaret Atwood

"In the afternoons she makes herself a cup of tea, which does not smell entirely like tea but of something else she puts into it, out of a small silver bottle. " ~Margaret Atwood

"His place is to be a lover, with his secrecy and his almost-empty rooms, and his baleful memories and bad dreams." ~Margaret Atwood

"It's lovely to live on a raft." ~Mark Twain

"He resolved not to entertain the idea that she would disturb his solitude and the fruitfulness of his exile." ~Colm Toibin

"...he felt an urgent need to be away from them, to cut short his stay, to return to his own hard-won solitude." ~Colm Toibin

"...but he had not known about this, the long day waiting as his sister's breath grew shallow, then seemed to fade, then rose again. He tried to imagine what was happening to her consciousness, her great barbed wit and he came to feel that all that was left of her was her fitful breath and her weakened pulse. There was no will and no knowledge, merely the body moving slowly towards its end." ~Colm Toibin

"But something other than mere arrangements filled him with a vague, unnameable foreboding. It took him weeks to understand what it was and then it came to him in a flash: when he walked into the upstairs rooms of Lamb House, and into the room where he himself would sleep, he believed that he had come into the room where he would die. .......The idea both froze his blood and comforted him at the same time. He had traveled without hesitation to meet his own place of death, to remove its mystery, one of its unknown dimensions. ......He had found his home, he who had wandered so uneasily, and he longed for its engulfing presence, its familiarity, its containing beauty." ~Colm Toibin

"The ladies will save us," said the old man; "that is, the best of them will - for I make a difference between them. Make up to a good one and marry her, and your life will become much more interesting." ~Henry James

"I am very fond of my liberty." ~Henry James

"Her marrying - some one or other? It's just to do away with anything of that sort that I make my suggestion. If she has an easy income she will never have to marry for a support. She wishes to be free, and your bequest will make her free." ~Henry James

"Besides this, her short interview with Osmond, half an hour before, was a striking example of his faculty for making everything wither that he touched, spoiling everything for her that he looked at." ~Henry James

"Instead of leading to high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity, it led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression, where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and served to deepen the feeling of failure." ~Henry James

"Then the shadows began to gather; it was as if Osmond deliberately, almost malignantly, had put the lights out one by one. The dusk at first was vague and thin, and she could still see her way in it. But it steadily increased, and if here and there it had occasionally lifted, there were certain corners of her life that were impenetrably black." ~Henry James

"Leave your husband before the worst comes; that's what I want you to promise."
"The worst? What do you call the worst?"
"Before you character gets spoiled." ~Henry James

"It had become her habit to be so careful as to what she said to him that, strange as it may appear, she hesitated, for several minutes after he had come in, to allude to his daughter's sudden departure; she spoke of it only after they were seated at table. But she had forbidden herself ever to ask Osmond a question; all she could do was to make an affirmation, and there was one that came very naturally." ~Henry James

"There at the entrance was the luminous figure of Pedro waiting for her. Tita did not hesitate. She let herself go to the encounter; again experiencing an amorous climax, they left together for the lost Eden. Never again would they be apart." ~Laura Esquivel

"Did people leave you, did their spirits simply take off, because you wouldn't read a book that turned them on? He now knew the answer was yes." ~Alice Walker

"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!" ~Henry David Thoreau

"Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in." ~Henry David Thoreau

"I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Morning air!" ~Henry David Thoreau

"I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal? True, he can and does live, in a great measure, by preying on other animals; but this is a miserable way, - as any one who will go to snaring rabbits, or slaughtering lambs, may learn, - and he will be regarded as a benefactor of his race who shall teach man to confine himself to a more innocent and wholesome diet. Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Thank Heaven, here is not all the world." ~Henry David Thoreau

"The universe is wider than our views of it." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find a thousand regions in your mind yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be expert in home-cosmography." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made." ~Henry David Thoreau

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." ~Henry David Thoreau

"...I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving--Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home." ~John Irving

"She died in her sleep, only two weeks short of her hundredth birthday. She didn't like things that "stood out".........I imagine her contemplating her hundredth birthday; the family celebration that was planned to honor this event would surely have killed grandmother--I suspect she knew this. Aunt Martha had already alerted the Today show; as you may know, the Today show routinely wishes Happy Birthday to every hundred-year-old in the United States--provided that the Today show knows about it. Aunt Martha saw to it that they knew." ~John Irving

"She reminded him that the weak would never enter the kingdom of love, which is a harsh and ungenerous kingdom, and that women give themselves only to men of resolute spirit, who provide the security they need in order to face life." ~Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"It was the year they fell into devastating love." ~Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"In this way he learned that she did not want to marry him, but did feel joined to his life because of her immense gratitude to him for having corrupted her. She often said to him: "I adore you because you made me a whore." Said in another way, she was right. Florentino Arizo had stripped her of the virginity of a conventional marriage, more pernicious than congenital virginity or the abstinence of widowhood. He had taught her that nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love." ~Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"He did not even stop to think about the obstacle of her being married, because at the same time he decided, as if it depended on himself alone, that Dr. Juvenal Urbino had to die. He did not know when or how, but he considered it an ineluctable event that he was resolved to wait for without impatience or violence, even till the end of time." ~Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"Ausencia Santander was almost fifty years old and looked it, but she had such a personal instinct for love that no homegrown or scientific theories could interfere with it." ~Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"She mounted him and took control of all of him for all of her, absorbed in herself, her eyes closed, gauging the situation in her absolute inner darkness, advancing here, retreating there, correcting her invisible route, trying another, more intense path, another means of proceeding without drowning in the slimy marsh that flowed from her womb,.......until she succumbed without waiting for anybody, she fell alone into her abyss with a jubilant explosion of total victory that made the world tremble." ~Gabriel Garcia Marquez

".....Florentino Arizo stated it another way. "The world is divided into those who screw and those who do not." He distrusted those who did not: when they strayed from the straight and narrow, it was something so unusual for them that they bragged about love as if they had just invented it. Those who did it often, on the other hand, lived for that alone. They felt so good that their lips were sealed as if they were tombs, because they knew that their lives depended on their discretion. They never spoke of their exploits, they confided in no one, they feigned indifference to the point where they earned the reputation of being impotent, or frigid, or above all timid fairies, as in the case of Florentino Ariza. But they took pleasure in the error because the error protected them. They formed a secret society, whose members recognized each other all over the world without need of a common language...." ~Gabriel Garcia Marquez

""We men are the miserable slaves of prejudice," he had once said to her. "But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about."" ~Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"That isn't for Roz, she can't stand the thought of someone, some strange man, bending over her with a knife while she's lying in bed conked out cold......No, she'd rather just age quietly. Like good red wine." ~Margaret Atwood.

"Her mother had died earlier and was presently in a metal canister the shape of a miniature depth charge, which she kept on a closet shelf, tucked in behind her folded sweaters." ~Margaret Atwood

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Currently readingAn American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser