Share a line or passage from your current book, part 2

Just thought I would get this started as others were asking. :) I don't actually have a quote for the day.

From the introduction to Neil Gaiman's short stories in his book Smoke and Mirrors:

"When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning." :D

Three great quotes from a book I just finished, A Long Walk to Freedom, by Nelson Mandela:

"I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, a thousand unremembered moments, produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people."

"A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor."

"No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite. .... Man's goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished."

#2: SqueakyChu

I LOOOOOVE that quote!!! So happy and true! =D

--> 4

I love it, too. I should have been a writer (...except I have no talent!)

From "Seasons of the Ansarac" in Changing Planes, by Ursula K. Le Guin:

People are always telling you that "we have always done thus," and then you find that their "always" means a generation or two, or a century or two, at most a millennium or two. Cultural ways and habits are blips compared to the ways and habits of the body, of the race. There really is very little that human beings on our plane have always done, except find food and drink, sleep, sing, talk, procreate, nurture the children, and probably band together to some extent. Indeed it can be seen as our human essence, how few behavioral imperatives we follow. How flexible we are in finding new things to do, new ways to go. How ingeniously, inventively, desperately we seek the right way, the true way, the Way we believe we lost long ago among the thickets of novelty and opportunity and choice...

#5: SqueakyChu

Ditto! I'm a writer of sorts, just not the gifted kind! =P

Still reading Obasan but almost done. I love this passage; WWII is over; but the Japanese family has been relocated once again, out of British Columbia to somewhere in Alberta. They're not allowed to return to their home.

"Where are we going?" I shout to Uncle.

He is sitting up straight like a sphinx on a box and staring at the land. We have come to the moon. We have come to the edge of the world, to a place of angry air. Was it just a breath ago that we felt the green watery fingers of the mountain air? Here, the air is a fist.

From On Beauty by Zadie Smith -

'Zora..slid off her stool to get some more half and half and a slice of cheesecake. Somehow if you ordered the cheesecake as an afterthought it had fewer calories in it.'

(touchstone not working properly)

Also from On Beauty by Zadie Smith - I loved this line on page 424

"The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free."

Not a current book, but speaking of lines from books by Zadie Smith, how about this one with which I identified from The Autograph Man?

“The edges of skates are very thin and very sharp, he felt, the opposite of human feet. It takes an optimistic man to put them on. Skating is not to be taken lightly.” (spoken by Alex-Li Tandem)

From The Birth House by Ami McKay:

My house stands at the edge of the earth. Together, the house and I have held strong against the churning tides of Fundy. Two sisters, stubborn in our bones.

My father, Judah Rare, built this farmhouse in 1917. It was my wedding gift. "A strong house for a Rare woman," he said. I was eighteen. He and his five brothers, shipbuilders by trade, raised her worthy from timbers born on my grandfather's land. Oak for stability and certainty, yellow birch for new life and change, spruce for protection from the world outside. Father was an intuitive carpenter, carrying out his work like holy ritual. His callused hands, veined with pride, had a memory for measure and a knowing of what it takes to withstand the sea.

MrsLee, thanks for starting the new thread!

From The Absorbent Mind by Maria Montessori.

"If, as so many people think, the best kind of life would be to do nothing but sit around and be waited on, then what could be more ideal than the life which the child led before he was born? " - p 83

"We often forget that imagination is a force for the discovery of the truth." - p161

Happy to oblige. :) I'm sure enjoying these quotes.

From Mrs. McGinty's Dead by Agatha Christie:

Johnnie Summerhayes looked at Edna doubtfully. Never, he thought, had he seen a more unprepossessing girl. Exactly like a skinned rabbit. Seemed half-witted too. Surely she couldn't be in what was known officially as "trouble."

"Bon Dieu, how stupid I have been," said Hercule Poirot. "The whole thing is simple, is it not?"
It was after that remark that there was very nearly a third murder—the Murder of Hercule Poirot by Superintendent Spence in Kilchester Police Headquarters.

"But we didn't know—" She broke off. Her light eyes went quickly to her husband's face.
"It is from him she takes the Greenwich time," said Poirot to himself.

Scenes of violence and crude brutality were the fashion and as a former police officer, Poirot was bored by brutality. In his early days, he had seen plenty of crude brutality. It had been more the rule than the exception. He found it fatiguing, and unintelligent.

The delicate hand that had lain passively in his tightened and he was reminded for a moment of the talon of a bird. Not really a piece of delicate Dresden china —a scratchy predatory claw ...

James Bentley's attitude to murder would have been, Poirot felt sure,that it wouldn't be much good anyway.

"Oo," said Mrs Summerhayes, her attention diverted from Poirot to the basin in her lap. "I'm bleeding over the beans. Not too good as we've got to have them for lunch. Still it won't matter really because they'll go into boiling water. Things are always all right if you boil them, aren't they? Even tins."
"I think," said Hercule Poirot quietly, "that I shall not be in for lunch."

"For somewhere," said Poirot to himself, indulging in an absolute riot of mixed metaphors, "there is in the hay a needle, and among the sleeping dogs there is one on whom I shall put my foot, and by shooting the arrows into the air, one will come down and hit a glass house!"

'Mrs McGinty's dead' 'How did she die?' 'Like THIS!' Smack, the top of the row would fall sideways and down we all went like a pack of ninepins!" Spence laughed uproariously at the
remembrance. "Takes me back, it does!"
Poirot waited politely. This was one of the moments when, even after half a lifetime in the country, he found the English incomprehensible. He himself played at Cache Cache and Le Boulanger in his childhood, but he felt no desire to talk about it or even to think about it.

"Enfin," said Hercule Poirot. "C'est insupportable!"
The door burst open, the wind surged round the room, the dog rushed out, still barking. Maureen's voice came upraised loud and clear.
"Johnnie, why the hell did you leave the back door open! Those bloody hens are in the larder."
"And for this," said Hercule Poirot with feeling, "I pay seven guineas a week!"

Poirot dextrously averted the rising wrath of Superintendent Spence.
"Do you know, cher ami, what is a secret de Polichinelle?"
"Is this a French lesson?" demanded the Superintendent wrathfully.
"A secret de Polichinelle is a secret that everyone can know. For this reason the people who do not know it never hear about it—for if everyone thinks you know a thing, nobody tells you."
"How I manage to keep my hands off you I don't know," said Superintendent Spence

It was as though a pattern, perfectly visible was woven into a piece of material and yet, although he was holding the piece of material, he could not see what the pattern was.
But it was all there. That was the point. It was all
there. Only it was one of those patterns, self-coloured and subtle, that are not easy to perceive.

"Thank goodness," said Maureen. "I didn't get to
that pudding in time. It had boiled dry. I think it's
really all right—just a little scorched perhaps. In case
it tasted rather nasty I thought I would open a bottle
of those raspberries I put up last summer. They seem
to have a bit of mould on top but they say nowadays
that that doesn't matter. It's really good for you—
practically penicillin."

What bliss, what glorious and solitary bliss! What a mistake for an author to emerge from her secret fastness. Authors were shy, unsociable creatures, atoning for their lack of social aptitude by inventing their own companions and conversations.

"What about this new fellow, Maureen? Looks a bit peculiar to me. What's his name again?"
"I couldn't remember it just now when I was talking to him. Hard to say Mr Er-um. Poirot—that's what it is. He's French."
"You know, Maureen, I seem to have seen that name somewhere."
"Home Perm, perhaps. He looks like a hairdresser."
Poirot winced.
"N-no. Perhaps it's pickles. I don't know. I'm sure it's familiar. Better get the first seven guineas out of him quick."

''Had Mrs McGinty had a drab life?"
"Ghastly, I expect," said Mrs Summerhayes vaguely. "Always on your knees scrubbing. And then piles of other people's washing up waiting for you on the sink when you arrive in the morning. If I had to face that every day, I'd be positively relieved to be murdered. I really would."

From Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (this is on page one, it bodes well for the rest of the book):

One person's picture postcard is someone else's normal. This was the landscape whose every face we knew: giant saguaro cacti, coyotes, mountains, the wicked sun reflecting off bare gravel. We were leaving it now in one of its uglier moments, which made good-bye easier, but also seemed like a cheap shot - like ending a romance right when your partner has really bad bed hair. The desert that day looked like a nasty case of prickly heat caught in a long, naked wince.

From Diary of a Mad old man by Junichiro Tanizaki

"Two years later the borzoi caught distemper and died; this time Satsuko frankly announced that she wanted another dog to replace him, and asked the pet shop owner to find her a greyhound. She called this one Gary Cooper and lavished affection on him, often taking him out on long walks or having Nomura drive the two of them around town together."

I simply had to tell my boyfriend about this quote as soon as I read it as his favourite dogs are greyhounds & he also loves Westerns !

>16 teelgee: teelgee

Ooooooh! Makes the hair on my arms stand on end.

Another TBR.

From Eats, Shoots and Leaves, the introduction by Frank McCourt:

You never thought a book on punctuation could contain raw sex? Well, here is Lynne Truss bemoaning the sad fact she never volunteered to have the babies of Aldus Manutius the Elder (1450-1515). (Help! In that last sentence does the period go inside the parenthesis/bracket or outside?) If you actually know who Aldus was you get the door prize and, perhaps, Ms. Truss will have your babies.

#19. God love Frank McCourt. Lynn Truss, too, for that matter.

My contribution is this, from The Geographer's Library

"...They call it 'the whispering of the stars.' Listen," he said, raising a finger for silence. I could still hear the tinkling and craned my neck to see what it was. Zhensky laughed. "No, here. Look." He formed his mouth into a wide O and exhaled slowly. As he did, I saw the cloud of breath fall in droplets to the ground. That was the sound I heard: our breath falling. "It's a Yakut expression. It means a period of weather so cold that your breath falls frozen to the ground before it can dissipate. The Yakuts say that you should never tell secrets outside during the whispering of the stars, because the words themselves freeze, and in the spring thaw anyone who walks past that spot will be able to hear them."

#20. As do I. I was so nervous typing that quote - what if I had made a typo? Oh, sweet irony.

Well, perhaps not as weighty as some but it made me laugh today:

"Anyway, I was really glad I'd gotten the call. The day was already shot to hell. It was still too early to tidy up the apartment (like any self-respecting man whose family is away, I only do that once, on the final day of bachelor life)."

From Twilight Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko, translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield.

It's always good to have confirmation that I'm a self-respecting man.

I'm currently reading Inkspell by Cornelia Funke. Here's a descriptive passage that I liked because it set the scene so well.

"The Castle of Night, a dark growth by the sea, every stone of it polished with screams, its walls slippery with tears and blood."

You've made that abundantly clear. Do you have a favorite book quote to share, or something book-related you'd like to discuss?

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell:

"When will people realise that not hurting people is ten thousand times more important than being right."

This is a child's observation of his parents' meaningless victories during marital arguments, but is a pretty good universal sentiment.

raisincain, my first thought after reading the quote was about parental battles. (I had to read three times to follow because I kept getting distracted by those bloody annoying things in 24/25.)

>28 raisincain: I love that so much I'm adding it to my profile even though I've never read the book.

I don't actually have the book right in front of me, so it might be a paraphrase. I'm in the middle of the book right now and the quote stuck with me. I searched amazon for the quote and someone wrote it like that in a review of the book.

That does it. Standing outside at the top of the stairs behind J. E. Fraser's statue of Teddy Roosevelt and his guides, staring into the marvelous scrotum of Roosevelt's horse, Dad takes one last look around. "That's it for me," he says. "I've had it with New York."

From Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family

This just happened to be the page I was on when I came across this thread.

I've been staring at that stupid koala for a full minute, and I have come to loathe it more than I ever believed possible.

And it's vaguely frightening.

*reaches for happy pills*

I really liked this line from The plot against America by Philip Roth

p301
"Soon my homeland would be nothing more than my birthplace."

This well summarizes my feelings about immigragting as well.

There are a few different really amusing quotes from this book, but they're scattered through it and I don't want to take the time to find them all, so I'll just post the first one (which I just came across while reading just now):

"He started for the kitchen to get a drink, and checked himself. Take a drink because you pity yourself, and then the drink pities you and has a drink, and then two good drinks get together and that calls for drinks all around."

This is a first line that immediately throws the reader into the book.

"For the third time that morning I shut my eyes tight in the absolute and certain knowledge that I was just about to die."

From First Drop by Zoe Sharp

This is from The Catcher in the Rye, and it is just a very thought-provoking quote, or at least I thought so. I am not very religious, but the sentiment of the quote comes through pretty much no matter what you believe.

"I remember I asked old Childs if he though Judas, the one that betrayed Jesus and all, went to Hell after he committed suicide. Childs said certainly. That's exactly where I disagreed with him. I said I'd bet a thousand bucks that Jesus never sent old Judas to Hell. I still would, too, if I had a thousand bucks. I think any one of the disciples would've sent him to Hell and all--and fast, too--but I'll bet anything Jesus didn't do it."

Also, thanks to laytonwoman3rd (20) for the quote. It was so beautiful.

I like Nabokov for his sentences which begin very seriously and then skid at the end, as in this description of a break-up:

"Valeria, as she waddled by my side, began to shake her poodle head vigorously without saying a word. I let her go on for a while and then asked if she thought she had something inside."

From Nabokov's Lolita (First part, Chapter 8).

From Salt: A World History taken from hearings from a town council about a saltworks in 1839 -

"The gas from the manufactories is of such a deleterious nature as to blight anything within its influence, and is alike baneful to health and property. The herbage in the fields in their vicinity is scorched, the gardens yield neither fruit nor vegetables; many flourishing trees have lately become rotten naked sticks. Cattle and poultry droop and pine away. It tarnishes the furniture in our houses, and when we are are exposed to it, which is of frequent occurrence, we are afflicted with coughs and pains in the head."

Seems like that meeting could happen today in some places.

Talking about leaving his manuscript to his friends' cat.

"I will choose another charity. One that has not peed on me."
Odd Thomas is funny.

"Five years of marriage had made me itchy for all those things: itchy for men, and itchy for solitude. Itchy for sex, and itchy for the life of a recluse. I knew my itches were contradictory -- and that made things even worse. I knew my itches were un-American -- and that made things still worse. it is heresy in America to embrace any way of life except as half of a couple. Solitude is un-American. It may be condoned in a man -- especially if he is a "glamorous bachelor" who "dates starlets" during a brief interval between marriages. But a woman is always presumed to be alone as a result of abandonment, not choice. And she is treated that way: as a pariah. There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (although not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness -- her selfishness, in short -- is a reproach to the American way of life."

-- Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

There are so many great quotes! I already know where I will find some good ones....too bad i'm away from my books right now

From Al Gore - The Assault on Reason:

If dogma and blind faith rush in to fill the vacuum left by reason's departure, they allow for the exercise of new forms of power more arbitrary and less derived from the consent of the governed. In simple terms, when fear and anxiety play a larger role in our society, logic and reason play a diminished role in our collective decision making.

Unfortunately, the new expressions of power that surface in such circumstances often spring from the deep, poisoned wells of racism, ultranationalism, religious strife, tribalism, anti-Semitism, sexism, and homophobia, among others. And the passions thus mobilized are exploited most of all by those who claim divine authority to restore security and order.

I got this poem from the biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay called Savage Beauty by Nancy Milford The poem is called "Renascence"

It's really long but....so good

All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I'd started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.

Over these things I could not see;
These were the things that bounded me.
And I could touch them with my hand,
Almost, I thought, from where I stand!
And all at once things seemed so small
My breath came short, and scarce at all

But, sure, the sky is big, I said:
Miles and miles above my head.
So here upon my back I'll lie
And look my fill into the sky.
And so I looked, and after all,
The sky was not so very tall.
The sky, I said, must somewhere stop...
And-sure enough!-I see the top!
The sky, I thought, is not so grand;
I 'most could touch it with my hand!
And reaching up my hand to try,
I screamed, to feel it touch the sky.

I screamed, and -lo!-Infinity
Came down and settled over me;
Forced back my scream into my chest;
Bent back my arm upon my breast;
And, pressing of the Undefined
The definition on my mind,
Held up before in my eyes a glass
Through which my shrinking sight did pass.
Until it seemed I must behold
Immensity made manifold;
Whispered to me a word whose sound
Deafened the air for worlds around,
And brought unmuffled to my ears
The gossiping of friendly spheres,
The creaking of the tented sky
The ticking of Eternity.

There is about 15 more stanzas...but I won't type them here unless someone wants to read them.

Here's another called "God's World"

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists, that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this:
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart,-Lord, I do fear
Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me,-let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

From The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon:
"I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time."

From The Deserter, a short story by William Tenn
"As he swung around, the dozen or so sapphire-studded Royster pistolettos that swung picturesquely from his shoulder straps clinked and clanked madly, making him seem like a gigantic cat that the mice had belled again and again."

#45 booksngames - The Shadow of the Wind is one of my favorite books. That's a great line!

I've just started this book (only on page 54) but I'm so hooked already that it has left the realm of just being parchments of paper and has since traveled with me into my dreams. It is entitled "Ghostwalk" by Rebecca Stott.

I've been searching for a passage that best captures the surreal imagery and enchanting description that takes place in the book. I think this one comes close:

p. 19, "It was the smell I noticed first as I pulled the heavy door open and stepped into the dark chapel. Someone had filled the church with blue hyacinths. Though the lights were off, in every corner the Delft blue of the flowers and their emerald leaves gleamed against whitewashed deep-cobbled walls. At the far end of the tiny church, which was not bigger than a small barn, under the arch and beyond the altar, a projector threw a photograph of Elizabeth aged about thirty onto the far wall. The photographer had called out to her and she had turned towards him, glass of champagne in one hand, cigarette in the other, turned towards the voice and the camera, had smiled and raised her glass, her eyes distant, daydreaming. Just like Vermeer's girl with the pearl earring, I thought..."

> 44: scistarz - Those poems were beautiful.

From Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. This is her fictional take on the 1928 hurricane - the one that took out part of the poorly made dikes holding back Lake Okeechobee and let out a massive flash flood. This is kind of a forgotten event in US history, overshadowed the 1926 hurricane that wiped out Miami - but it's second only the Galveston hurricane of 1900 in the number of Americans killed in a natural disaster (if bursting dikes are considered natural). Something like 2,500 people were killed, mostly black farmers. This was published in 1937.

"It woke up old Okechobee and the monster began to roll in his bed. Began to roll and complain like a peevish world on a grumble." p. 158

…

"And the lake. Under its Multiplied roar could be heard a mighty sound of grinding rock and timber and a wail. They looked back. Saw people trying to run in raging waters and screaming when they found they couldn’t. A huge barrier of the makings of the dike to which the cabins had been added was rolling and tumbling forward. Ten feet higher and as far as they could see the muttering wall advanced before the braced-up waters like a road crusher on a cosmic scale. The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles an hour wind had loosed his chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters; uprooted them like grass and rushed on after his supposed-to-be conquerors, rolling the dikes, rolling the houses, rolling the people in the houses along with other timbers. The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel." p. 161-162

From The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck:

He loved the land no more than the bank loved the land. He could admire the tractor -- its machined surfaces, its surge of power, the roar of its detonating cylinders; but it was not his tractor. Behind the tractor rolled the shining disks, cutting the earth with blades - not plowing but surgery, pushing the cut earth to the right where the second row of disks cut it and pushed it to the left; slicing blades shining, polished by the cut earth. And pulled behind the disks, the harrows combing with iron teeth so that the little clods broke up and the earth lay smooth. Behind the harrows, the long seeders -- twelve curved iron penes erected in the foundry, orgasms set by gears, raping methodically, raping without passion. The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.

Because Rowling needs a line: From Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

"What did you say to one anther after sixteen years of solid dislike?"

Paraphrasing: "I fell for her like a suicide from a bridge."

Neil Gaiman.

From Robert Fagles' translation of The Aeneid:

'So long as rivers run to the sea, so long as shadows
travel the mountain slopes and the stars range the skies,
your honor, your name, your praise will live forever,
whatever lands may call me to their shores.'

and

'To what extremes won't you compel our hearts,
you accursed lust for gold?'

For some reason, I liked this line...

"Dale himself felt as if he was made of torn paper and broken glass and might cry any second."

- from A Winter Haunting, by Dan Simmons

From Party of One by Anneli Rufus:

"Since the begining, loners had been out there, on their own, making and doing things. They had kept to themselves, liked their own ompay, thrived on their days alone. They had produced the Mona Lisa, Jungle Book, Taoism, Walden. How could I have known? In that nonloner world of teams and troops and congregations, who would have said, Psst, hey, loner. Here is a grand roll call of your forebears. Protoloners."

Still from A Winter Haunting, by Dan Simmons:

"He know only one thing at that moment -- he wanted to live. Death was an obscenity, and it had been obscene to court it the way he had. Death was the theft of every choice and every breath and every option the future had offered him, pain and promise alike, and Dale Stewart had always hated thieves. Death was the cold silence of King Lear; it was the never, never, never, never, never that had chilled him from childhood on. From the day Duane had died."

I know I am a bit late on this one, but I was so struck by this passage in Good Omens that I had to share.
Crowley is a demon and this is opinion of humans:
“Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think of was half as bad as the stuff that they thought of themselves. They had a talent for it. It was built into their design somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years, Crowley found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness.”

This is from A Natural State: Essays on Texas by Stephen Harrigan. It's the opening paragraph.

"Morning is the time of day when we are least receptive to the lessons of Copernicus. We may understand that our earth is a sphere revolving in the light of the sun, that is moves furiously through space neither forward nor backward, neither into nor out of time, with no apparent purpose and no fate other than entropy. But still a part of our intelligence greets each new day as if celestial mechanics has never been discovered, with a primitive confidence that the sun rises solely for us, to light our way and warm our blood."

# 57: januaryw

Haha! I love that! Well, Good Omens is my favorite book in the world, so I may be biased. =P

From When God Weeps by Joni Eareckson Tada and Steve Estes:

"God offered Adam and Eve a path that led straight from Eden to an eternal Paradise. But since our first parents opted for a detour, since suffering is now part of what it means to be Homo Sapiens, God is going to use it. Not half-heartedly, but in delight. For as dark and pernicious as it is, God will squash suffering like a grapefruit in the face of the Devil, turning it inside out into something sweet. If suffering can't be avoided, God's going to redeem it to usher us into the highest echelons of heaven."

#59 Not at all biased, thioviolight! Not at all! Definitely not!

Of course, it's MY favorite book in the world too, so...

#61: Storeetllr, haha! Well, at least we're not alone! ;D

Anyway, here are a couple of lines from InterWorld, by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves, which I just started last night and am already immensely enjoying:

"It must be nice to be your own audience."

and

"It's good to know where you are, but it's better to know where you're going."

Some lines from The Mobile Library:The Case of the Missing Books by Ian Sansom:-

There is a terrible poignancy about a building intended for the public that is closed to the public: it feels like an insult, a riposte to all our more generous instincts, the public polity under threat, and democracy abandoned...the sight of the big red-brick library with its dark windows affected him even more deeply, in the same way that the sight of a derelict school might affect a teacher, or an empty restaurant a chef: a clear sign of the impending collapse of civilization ...

From the introduction taken from Homage to Marcus Aurelius by Joseph Brodsky in Meditations - A New Translation, with an Introduction by Gregory Hays

I saw him for the last time a few years ago, on a wet winter night, in the company of a stray Dalmatian. I was returning by taxi to my hotel after one of the most disastrous evenings in my entire life. The next morning I was leaving Rome for the States. I was drunk. The traffic moved with the speed one wishes for one's funeral. At the foot of the Capitol I asked the driver to stop, paid, and got out of the car. . . . Presently I discovered I was not alone: a middle-sized Dalmatian appeared out of nowhere and quietly sat down a couple of feet away. Its sudden presence was so oddly comforting that momentarily I felt like offering it one of my cigarettes. . . . For a while we both stared at the horseman's statue. . . . And suddenly -- presumably because of the rain and the rhythmic pattern of Michaelangelo's pilasters and arches -- all got blurred, and against that blur, the shining statue, devoid of any geometry, seemed to be moving. Not at great speed, and not out of his place, but enough for the Dalmatian to leave my side and follow the bronze progress.

Here's a passage from Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

As we attempt to analyze dialogue as a human phenomenon, we discover something which is the essence of dialogue itself: the word . . . Within the word we find two dimensions, reflection and action, in such radical interaction that if one is sacrificed-even in part-the other immediately suffers. There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world . . .

Human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words, with which men and women transform the world. To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. Human beings are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection . . .

Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people. The naming of the world, which is an act of creation and re-creation, is not possible if it is not infused with love. Love is at the same time the foundation of dialogue and dialogue itself . . . No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause--the cause of liberation. And this commitment, because it is loving, is dialogical. As an act of bravery, love cannot be sentimental; as an act of freedom, it must not serve as a pretext for manipulation. It must generate other acts of freedom; otherwise, it is not love. Only by abolishing the situation of oppression is it possible to restore the love which that situation made impossible. If I do not love the world--if I do not love life--if I do not love people--I cannot enter into dialogue.

From The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Me, it is my fortune and misfortune to know how the spirit-presence of a strange place can enrich a man or rob a man but never leave him alone, if a man travels lightly to a hundred strange cities and cares nothing for the risk he takes, he may find himself No one and Nowhere.

Humanity from the geological point of view. This is the conclusion from a chapter on the history of the plate tectonic theory. From Earth: An Intimate History by Richard Fortey (page 164)

Mankind is no more than a parasitic tick gorging himself on temporary plenty while the seas are low and climate comparatively clement. But the present arrangement of land and sea will change, and with it our brief supremacy.

From the glass bead game appendage - the three lives chapter three = p518

"But what then? Then there was a brief pause of unconsciousness, or slumber, or death and immediately afterwards you are awake again, had to admit the currents of life into your heart once more and once more let the dreadful, lovely, terrible flood of pictures pour into your eyes, endlessly, inescapably, until the next unconsciousness, until the next death. But then it went on, and once again you were of the thousand figures engaged in the wild, intoxicating, desperate dance of life. Ah, there was no extinction. It went on forever."

From Sophie's World : A Novel About the History of Philosophy by Jostein Gaarder

"A dream is, after all, a little work of art, and there are new dreams every night" - p442

"If we are disturbed during our dream phases we become nervous and irritable. This means nothing less than that everybody has an innate need to give artistic expression to his or her existential situation. After all, it is ourselves that our dreams are about." - p442

Well, nothing in my current book grabs me, but here's a passage from Brick Lane that I thought was stunning:

"The baby was astonishing. He had little cloth ears, floppy as cats. The warmth of his round stomach could heat the world. His head smelled like a sacred flower. And his fists held mysterious, tiny balls of fluff from which he could not bear to be parted."

This isn't really from a book itself but from the forward to Fade Away by Harlan Coben--it totally cracked me up:

"The author wishes to thank the following for their help: {then follows a list of MDs, sports agents, etc}. Any errors--factual or otherwise--are totally their fault. The author is not to blame."

"This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it.Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its sprit grows and strengthens'

From The shadow of the winds by
Carlos Ruiz Zafon

In a line that made me laugh out loud on the trolley this morning Gaiman describes a waitress at a family restaurant as a "girl who looked scarcely old enough to have dropped out of high school."

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

>72 usnmm2: usnmm2: YUM!

From Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

"And now everywhere I go the last several days there seems to be a statistically improbable number of wheelchaired figures around, lurking, somehow just a little too nonchalantly"

from a conversation between Hal Incandenza and his brother, Orin. The story of Hal is my favourite part of the book, or parts...

(22) booksthesky,

Thanks for the laugh! I'll admitt I've been guilty of the same thing. I'll have to look intoTwilight Watch and Sergei Lukyanenko

I'm reading The Rings Of Saturn and it is full of beautiful passages. This one is about a town in Siberia where Joseph Conrad's father was exiled:

"There are only two seasons: the white winter and the green winter. For nine months the ice-cold air sweeps down from the Arctic sea. The thermometer plunges to unbelievable depths and one is surrounded by a limitless darkness. During the green winter it rains week in week out. The mud creeps over the threshold, rigor mortis is temporarily lifted and a few signs of life, in the form of an all-pervasive marasmus, begin to manifest themselves. In the white winter everything is dead, during the green winter everything is dying."

I've never posted in this thread before but here's a bit from the beginning of Love Among the Chickens by P.G. Wodehouse:

"A gentleman called to see you when you were out last night sir," said Mrs. Medley my landlady, removing the last of the breakfast things.
"Yes?" I said, in my affable way.
"A gentleman," said Mrs. Medley meditatively, "with a very powerful voice."
"Caruso?"
"Sir?"
"I said, did he leave a name?"
"Yes, sir. Mr. Ukridge."
"Oh, my sainted aunt!"
"Sir!"
"Nothing, nothing."
"Thank you, sir," said Mrs. Medley, withdrawing from the presence.
Ukridge! Oh, hang it!...

"And instead of getting on with proper science* scientists suddenly went around saying how impossible it was to know anything, and that there wasn’t really anything you could call reality to know anything about, and how all this was tremendously exciting, and incidentally did you know there were possibly all these little universes all over the place but no one can see them because they are all curved in on themselves?

*Like finding that bloody butterfly whose flapping wings cause all these storms we’ve been having lately and getting it to stop."

Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett

From Our Brilliant Heritage by Oswald Chambers:

"The greatest hindrance of spiritual life lies in looking for big things to do--Jesus Christ 'took a towel' (and washed the disciples' feet). We are not meant to be illuminated versions, we are meant to be the common stuff of ordinary human life, exhibiting the marvel of the Grace of God."

#80 caroline123
Thanks for sharing that quote. Inspired me today.

Bel Canto-Ann Patchet

"All the love and the longing a body could contain was spun into not more than two and a half minutes of song, and when she came to the highest notes it seemed that all they had been given in their lives and all they had lost came together and made a weight that was almost impossible to bear."

>82 krisa: I just finished Bel Canto. It was such a beautiful book.

"As Archer listened, his sense of inadequacy and inexpressiveness increased. The boy was not insensitive, he knew; but he had the facility and self-confidence that came of looking at fate not as a master but as an equal. "That's it: they feel equal to things--they know their way about," he mused, thinking of his son as the spokesman of the new generation which had swept away all the old landmarks, and with them the sign- posts and the danger-signal."

I loved this paragraph from The age of innocence

#85 - I enjoyed that.

I was looking for something from Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns, and found this.

"In a few years, this little girl will be a woman who will make small demands on life, who will never burden others, who will never let on that she too has sorrows, disappointments, dreams that have been ridiculed. A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washed over her"

This is a passage from the book I'm currently reading, Mystic River:

'Marita had died fourteen years ago, while Jimmy served a two-year bid at the Deer Island House of Corrections in Winthrop. One Saturday during visitation hours, as five-year-old Katie squirmed in her lap, Marita told Jimmy a mole on her armhad been darkening lately, and she was going to visit a doctor at the community clinic. Just to be safe, she said. Four Saturdays later she was undergoing chemo. Six months after she'd told him about the mole, she was dead, Jimmy having been forced to watch his wife's body puree into chalk over a succession of Saturdays from the other side of a dark wood table scarred by cigarrettes, sweat, come stains, and over a century's worth of convict bullshit and convict laments.'

From the Shadow of the wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

"This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it.Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its sprit grows and strengthens."

From The Accidental by Ali Smith:

I was born free, I've had the time of my life and for all we know I'm going to live forever.

(There's a whole chapter built on lies a character tells about her past--all drawn from news stories, movies, TV, and popular songs. Loved this novel!)

From Jack by A.M. Homes where an angry young teenager is being given a tour of the apartment his father is sharing with his gay lover:

It annoys the hell out of me when people say, This is the kitchen, and this is the bathroom. What am I, Helen Keller? I mean, it's pretty obvious when you're in a kitchen and when you're not.

(Love that "What am I, Helen Keller?". Feels like just the thing a 13-14 year old would say)

All from A Bed of Earth by Tanith Lee:

Belief is not always necessary for a miracle, and disbelieving seldom prevents disaster.

***

Not every deceit is to be condemned. Not every truth is good.

***

Love, it transpires, persists both sides of the grave. Love is everywhere, and I have known it well. It is the most holy thing and the most fearful, on the earth, but what we have of it here is but the phantom, as all things are, of the love to which we return.

From Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse:

"To turn on my side was agony, but I had a bright idea. With my right hand, I tugged at the seat of my pants so as to turn my body on its side. Then I hunched up my body and got my buttocks in the air, then got onto my knees and so succeeded, little by little in raising the upper part of my body. Sufferers from lumbago get up in the same way. One elbow goes on the bed, while one presses oneself up with the other hand. As one does so, the arm belonging to the elbow on the bed goes into just the same position as when someone doing a classical Japanese dance gets up off the floor. I found myself wondering: perhaps the originator of the Japanese dance had suffered from lumbago?"

That last sentence struck me as just the sort of thing I would think!!

From Middle Age: A Romance by Joyce Carol Oates:

Of all utterances of the past none are so painful as those written in the hope of winning another's love.

From Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell:

"Sometime the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage. (...snip...) I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. The Diagonal People."

"It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy."
-Alan Lightman, "Einstein's Dreams" p.32

'If you are bored beyond endurance, I can offer only my promise that
there will be fucking in the very near future, not to mention madness, abduction, and violent death.'
- The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber

#96: OK, ellevee. Now I have another book to add to my TBR pile. Like I needed it :-)

From H. M. Tomlinson's The Sea and the Jungle:

"Straight beneath the rail the wake is an upheaval of gems, sapphires, emeralds, and diamonds, always instantly melting in the sun, always fusing and fleeting in swift coils of malachite and chrysoprase, but never gone."

Even under a white hospital blanket, Herlihey looked like something out of World War II concentration camp. His sunken eyes had bluish circles beneath them. His red hair was fine and thinning, his scalp showing through in places. The bones of his legs and arms barely tented the woven white fabric covering them. He seemed ageless to Jonah, nine or ninety, close to birth and close to death.

From Psychopath by Keith Ablow

Only a cynic can create horror. For behind every masterpiece of the sort
must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its
illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.

HPL as quoted in H.P. Lovecraft: master of weird fiction by William Schoell

"... in everybody's life there's a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can't go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That's how we survive."
-Haruki Murakami, "Kafka on the Shore" p.142-3

A second unusual event took place that afternoon, varying Walter Allanson's heretofore precise schedule once more. First he had bought the rifle, and then he left for home early. His staff recalled that he had received a call at his office sometime around 5:30 from a woman who didn't give a name. She had been brusque. "You'd better tell Mr. Allanson to get home as fast as he can," she said. "His son is headed over there to cause trouble."

from Everything She Ever Wanted by Ann Rule

I loved these two quotes from Family matters.

pg 122
"And Vilas, writing and reading the ongoing the ongoing drama of family matters, the endless tradegy and comedy, realized that collectively, the letters formed a pattern only he was priviledged to see. He let the mail flow through his consciousness, allowing the episodes to fall into place on their own accord, like bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope. He felt that chance events, random cruelty, unexplainable kindness, meaningless disaster, unexpected generosity could, together, form a design that was otherwise invisible. If it were possible to read letters for all humanity, compose an infinity of responses on their behalf, he would have a God's eye view of the world, and be able to understand it."

and this great line on pg 121

"A letter is like perfume. You don't apply a whole bottle. Just one dab will fill your senses. Words are the same-a few are sufficient."

Airlines have allowed at best for an almost absurd reduction in travel time, but not in distances. Those remain as immense as before. Let us not forget: the line of flight is only a line, not a road. From a physiognomic viewpoint, we are pedestrians and runners.

The Terrors Of Ice And Darkness by Christoph Ransmayr.

Christian witness must always be forged anew in the fire of the question of truth. Otherwise it can in no case and at no time be a witness that is substantial and responsible, and consequently trustworthy and forceful. Evangelical theology

But it was this decison that eventually brought Sofie her third dead body. The first had been her mother, lying sprawled across the bed, sunshine streaming through the windows. The second was her father, in the cold fluorescent light of the hospital morgue. The third would be swinging gently from a tree, surrounded by brilliant red autumn leaves.

They Did It With Love by Kate Morgenroth

http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook52936.htm

From Christopher Moore's Practical Demonkeeping:

"'Are you saying,' Brine interrupted, 'that the human race was created to irritate Satan?' 'That is correct. Jehovah is infinite in his snottiness'"

"I was on fire."

Opening line from The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls. How can you not keep reading?

</i> nothing to add. Hopefully just ending the italics.

</i> . . . just trying to kill the italics . . . but too late!

>111 nancyewhite:, 114: LOL, I almost weighed in to do exactly the same thing! I thought I might find a quote first, so I'd have an excuse. Thanks!

I believe that the italics were my fault. I thought it would only Italics my box. My apologies friends. I am not savy with Html as I thought I was :/.

From Never Surrender by Michael Dobbs. Churchill is reading a telegram in which a junior officer informs the beleaguered British Expeditionary Force garrison in Calais that it must hold on against an enormous German force with no hope of rescue "for the sake of Allied solidarity." From the book (p. 158):

"To hold on. Without assistance? Against overwhelming numbers of panzers? For the sake of 'Allied solidarity'? Simply so that someone in the War Office could avoid a row with the French?

"'Jock, to die for one's country is one thing. But to tell a man he is going to die for his superiors' convenience is an abomination!'"

Langdon's Mickey Mouse wristwatch read almost seven thirty when he emerged from the Jaguar limousine onto Inner Temple Lane with Sophie and Teabing. The threesome wound through a maze of buildings to a small courtyard outside the Temple Church. The rough-hewn stone shimmered in the rain, and doves cooed in the architecture overhead.

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

Willie Stark in All the Kings Men, by Robert Penn Warren. A long quote, but so very Willie:

"I'm not a lawyer. I know some law. In fact, I know a lot of law. And I made me some money out of law. But I'm not a lawyer. That's why I can see what the law is like. It's like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed on a cold night. There ain't never enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is alwys going to catch pneumonia. Hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shank bone's to the breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind. The best thing you can do is something and then make up some law to fit and by the time that law gets on the books you would have done something different."

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid:

"On street corners, tourists would ask me for directions. I was, in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker."

"He smiles most of the time and has eyes that the naive might think of as candid."

Murder in the Dark, Margaret Atwood.

"...perhaps God has forbidden men to know His ways, for if they did know the full extent of His goodness, and the magnitude of our rejection of it, they would be so disheartened they would abandon all hope of redemption, and die of grief."

An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears

I`m not at all sure if this one will work out of context, but we`ll see. The scene, I should explain is seen partly through the eyes of a dolphin -

"It was the first time Ee had seen a human body so close, and he swam cautiously round it, eyeing it curiously. What, he wondered, was the point of having long, floppy fins like those ? How could he swim ? And it was very strange skin indeed. It would not have done for a dolphin.

And yet Ee felt the kinship of one mammal for another, the call of red, warm blood to red, warm blood. And of blood there was ample evidence. It trickled steadily from the head of Captain Hughes, from a gash that ran from his ear to the back of his head, the typical gash or split caused by a violent blow from something hard."

- Murder by Moonlight by `Desmond Reid` (actually written by Wilfred McNeilly).

This is taken from The box man

So I want to cherish that fiery wind that is so difficult to come by, that begins with love lost. Marvelous forests of words and seas of desire...time stops just by touching your skin lightly with my fingers, and eternity draws near.

Taken from The Bridge of San Luis Rey:

All night they talked, secretly comforting their hearts that longed always for Spain and telling themselves that such a symposium was after the manner of the high Spanish soul. They talked about ghosts and second-sight, and about the earth before man appeared upon it and about the possibility of the planets striking against one another; about whether the soul can be seen, like a dove, fluttering away at the moment of death; they wondered whether at the second coming of Christ to Jerusalem, Peru would be long in receiving the news. They talked until the sun rose, about wars and kings, about poets and scholars, and about strange countries. Each one poured into the conversation his store of wise sad anecdotes and his dry regret about the race of men.

From Born Standing Up by Steve Martin:

"Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration."

From this thread comes 2008 Resolution #1: read some Neil Gaiman -- !!

"Deliver me, Lord, deliver me, from the evil around me," I prayed, but I couldn't hear my own voice. The prayers grew louder and became like a rumbling rising so high it almost rose above the screams and cries of those who fought.

Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt by Anne Rice

This is taken from The master

"Alice was dead now, Aunt Kate was in her grave, the parents who noticed nothing also lay inert under the ground, and William was miles away in his own world, where he would stay. And there was silence now in Kensington, not a sound in the house, except for the sound, like a vague cry in the distance, of his own great solitude, and his memory, working like grief, the past coming to him with its arm outstretched looking for comfort."

and this paragraph

"Soon after she died he wrote a story, "Travelling companions," in which William, travelling in Italy from Germany, met her by chance in a Milan cathederal, having seen her in front of Leonardo's The Last Supper. He loved describing her white umbrella with a violet lining and the sense of intellignet pleasure in her movements, her glance and her voice. He could control her destiny now that she was dead, offer her the experiences she would have wanted, and provide drama for a life which had been so cruelly shortened. He wondered if this had happened to other writers who came before him, if Hawthorne or George Elliot had written to make the dead come back to life, had worked all day and night, like a magician or an alchemist, defying fate and time and all the implacable elements to recreate a sacred life."

Clari ~ an American ~ travels to a small Lapland village and, in English, asks some native women a question, which they answer in their own language.

"'Thank you,' I said.

"For a moment, I felt we were all related, the five Sami women and I. None of us understood anything."

From Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida.

#125 I just loved the lines from Bridge of San Luis Rey. Thank you for sharing. I have to put this book on my TBR list.

"Hey, ocean boy!" Corky chided. 'Let's leave the science to the scientists, shall we?" He immediately turned back to Rachel. 'In earth rocks, the mineral nickel occurs in either extremely high percentages or extremely low; nothing in the middle. In meteorites, though, the nickel content falls within a midrange set of values. Therefore, if we analyze a sample and find the nickel content reflects a midrange value, we can guarantee beyond the shadow of a doubt that the sample is a meteorite."

Deception Point by Dan Brown

Incidentally, the long but peculiarly different sequence of steps and the entirely different set of plants involved in the incipient phases of agriculture in the Old and New worlds should lay to rest once and for all the hoary notion that one development was derived from the other. If people from the Middle East somehow managed to get to Tehuacan 9000 years ago, they came empty-handed and were obviously not very helpful.

Cannibals and Kings by Marvin Harris

"A woman's third eye is her vagina."

No, seriously. From a Shakespeare biography, no less.

134

That may be something general from the culture of the times. I recall seeing a play some years ago (not Shakespeare) which contained a very similar line.

Do you take your user name from Studio One the reggae record label ?

Anyway, on to a quote -

"Foulness-On-Sea clutched at the south-east shore of England like a drowning man clutching a straw. It seemed to be terribly afraid of sinking out of sight into the mud of the Thames estuary, and even a casual visitor to the resort - the only kind of visitor the resort ever had - would say that the fear was not without justification.

There was mud everywhere, in varying degrees of hardness ; a coating of pebbles attempted to brighten up something which only the Publicity Director in his cups could summon up enough poetic fancy to call a beach ; whilst a well-barnacled pier...reached out like a rusty metal finger over the tea-coloured sea."

Murder With Variety by William Arthur

135 - I didn't know about the record label actually, it's the name of one of my childhood hangouts. :)

(about university life:)

Having abandoned lectures, I was more or less at sea, a warm and balmy sea that posed no immediate threat unless one began thinking of the depths beneath.

brilliant!

from Clever Girl by Brian Thompson.

There was a violent, soundless explosion and Kim was flung backward against the cupboards on the other side of the wagon. Through a haze of violet light, she saw the lid of the trunk slowly close itself. Purple spots danced before her eyes, then spread out to cover her entire field of vision. Her last coherent thought, as the purple deepened into black unconciousness, was an angry curse directed at the toff waiting for her in the public house. Five pounds wasn't anywhere near enough pay for snooping on a real magician.
Chapter 1 - Mairelon the Magician

About a past relationship

"You couldn't make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes they didn't go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind."

From Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

"Reading and books are medicine. Stories are written and told by and for people who have been broken, but who have risen up, or will rise, if attention is paid to them. Those people are you and us. Stories and truth are splints for the soul, and that makes today a sacred gathering. Now we are all saying: Pass it on."

From "Steinbeck Country" in Grace (eventually) by Anne Lamott

After getting tossed by a horse:

"I think I was unconscious for a few seconds, because I remember I opened my eyes as if to a new beginning; nothing I saw was familiar to me, my head was empty, no thoughts, everything quite clean and the sky transparently blue, and I didn't know what I was called or even recognize my own body. Unnamed, I floated around looking at the world for the first time and felt it strangely illuminated and glassily beautiful, and then I heard a whinny and the thundering of hooves, and it all came back like a whirring boomerang and hit me on the head with a crack..."

From Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

From How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas Foster:

"My main suggestion is to read things you like . . . Go to your bookstore or library and find novels, poems, plays, stories that engage your imagination and your intelligence. Read 'Great Literature' by all means, but read good writing. Much of what I like best iny my reading I've found by accident as I poked around bookshelves. And don't wait for writers to be dead to be read; the living ones can use the money. Your reading should be fun. We only call them literary works. Really, though, it's all a form of play."

#142 Ooooh, alcottacre, I like that!

#143 - I know, makes me wish I had written it!

A woman, about her husband...

"He spent the day shopping and making risotto in the time-honored male way, removing all the utensils from the drawers and laying them out like surgical instruments, then decanting all the ingredients into small bowls to maximize the washing up."

A Spot of Bother: A Novel by Mark Haddon

#145 lol - I read that book about six months ago, and I still think about that line. I think that may be why my wife more-or-less kicked me out of the kitchen (admittedly, I did go willingly).

On the same theme, from Claudia Roden's Arabesque:

Trust your taste and allow yourself a certain freedom in the preparation of the dishes. ... that is what cooking is about. We are dealing with products of nature and these vary. You can have a small lemon that has more juice and is sharper than a larger one. Garlic cloves vary in size and flavour; there are many varieties and they can be young or old and more or less strong. Many of the vegetables available to us come from different countries and are grown in different soils, under a different sun. They have a different taste and respond differently to cooking. Rice, even of the same variety and the same provenance, varies from one year to the next and, depending on whether it is new or old, in the amount of water it absorbs. Once upon a time the recommendation for many rice recipes was to add 'as much water as it takes' and there was much sense in that.

#147: 'under a different sun', eh? Alien vegetables! (heehee)

From The Dark Tower by Stephen King

Do any of us, except in our dreams, truly expect to be reunited with our hearts' deepest loves, even when they leave us only for minutes, and on the most mundane of errands? No, not at all. Each time they go from our sight we in our secret hearts count them as dead. Having been given so much, we reason, how could we expect not to be brought as low as Lucifer for the staggering presumption of our love?

From The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett:

"You don't put your life into your books. You find it there."

Well I just finished reading this book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and I am just so in love with the whole series and it's characters that this line for no real reason made me hyperventalate..in a fantastic way...

"Harry, we saw Uranusup close!" said Ron, still giggling feebly. "Get it, Harry? We saw Uranus-ha ha ha-"

I don't know starnge things make me happy..maybe you'll comprehend it...

HEY TIM....

The username for message#151 prompted me to look at his/her profile where the following is noted in red:

This user has been suspended for being 12 or younger. If you are the owner of this account, we need an email from your parent or guardian, confirming that you are thirteen or older and permitting you to use this site. Email tim@librarything.com

Can we get rid of the posts? I wouldn't mind if the username disappeared too, and hopefully a mature user would do that.

I'm reading Woman in White by Collins. I read this passage last night before bed and enjoyed it so much I read it twice more. It's kind of long, so I apologize in advance if that's a problem.

Anyway, the young man who is the narrator is describing an older woman:

A mild, a compliant, an unutterably tranquil and harmless old lady, who never by any chance suggested the idea that she had been actually alive since the hour of her birth. Nature has so much to do in this world, and is engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions, that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at the time. Starting from this point of view, it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.

From Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, p122 (pbk):

When she woke up crying from one of her nightmares, (he) would stay with her, brush her hair with his hands, collect her tears in thimbles for her to drink the next morning

From The Mother Dance by Harriet Lerner, p3:

"I never believed that I would really become pregnant because the thought of having an entire person grow inside your body is such a bizarre idea that only lunatics or religious fanatics would take it for granted the fact that it might actually happen."

>155 lisalouhoo:-I hope you review this book, because if it's all as good as that line, I've got to read it. That's how I felt the entire time I was in college and through most of my pregnancy.

>156 kaelirenee: - I am in the middle of it right now. Will post a review when I have finished.

I thought it was a great line, too. I still feel that way - six months pregnant with my fifth child.

'...you'd better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It's unpleasantly like being drunk.'

'What's so unpleasant about being drunk?'

'You ask a glass of water.'

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

(On a side note, I've never noticed the double 'h' in 'hitchhiker' before. What a wierd word.)

First one is a bit of a cheat, as it's from The Mighty Boosh, which is a DVD rather than a book:

'You shouldn't wear a mink coat. I read a pamphlet'

'So? I once looked at a hedge. What's your point?'

From a review by Rebecca West of a book called The Spinster, reprinted in The Penguin Book of British Comic Writing

'There were reservoirs of of love in her - of wife-love and of mother-love - reservoirs which had never been tapped.' This is luscious imagery. 'The Tapping of the Spinster' would be would be an exquisite title for a poetic play. And the conception of fate as as a Metropolitan Water Board regulating the flow of spiritual liquids is immense.

This is from unless

" We are too kind, too willing-too unwilling too-reaching out blindly with a grasping hand but not knowing how to ask for what we don't even know we want."

"Then the killing began."

Boy, does it ever from The Gangs of New York.

"Utopias are often satirical, the satire being directed at whatever society the writer is currently living in-that is, the superior arrangment of the Utopians reflect badly on us. Dystopias are often more like dire warning than satires, dark shadows cast by the present into the future. They are what will happen to us if we don't pull up our socks."

"Writing Utopia," from Writing with Intent (About writing The Handmaid's Tale

From Bel Canto. Everyone has been held hostage for a long time now (not a spoiler, trust me) and Kato is playing the piano:

"Every note was distinct. It was the measurement of the time which had gotten away from them. It was the interpretation of their lives in the very moment they were being lived."

Ever since I read that quote, I think of it every time I play the piano.

Edited to fix touchstone

#163 ChocolateMuse: I read Bel Canto recently and loved it. I thought some of the passages, like the one you quoted, are pure poetry.

'Once I read, in no nationalist leaflet, but in a restrained and judicious textbook, that old Irish music was the finest and sweetest in the world and pricked up my ears in joyous anticipation; but they dropped again at once. "Unfortunately;" the writer went on, "not a single note of it has been preserved"

Honor Tracy, 'A Fresh Eye', quoted in The Penguin Book of British Comic Writing

'Once I read, in no nationalist leaflet, but in a restrained and judicious textbook, that old Irish music was the finest and sweetest in the world and pricked up my ears in joyous anticipation; but they dropped again at once. "Unfortunately;" the writer went on, "not a single note of it has been preserved"

Honor Tracy, 'A Fresh Eye', quoted in The Penguin Book of British Comic Writing

From 'A Bloomsbury Reader', Beatrice Webb reports on Virginia and Leonard Woolf's view of state-funded religious education:

'They were totally opposed to it. Things that were "palpably untrue" should not be taught at public expense, and should not be thought by those above a certain level of intellect'

"From the enormous pit before him white peaks lifted themselves yearning to the moonlight."

Rudyard Kipling captures something of the majesty of the Himalayas by moonlight in Kim.

From Walter Tyrer`s The Case of the Cottage Crime.

To set the scene, the wife of a none-too bright criminal has just suggested a solution to certain difficulties they are experiencing. It takes her spouse some time to grasp her meaning -

"Alf Beckett reflected over this. His brain was slower than that of his wife and ideas took some time to penetrate. Now over his ruddy countenance spread the dawn of understanding like the sun shouldering upwards over a bleak and deserted landscape, picking out first one land-mark and then another until at last the whole countryside is bathed in light and warmth."

The writer-wannabe in me loves this quote from Matt Haig's book The Dead Fathers Club, which I just finished reading yesterday:

"She said that writing is sometimes easier than speaking even though it takes longer and she said it is easier because you can do it on your own and say things you are scared to speak unless it was by yourself and if you speak to yourself people think you are mad but if you write the same things they think you are clever." (pgs 76 & 77)

You know if you guys keep cherry picking the best quotes out of a book then I'll never have to read another whole book. LOL

The Last Templar

"See the thing about miracles is...if you have faith, you don't need them, and if you're a doubter, well then no miracle is ever enough."

"Faith is easy when you're standing in front of a miracle. The real test of faith is when there aren't any signs."

"You'll be careful?"

"No, I intend to be totally, wantonly, inexcusably reckless."

This is from one of my all-time favourites...
"He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same" - from Wuthering Heights
Quite cheesy maybe, but where are those passions now? :)

From Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine

"Authoritarian government is best suited to safeguarding economic freedom because of its impersonal use of power"
-Pinochet/Friedman

"Torture is notoriously unreliable to gain the truth. But nothing is quite as effective at controlling the population."
-CIA Torture handbook

From Walking Tractor and Other Tales of Old Anderson Valley by Bruce Patterson:

Because Rosarito Beach was so close to Los Angeles, and because my parents were a part of a clan of people that had left the old neighborhood in Chicago and had moved to the west coast, at least once per summer all of the adults and their kids gathered at El Hotel Rosarito for a vacation. The adults would pass the time drinking liquor and playing poker in their suite and, since poker was the sort of game that required a bit of peace and quiet, us kids would spend our days riding horses. Back then one horse cost one dollar American per hour, but if you rented a half dozen horses for the whole day you could get the price down to eighty cents or even less if business was slow. As an added benefit, when you put a half dozen tinhorn kids aboard a half dozen rental horses, it was the horses and not the kids who called the shots and you could trust them to keep the kids safe. Like when it came to determining the speed of travel. Kids never wanted to walk and rental horses never wanted to run and so we walked.

'A radical is just a liberal with a big mouth'

The Eye in the Pyramid by Robert Shea

OK, so it's not what I'm reading now, but the book is just sitting here in front of me and I love this excerpt. From The Deer Pasture by Rick Bass

"Each year I tell myself that if I see such a deer, I will pass him up, just sit silently and watch him, and leave him to help generate another generation of thick-necked Hill Country monsters, but each year, when I hear hooves clattering faintly against the rock, and see the tawn flash through the cedars, I do this: I raise my scope, and listen to the heavy sound of my heart, and wait breathless. My heart beats."

Read that book about Henry James. Good quote!
Machteld

I am new here-great topic.
Read this last night and laughed my head off. From 'Pies and Prejudice: In search of the North' by Stuart Maconie...

When I was about eight, I went to some kind of trade show in Wigan Park where Heinz, paternalistic local employers of thousands, had a food stall. A nice lady offered me a small plastic pot of a new line of theirs, Spaghetti Bolognese in a tin. I thought my head was going to explode. I felt like Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead must have done when they first took acid. Whole new vistas of monosodium glutamate and preservatives opened up to me...I had tasted the future and it worked, Mum.

From "The Historian's Craft" by Marc Bloch:

"Between the expression of physical and human realities there is as much difference as between the task of a drill operator and that of a lutemaker: both work down to the last millimeter, but the driller uses precision tools, while the lutemaker is guided primarily by his sensitivity to sound and touch. It would be unwise either for the driller to adopt the empirical methods of the lutemaker or for the lutemaker to imitate the driller. Will anyone deny that one may not feel with words as well as with fingers?"

From Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs:

"Can't read all the time. Bummer."
by Rina Bander

From Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton:

"The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon...

A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr Mingott; and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows."

That repetition of 'snowy' jars a bit - but I love the image Wharton creates, especially the picture of those two tiny white hands.

From Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist:

"Why is Melancholy like Honey? Because it is very sweet, and it is culled from Flowers."

and

"How comfortable were other men's shoes!"

The language is a little archaic, but I bet you`ve met someone like this -

"He was that terrible type, the Silly Cynic, his aim a caustic commentary on all things and all men, his achievement mere vulgar irreverence and unintelligent scorn."

E W Hornung, from his short story Nine Points of the Law, a story featuring the character Raffles which appears in many crime fiction anthologies, among them Marie Smith (ed), Golden Age Detective Stories , published in the US as The Mammoth Book of Golden Age Detective Stories.

Schrodinger's Ball

"God died a cartoon death, you know."

"Look, God cheerfully led us to science, right past the cliff's edge of his own plausibility. Then, sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century, he looked down, saw he was standing on empty air, did one last double take to the camera, and plummeted to his death. If there ever was a deus ex machina, the machina was built by the ACME Corporation."

The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides

Athenian envoys speaking before the Lacedaemonian assembly:

Men's indignation, it seems, is more excited by legal wrong than by violent wrong; the first looks like being cheated by an equal, the second like being compelled by a superior. At all events they contrived to put up with much worse treatment than this from the Mede, yet they think our rule severe, and this is to be expected, for the present always weighs heavy on the conquered. This at least is certain. If you succeed in overthrowing us and in taking our place, you would speedily lose the popularity with which fear of us has invested you, if your policy of today is at all to tally with the sample that you gave of it during the brief period of your command against the Mede. Not only is your life at home regulated by rules and institutions incompatible with those of others, but your citizens abroad act neither on these rules nor on those which are recognized by the rest of Hellas.

From Don't Tell the Grownups: Subversive Children's Literature

"The simple, pleasant adult society they polite children's stories had prepared us for did not exist. As we had suspected, the fairy tales had been right all along-the world was full of hostile, stupid giants and perilous castles and people who abandoned their children in the nearest forest. To succeed in this world you needed some special skill or patronage, plus remarkable luck; and it didn't hurt to be very good-looking."

"It may be that I was looking into the brain of a mindless beast in its last convulsion of fear - or of a godlike being making its peace with the universe"

This is part of the short story "Out of the sun" from the book The other side of the sky by Arthur C. Clarke. The character is trying to determine what it is that he is picking up on his radar.

Ah, pure poetry...

From the Advance Reader's Edition of Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence, p. 44

"If you were an atheist, Birbal," the emperor challenged his first minister, "what would you say to the true believers of all the great religions of the world?" Birbal was a devout Brahmin from Trivikrampur, but he answered unhesitatingly, "I would say to them that in my opinion they were all atheists as well; I merely believe in one god less than each of them." "How so?" the emperor asked. "All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own," said Birbal, "and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none."

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which I'm just starting today. Literally the first two sentences.

In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. "To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing," he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angouleme or to the editor of The Comics Journal.

Whew. Long sentences. I can't wait to begin!

From The Book Thief (p.246) which, despite a WWII-Germany setting, is clever and playful:

"As the book quivered in her lap, the secret sat in her mouth. It made itself comfortable. It crossed its legs."

From The Throwback by Tom Sharpe. Almost at the end of the book (p213):

"Mr Mirkin clutching his head in agony took an unwise step forward, fell and lay on an extremely large loudspeaker which was resonating at an extremely low frequency. Before he knew what was happening Mr Mirkin was transformed from Senior Collector of Taxes (Supertax Division; sub-department, Evasion of) of the Inland Revenue into a sort of semi-human tuning fork, one end of which felt as if it had been sucked into a jet engine at full power while the middle lying on top of the low-frequency loudspeaker began to rumble, stir, reverberate and bounce quite horribly."

on Life Before Man by Margaret Atwood

"But I'm not crying, I'm angry. I'm so angry I could kill you. If you hadn't already doen that for yourself."

From A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy

"Ah, we must be careful! I lost another earring doing like this."
No sooner did she realize the significant words than a troubled look passed across her face, and she shut her lips as if to keep them back.
"Doing like what?" said Knight, perplexed.
"Oh, sitting down out of doors," she replied hastily.

#180 Detail_Muse ~ I love that quote! It's the story of my life. lol I'm going to print it out in a fun font and color and frame it.

..."But beginner, in the sense of being excited about something new. About having the guts to keep at it, because you love it, not because it's your profession or you have a license or something. It means enthusiasm -- passionate enthusiasm. It means... well, think about it, its root. Amateur. Because, well, what it really means is lover."

Amateur

From Safe Word by Molly weatherfield

"The old writings about snow country dogs say the color of their fur should be subtle, almost plain. The aim was to reflect the feeling of nature, of colors fading softly, the way a wheat field burns in autumn or snow melts into clear water."

From Dog Man: An Uncommon Life on a Faraway Mountain by Martha Sherrill.

"Tools were made, and born were hands."

Jeffrey Mahmelman in Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes, quoting William Blake

From Holiday in Death by J. D. Robb:

"We can talk in the library."

"Oh." The minute she stepped inside, Mire clasped her hands in sheer pleasure. "What a marvelous room. Oh, what absolute treasures. Not enough people appreciate the feel and the smell of a real book in their hands any longer. The delight of curling into a chair with the warmth of one . . ."

This is the thread I have been longing for and it's only taken four months to find it. I write phrases and passages in my book journal and often long to share them with others. No time at the moment to grab the journal, but watch out!

From Mad House, a short story found in I Am Legend.

"A man had a choice, after all. He devoted his life to his work or to his wife and children and home. It could not be combined; not in this day and age. In this insane world where God was second to income and goodness to wealth."

#200 thekoolaidmom - oh dear, I feel like avoiding that choice is my current state of life in a nutshell.

"Pitching is a beautiful thing. It's an art - it's a work of art when done right. It's like ballet or the theatre. And, like any work of art, you have to have it in your head first - the idea of it, a vision of what it should be. And then you have to perform. You try to make your hand and body come up to that vision."

- Tom Seaver, quoted in Late Innings by Roger Angell (probably 1977).

That actually helped me breakthrough with something I've been dealing with at work.

I’ve always been fascinated by an author’s relationship with his or her characters. No one does this better of course than J. M. Coetzee (Foe, Elizabeth Costello). But this passage by Adam Mansbach from The End of the Jews is a good one.

Tristan Brodsky is an aging writer who has never been extremely prolific anyway. Now on the downside of his career he finds it more and more difficult to write:

Tristan sat at his desk, furious, staring into space. There was no getting around it: he wrote like an old man now. The simple slowing of his recall, the fact that the right word no longer bobbed straight to the surface of his mind but swam languorously upward and broke through gasping for air, was the least of it. More crippling by far was that his understanding of people had eroded. The world had grayed as he had. It was not the gray of complexity, but the gray of remoteness, the gray that faded to black. He questioned his footing with every step. Was he interpreting things right? Did people think the way he believed they did? Act for the thin reasons he gave them?

His characters noticed his unsteadiness and began to mistrust him. They looked at Tristan and saw an old man who would muddle or forget their secrets, and so they divulged nothing, humored him by making meaningless conversation. It was infuriating, trying to work with such people. Tristan had had reluctant characters in the past, but he’d overpowered them with persistence and wile, stalked them until he caught them in some moment of privacy or paradox and then black-mailed them for everything he needed. All he could do now was play the sympathetic geezer. Sit on a park bench, throwing crumbs to pigeons, and hope someone would shoulder in beside him and start telling his life story.

"Will you ever have any sense, Anne?" groaned Marilla.

"Oh, yes, I think I will, Marilla," returned Anne optimistically. A good cry, indulged in the grateful solitude of the east gable, had soothed her nerves and restored her to her wonted cheerfulness. "I think my prospects of becoming sensible are brighter now than ever."

"I don't see how," said Marilla.

"Well," explained Anne, "I've learned a new and valuable lesson today. Ever since I came to Green Gables I've been making mistakes, and each mistake has helped to cure me of some great shortcoming. The affair of the amethyst brooch cured me of meddling with things that didn't belong to me. The Haunted Wood mistake cured me of letting my imagination run away with me. The liniment cake mistake cured me of carelessness in cooking. Dyeing my hair cured me of vanity. I never think about my hair and nose now--at least, very seldom. And today's mistake is going to cure me of being too romantic. I have come to the conclusion that it is no use trying to be romantic in Avonlea. It was probably easy enough in towered Camelot hundreds of years ago, but romance is not appreciated now. I feel quite sure that you will soon see a great improvement in me in this respect, Marilla."

"I'm sure I hope so," said Marilla skeptically.

But Matthew, who had been sitting mutely in his corner, laid a hand on Anne's shoulder when Marilla had gone out.

"Don't give up all your romance, Anne," he whispered shyly, "a little of it is a good thing--not too much, of course--but keep a little of it, Anne, keep a little of it."

~ Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery, 1908

edited to fix author touchstone

This might make up for my last one... #200, dchaikin found it unpleasant... This one is a better one. It's from The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a delightful little YA historical fiction book.

Hugo smiled, and then Isabelle wound up the mouse. They watched it skitter across the counter.

Hugo thought about his father's description of the automaton. "Did you ever notice that all machines are made for some reason?" he asked Isabelle. "They are built to make you laugh, like the mouse here, or to tell the time, like clocks, or to fill you with wonder, like the automaton. Maybe that's why a broken machine always makes me a little sad, because it isn't able to do what it was meant to do."

Isabelle picked up the mouse, wound it again, and set it down.

"Maybe it's the same with people," Hugo continued. "If you lose your purpose... it's like you're borken."

Finding Your Own North Star by Martha Beck

"Babies show up knowing the truth: Each of them is an utterly loveable, beautiful creature, with a unique mission in life and all the equipment necessary to fulfill that mission."

#204 thekoolaidmom - but I like the line! 8p~ and the one in #204 (and #205 & #202 and ...)

But I really got a kick out of showing my wife the Anne of Green Gables excerpt in #203 (Irisheyz77) - she read along with Anne's lines practically from memory (I've never read LM Montgomery).

Being a serious fan of Jane Austen, I found the following bit in The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin amusing:

Wilkes rose from Sharman's tattered and bleeding body.

'He's not dead,' he said. 'There are a lot of things broken, but he'll live.'

'To be hanged,' said Fen in a shaky voice. 'Which,' he added more cheerfully, 'will be one Janeite the less, anyway.'

#202 I love you passage. It made me think of this...

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen , Chapter 47 first line:

Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore every body, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.

*************

I also love what #203 and #204 wrote. thanks

All of the writing in the anthology, The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review, is first-rate; but since I rarely read poetry, I'm especially enjoying that -- like "Postoperative Care" by Arlene Eager:

Glad to be alive,
I look in mirrors
with detachment
I study my seams.
My belly looks like
a garment taken in
by a tailor's apprentice,
the crazy one
he had to fire.

I enjoy reading everyone's favorite quotes but seldom feel the need to make a note of any portion of my reading - Hotel du Lac is one of those exceptions. There are so many wonderful lines in there! One of my very favorites is:

"Edith Hope, a writer of romantic fiction under a more thrusting name, ..."

I have to get the book back to the library today, but I'm going to buy a copy of my own so I can have it to dip into whenever I feel like it, and then I may share a few more wonderful quotes from it.

I'm really enjoying Duma Key, but it's a bit long... not one to pick up with hopes to finish on the weekend. A very good read, though.

"I'm going to be fielding everything from emergency queries about what to do if one of the Baumgarten boys gets stung by a jellyfish to where Rita Mean Dog can get a fan for her grandmother, who they'll probably stash in the back bedroom again for a week or so. You think Miss Eastlake's getting on? I've seen Mexican mummies hauled through the streets of Guadalajara on the Day of the Dead who looked better than Gramma Mean Dog. She's got two basic lines of conversation. There's the inquisitive line -- 'Did you bring me a cookie?' -- and the declarative -- 'Get me a towel, Rita, I think that fart had a lump in it.'"

I'm reading the Francis B. Grummere translation of Beowulf (groans from the audience). It's hard going, but worth it for me. Here's a passage that is relatively easy to understand. I find the flow of the language beautiful:

Time had now flown; afloat was the ship,
boat under bluff. On board they climbed,
warriors ready; waves were churning
sea with sand; the sailors bore
on the breast of the bark their bright array,
their mail and weapons: the men pushed off,
on its willing way, the well-braced craft.
Then moved o'er the waters by might of the wind
that bark like a bird with breast of foam,
til in season due, on the second day,
the curved prow such course had run
the sailors now could see the land,
sea-cliffs shining, steep high hills,
headlands broad. Their haven was found,
their journey ended.

I read Beowulf in high school; it has always been one of my favorites. One of my first stuffed animals I ever had I named Be-wolf ... He chased the dragons and monsters away. I was four or five when I got him, and I still have him. His fur's mostly worn off, and he's missing one of his floppy ears (I cried so hard the day the neighbor girl ripped his ear off! She never gave it back to me, either *sniff*)

Thanks for sharing the passage, karenmarie! It's brought back happy memories... :-D

From The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera:

What is flirtation? One might say that it is the behavior leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility from becoming a certainty. In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.

"Most of the world is happy.
Why does this come as a surprise? Two types of people, I think, are to blame: journalists and philosophers" ... "The philosophers, though, are the real culprits – the brooding white guys from Europe. They tended to wear all black, smoke too much, and had trouble getting dates. So they hung out, alone, in cafes, pondered the universe, and – surprise! – concluded it is an unhappy place. Of course it is. That is if you happen to be a lonely, brooding, pasty-skinned white guy.”

The Geography of Bliss by Eric Wiener

#213 Hi koolaidmom! Glad to oblige. I, too, have a stuffed animal from when I was a small child. He had a squeaker in his ear, now torn out. Bear was one of two. My brother had his brother. Thanks for the reminder back.

From The Curtain by Milan Kundera, a collection of essays on the history of the novel:

"Every novel created with real passion aspires quite naturally to a lasting aesthetic value, meaning to a value capable of surviving its author. To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who conciously produces books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional-thus non-useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious-is contemptible."

Why am I thinking of Jennifer Weiner right now?

From No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod

" I have often thought of my parents as upside down beneath the ice. Almost the way you see potato bugs on the underside of the leaf.Their hands and knees pushing upwards in something resembling a macabre foetal position, trying to press their mouths against the underside of the top which kept them down. Trying to breathe in order that they might somehow stay alive.

In the weeks that followed their loss, the sun shone brightly and the currents were strong, and the ice turned black beneath its own whiteness, as if eaten by a hidden cancer which only now began to make itself visible. And within a few days what had been a white and seeming certain expanse became a view of bobbing cakes and swirling chunks, turning and reflecting in the light and grey-blue water.

Twice, before the break-up, the dog left my grandparents' house and crossed to the island looking for her people, and twice my uncles crossed to bring her back. The second time Grandpa tied her with a chain to the doorstep, but she whined or 'whinged' as they said, so visibly and so mournfully that the next morning Grandpa let her go. 'Because she was breaking my heart,' he said.

Immediately, she raced down to the shore and started across, running low across the level ice and hurling herself without hesitation into the open water, swimming to the nearest pan and then leaping from one pan to the other while Grandpa watched her progress through his binoculars. 'She made it,' he said, finally turning from the window. 'Poor *cu*.'

She was still there, waiting for her vanished people to rise out of the sea, when the new lightkeeper, 'a man from the way of Pictou', nudged the prow of his boat against the wharf on the island's rocky shore. She came scrambling down the rocks to meet him, with her hackles raised and her teeth bared, protecting what she thought was hers and snarling in her certainty. And he reached into the prow of his boat for his twenty-two rifle and pumped four bullets into her loyal waiting heart. and later he caught her by the hind legs and threw her body into the sea.

'She was descended from the original *Calum Ruadh* dog,' said Grandpa when he heard the news, pouring himself a water glass full of whisky which he drank without a flinch. 'The one who swam after the boat when they were leaving Scotland. It was *in* those dogs to care too much and to try too hard.'"

Such an amazing book, it's hard to choose which part to quote from.

#218: Glad to hear that is an amazing book - I checked it out of the library yesterday!

"Art cannot exist without inequality, which is itself established by comparison."

Children of God by Mary Doria Russell

From The Promised City by Moses Rischin:

"Before overflow audiences, inaugural lecturers Sidney Webb, Samuel Gompers, Thomas Davidson, Father Edward McGlynn, and Dr. R. Heber Newton spoke on the theme of democracy. Thereafter, nightly lectures on American and European history, literature, contemporary social problems, ethics and sociology filled out a budding social science program. . . In 1899, the Honorable Hugh Lusk of New Zealand lectured on the history of democracy in Australia; Boston's Mayor Josiah Quincy spoke on public baths and gymnasiums; Edward Everett Hale invoked the spirit of Emerson; Booker T. Washington held forth on America's race problem; and Michigan's Governor Hazen S. Pinegree discussed the trusts. Jacob Riis, John R. Commons, and 'Golden Rule' Jones were among the galaxy of leading reformers to hold the platform, as the People's Institute aspired to become an evening school in a living social science."

Sounds like a lovely time and a wonderful idea to me!

#214: sanja

I remember that passage from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, highlighted it in my copy. :)

"Complicity is not sudden, though it occurs in an instant."

and

"To be proved true, violence need only occur once. But good is proved true by repetition."

and

"Jews were filling the corners and cracks of Europe, every available space. They buried themselves in strange graves, any space that would fit their bodies, absorbing more room than was allotted them in the world."

From Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels.

I found this poem at the beginning of A Day in the Death of Dorothea Cassidy by Ann Cleeves:

I've travelled the world twice over,
Met the famous: saints and sinners,
Poets and artists, kings and queens,
Old stars and hopeful beginners,
I've been where no-one's been before,
Learned secrets from writers and cooks
All with one library ticket
To the wonderful world of books. -
Janice James

Sometimes, you just gotta laugh at this stuff.

"Ye're fools, the lot o' ye," he declared. "The second best way to rid yourself of lice is to pour whisky on them and get them drunk. When they've fallen down snoring, then ye stand up and they'll drop straight off."
"Second best, eh?" said Ross. "And what's the best way, sir, and I might ask?"
Jamie smiled indulgently round the circle, like a parent amused by the antics of his children.
"Why, let your wife pick them off ye, one by one." He cocked an elbow and bowed to me, one eyebrow raised. "If you'd oblige me, my lady?"

Dragonfly In Amber pg. 606

From The Bronze Horseman:

Letting go of Alexander's hand, Harold stepped slightly away, struggling not to cry and failing. "I'll tell you something in English," he said in Russian. "A few corrupted lines from Kipling."

"Enough," said the guard. "I have no time --"

"If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken," Harold said loudly in English, "twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools..." Tears rolled down his face. "Or watch the thing you gave your life to, broken..." He was down to a whisper: "Son! -- stoop and build them up with worn-out tools." Harold stepped back and made a small sign of the cross on Alexander.

"Let's go!" yelled the guard.

Alexander mouthed to his father, in English, "I love you, Dad."

Then they left.

I really cried over this scene.

From Agatha Christie's Agatha Christie: An Autobiography:

"Life seems to me to consist of three parts: the absorbing and usually enjoyable present, which rushes on from minute to minute with fatal speed; the future, dim and uncertain, for which one can make any number of interesting plans, the wilder and more improbable the better, since - as nothing will turn out as you expect it to do - you might as well have the fun of planning anyway; and thirdly, the past, the memories and realities that are the bedrock of one's present life, brought back to you suddenly by a scent, the shape of a hill, an old song - some triviality that makes one suddenly say 'I remember...' with a peculiar and quite unexplainable pleasure.

This is one of the compensations that age brings, and certainly a very enjoyable one - to remember."

"They agreed the movie was terrific. A love story, it ended sadly with the woman committing suicide. Walking out of the theater afterwards, his girlfriend said she liked the film but it bugged her how often people in movies commit suicide for love. How many people in real life do that? It's just pure Hollywood, melodramatic nonsense. He stopped and stared at her strangely. "The woman doesn't kill herself for *love*. She kills herself because she knows at that time in her life she's as happy as she'll ever be. She's sure everything that comes afterwards will be either anti-climactic or disappointing. So she'd rather die now, at her peak. That's kind of wonderful if you've got the courage to do it: Go out in flames rather than sizzle down slowly into ash." Shaking her head, his girlfriend smiled as if he were an adorable idiot. He'd seen that look before. They walked on in silence, thinking about their different interpretations of the film. Finally she took his arm and said, "You always see things so optimistically." Hearing that, he winced a little because he knew the profoundly different ways they viewed life could undo them. And in time it did."

- Jonathan Carroll

</i> What book was that from, dancingstarfish?

turns out it wasn't from a book, i kept it because I liked it but it is just a snippet that the author wrote on his blog (i looked into it because others asked me the same thing) maybe someday he'll turn it into a book :) If you like it though, you should read his other books..

A snip from my current read:

Blah blahblah blahblah blah blahblah blah blahblah blah blah blah blahblah blah blahblah blah blah blah blah blah blahblah blah blah blah blahblah blah blah blah blah blah blahblah blah blahblah blah blah blah blah blah blahblah blah blah blah blahblah blah blahblah blah blah blah blahblah blah blahblah blah blah blah blahblah blah blah blah blah blah blahblah blah blah blah

sigh :(

That sounds just like the book I'm reading! Are you reading The Gun Runner's Daughter, too?

"Earl finished reading an editorial debating on the civil rights of the restless dead and whether blowing off their heads was a violation of those theoretical rights. Interesting points were made on each side. The pro-rights opinion was that dead people were still people and still endowed with certain basic rights according to the Constitution. The con argument went along the lines that someone, living or dead, forefits most their rights when they start gnawing on your limbs."

Gil's All Fright Diner by A. Lee Martinez

From Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson:

"Once on the road, he (Bronson Alcott) kept to a strict budget; eating only two meals a day and bravely resisting the temptations of the New York bookstores, he managed on a dollar a day."

I could do the two meals a day thing, but the bravely resisting bookstores thing might be a problem!

"The world is made of marble and mud."

The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

My favorite comes from the end of Life of Pi when Pi has asked Mr. Okamoto and Mr. Chiba which version of the story they prefer, with the animals or without. Okamoto and Chiba reply that the animal story was the better story.
"Pi Patel: Thank you. And so it goes with God."

Another is from Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale. "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum." Translated: "Don't let the bastards grind you down."

LOVE reading all of the fav quotes!

I am not all that far into My Antonia, but the prose is lovely, particularly to me having grown up in and attended undergraduate in the Midwest. Cather captures the subtle, yet powerful beauty which is difficult to appreciate when just traveling through:

"There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made."

"As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, as of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed somehow to be running."

"I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep."

"Waste no tears on me. I didn't come along too early. I was right on time." - Buck O'Neil

I'm not sure where or when Mr. O'Neil first said that but I recently read it in Shades of Glory.

Oh, it looks like his autobiography is titled I Was Right on Time.

This line just jumped right out at me when I read it last night - I'm not sure why it tickles me so much:

"... there's God, and there's girl trouble. It doesn't do anyone any good to confuse the two."

The Monk Downstairs by Tim Farrington

"In the lives of mortals, the best days are the first to flee."

My Antonia by Willa Cather

"The dynasty itself exploded for a myriad of stupidly brilliant reasons. Simply, it somehow stumbled upon a perfect, and yet altogether not random, chemicasl reaction: you take one part decent man but not enlightened ruler, one part heartbroken mother clutching for any way to save her son, two parts inbred dynasty adn gossip-obsessed court, one part Great War and three parts undeudated, worn, and hungry hepel, and BOOM what do you get? Revolution, terrible, terrible revolution, of course!"

The Kitchen Boy by Robert Alexander

>19 ellevee:, thanks to your quote I mooched it and got it today!

I like this thread.

"It's like this, Aramaki...we're dealing with one of the most extraordinary hackers in the history of cyberbrain crime. He's a puppeteer."

Ghost in the Shell by Masamune Shirow

In this sheer and craggy land, stone and forest,
dust of green stars, jungle clarity,
Mantur bursts out like a live lake
or like a new floor of silence.

The Essential Neruda by Pablo Neruda

"He felt a fine excitement, hefting a new book, fitting hand over sleek spine, seeing lines of type jitter past his thumb as he let the pages fall. he was a young man, shrewd in his fervors who knew there were books he wanted to read and others he absolutely had to own, the ones that gesture in special ways, that have a rareness or daring, a charge of heat that stains the air sound them."

"The future belongs to crowds."

"The city is a devise for measuring time."

Mao II by Don DeLillo

I just started reading Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje, so many beautiful phrases and powerful descriptions, three of my favorites (so far, I am only on page 37):

...then walk the half-mile to his cabin along with a shadow.

He felt himself gregarious in this solitude...

...the one who read so constantly and carefully she always had a frown, as if gazing at a fly on the end of her nose...

"The idea that good actions are rewarded, and bad punished, is a comforting fiction. As a child I needed to believe, and I honestly did believe, that life was like that. Even when confronted early in childhood with irrefutable evidence to the contrary, I tried to cling to the blessed and sustaining conviction that, somehow, life was fair. The literature I read told me so. I had plans to make a better life for myself, and I wasn't going to let a little thing like reality interfere."

from Little Heathens by Mildred Armstrong Kalish

This quote is from The Known World by Edward P.Jones: It is Mildred 's thoughts when her son, a freed Negro slave, tells her that he has bought himself a slave. She's going over in her mind what she has taught her son.

"Pick the berries close to the ground, son. Them the sweetest, I find. If a white man say the trees can talk, can dance, you just say yes right along, that you seen em do it plenty of times. Don't look them people in the eye. You see a white woman riding toward you, get way off the road and go stand behind a tree. The uglier the white woman, the farther you go and the broader the tree. But where,in all she taught her son, was it about thou shall own no one, havin been owned once your own self. Don't go back to Egypt after God done took you outa there."

and:

"The hitter can never be the judge. Only the receiver of the blow can tell you how hard it was, whether it would kill a man or make a baby just yawn."

#244 Thanks for posting that dancingstarfish! I love Neruda, and you just reminded me I need to read more poetry!

" When the day shall come, that we do part," he said softly, and turned to look at me, "if my last words are not 'I love you'-ye'll ken it was because I didna have time."

The Fiery Cross

Mmmmmmmmm....nice quote MDLady!

#250 *sigh* One of my favorites...

From Bibliotopia by Steven Gilbar, the Reader's Bill of Rights:

The right to not read
The right to skip pages
The right to not finish
The right to reread
The right to read anything
The right to escapism
The right to read anywhere
The right to browse
The right to read out loud
The right to not defend your tastes

from Daniel Pennac, Better than Life

Isn't that what Library Thing is all about?

I second that!

I really love that, Alcottacre!

We all need to remember that for ourselves, but even more that they are the rights of the friends we sometimes forcefully share our books with.

oh, come on... I'm not the only one that ambushes people with my "new favorite read," force them to take it, then hound them about their progress so we can talk about the book.... am I???

# 253: alcottacre

Thanks for the quote. I love it!

Ah, thekoolaidmom, you are not alone. Were it not for that fact that I loathe lending my books out because experience has taught me that they rarely return, I would still be bludgeoning friends into reading what I'm reading. As it is, I do have a rather insistent recommendation style, verging on the if-you-don't-read-this-I'll-pout kind of coercion. But the Reader's Bill of Rights rocks. I get pretty sick of having to defend my Stephen King habit, but not my Rebecca Solnit one.

thekoolaidmom, I think that my friends rejoice since I have found LibraryThing. Now I can foist my opinions and book passions on like-minded bibliophiles!

LOL, #257 Ă... I think my brother is still driving around with the book I "loaned" him three years ago that I thought was the best-book-ever. I stopped asking him about a year ago if he's read it yet...

I have one friend who reads a lot, just not as fast as me... She's the reason I've stop only reading classical literature. About six months ago, she gave me The Woods by Harlan Coben and I was hooked. Now, I'm making up for lost time and her TBR piling is growing fast, too!

It's all LibraryThing's fault. :-D

I am glad everyone liked the Reader's Bill of Rights. I knew LT was the correct place to post it and have it appreciated!

>249 jfetting:, you're welcome jfetting! I forget sometimes to read more poetry, but picked up the book by chance. now it sits on my desk for whenever i feel like it :)

>255 thekoolaidmom: no koolaidmom you are not alone!! I do it all the time (buying multiple copies of books just to be able to give it to different people i know..) I have yet to find someone in my life who loves reading as much as I do though! I made a new friend last week and she now talks to me about books when we hang out once and a while, its great! I'm wondering how manic she is about it though.. if i should mention Library Thing or if I'll get one of those "wait you go on a site that talks about reading/books in every possible small facet that has to do with reading and books? NERD!" looks. lol

>260 alcottacre: I think you should go post the Bill of Rights over in the Writer-Readers group...

Paraphrased from Love Over Scotland by Alexander McCall Smith:

"I cannot afford to have a romance with a pirate," she told herself. "Not at my stage of life. I just can't."

Some excerpts (not full poems) from New and Selected Poems by Larry D. Thomas

From: Amazing Grace
"Among the adults in her West Texas hamlet,
she's lived her life a closet sophisticate,
just to keep down trouble. Perhaps that's why
she rises every day before dawn for the breaking
of light so intense it's palpable; warm, amber light
savory as the brandy of aged literature
swirling in the snifter of her skull."

From: Of Ceremony
"He takes the meat and eats
to the scarlet drums
of a human heart"

From Medicus: a novel of the Roman Empire by Ruth Downie:

"Valens's letters had made Britannia sound entertaining. The islands, apparently, were bursting with six-foot warrior women and droopy-mustached, poetry-spouting fanatics who roamed the misty mountains stirrig up quarrelsome tribesmen in the guise of religion."

I laughed out loud when I read this.

"When I was campaigning for president, Billy represented our family's home in Plains, and with his independent spirit, wit, and excessive use of alcohol, he became a focus of news media attention. Once when accuse of being eccentric, he replied, "I've got one sister whi spends all her time on a motorcycle, and another who is a Holy-Roly preacher, a mother who was in the Peace Corps when she was seventy years old and my brother thinks he is going to be President of the United States. Which of our family do you think is normal?"

Jimmy Carter in his newest beek A Remarkable Mother

> 265 What a great quote about the Carter family!

I've gotone about Oxford undergrads. I'm reading Zuleika Dobson and here's probably the most famous excerpt:

"You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men. If a man were not a gregarious animal, the world might have achieved, by this time, some real progress towards civilization. Segregate him and he is no fool. But let him loose among his fellows, and he is lost - he becomes just an unit in unreason."

"Hyacinth bean and papayas, long vines, deep roots. Palm trees inside the garden walls, with deep roots, stand a thousand years."

These words describe the relationship Lily yearns for with Snow Flower.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: a novel by Lisa See

From the first chapter of If On A Winter's Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino describing the process of going to the bookstore to purchase your copy of If On A Winter's Night A Traveler :

"And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too."

It made me laugh. It's like he was in my head the last time I was in a bookstore.

Then Jamie's hand came down upon the dirk, snatching it away, and I saw as from a great distance that the light fell on his hand, gleaming wet with blood smeared past the wrist. Random drops shone red, dark jewels glowing, caught in the curly hairs of his arm.
"There is an oath upon her," he said to Arch, and I realized dimly that he was still speaking in Gaelic, though I understood him clearly. "She may not kill, save it is for mercy or her life. It is myself who kills for her."

A Breath of Snow and Ashes My favorite book of the series.

From The Secret History by Donna Tartt:

"There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty...but Beauty, unless she is wed to something more meaningful is always superficial. It is not that your Julian chooses solely to concentrate on certain, exalted things; it is that he chooses to ignore others equally as important."

"I think about the first time I ever saw a birch tree; about the last time I saw Julian; about the first sentence I ever learned in Greek....Beauty is harsh."

>268 jfetting:

My freshman English teacher read the first few pages of that book aloud as part of a quick overview of Italian literature and I just had to run out and buy it. I then proceeded to become completely enamored of Calvino. I just love that book.

From The Worst Journey in the World

"Looking back I realized...that those Hut Point days would prove some of the happiest in my life. Just enough to eat and keep warm, no more -- no frills nor trimmings: there is many a worse and more elaborate life. The necessaries of civilization were luxuries to us: ...the luxuries of civilization satisfy only those wants which they themselves create."

From The Pain of Confinement

"27th January '75

Slithering, sliding through the darkness in search of shadows that flit in and out of my life like seconds in the minute. Creeping, crawling along the passage in search of that which is non-existent as though i am certain of finding it. Feeling, groping, trying to assess what really is. All in the vague hope of surviving. There is a touch of reality about this fantasy so that if one tries hard enough the dream will exist..."

I read Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More Than You last year, but these lines are still in my mind:

"But everything else was gone. All the invisible things were gone."

"I stood far away from her, and she stood even farther away from me."

From a speech made in Congress by Harry Truman in 1937 when Truman was a senator, as quoted in Plain Speaking: an Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman by Merle Miller

"One of the difficulties as I see it is that we worship money instead of honor. A billionaire in our estimation is much greater in the eyes of the people than the public servant who works for the public interest.

It makes no difference if the billionaire rode to wealth on the sweat of little children and the blood of underpaid labor. . . . No one ever considers the Carnegie libraries steeped in the blood of the Homestead steel workers, but they are. We do not remember that the Rockefeller Foundation is founded on the dead miners of the Colorado Fuel Company and a dozen other performances. . . .

It is a pity that Wall Street with its ability to control all the wealth of the nation and to hire the best brains of the country has not produced some statesmen, some men who could see the dangers of bigness and of the concentration of the control of wealth. Instead of working to meet the situation, they are still employing the best law brains to serve greed and selfish interest."

Ruth: You know that's the kind of observation that shocks people.
Charles: It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.
Ruth: Write that down, you might forget it.
Charles: You underrate me.

from "Blithe Spirit" by Noel Coward

"Gossip is like water. It probes surfaces for their weak places, until it finds the breakthrough point."

Shame by Salman Rushdie

"...broadcasting to the world not only the information contained in the Ahriman scrolls but the little extra he had personally learned over five hundred years. In one gesture, he would expiate all his sins and repay every ounce of blood, every life taken, by warning mankind that the fear they harbored for the "ancient foe" ever since leaving the Garden was absolutely justified.

The Book of Common Dread by Brent Monahan

I hope I'm posting this right :S

I'm reading "Dexter in the Dark" by Jeff Lindsay. One line that just made me laugh is:

"Then 65 Doakes walked into the room, or at least 65% of him did."

"Trying to be more poetic." He grinned and twisted the fuzzy split ends of his newly blue mohawk around his fingers.
"Got a new girlfriend, she says there's not enough poetry in my views on garbage."

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow

From Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine;

Douglas saw the tennis shoes in the bright store window. He glanced quickly away, but his ankles were seized, his feet suspended, then rushed. The earth spun; the shop awnings slammed their canvas wings overhead with the thrust of his body running. His mother and father and brother walked quietly on both sides of him. Douglas walked backwards, watching the tennis shoes in the midnight window left behind.

Somehow the people who made tennis shoes knew what boys needed and wanted. They put marshmallows and coiled springs in the soles and they wove the rest out of grasses bleached and fired in the wilderness. Somewhere deep in the soft loam of the shoes the thin hard sinews of the buck deer were hidden. The people that made the shoes must have watched a lot of winds blow the trees and a lot of rivers going down to the lakes. Whatever it was, it was in the shoes, and it was summer.

From Pagan's Scribe by Catherine Jinks:

"Only because books are better than people, Father."

"Is that so?"

"Yes, it is. Because they are masters who instruct without a rod. If you approach them, they are never asleep; if you are ignorant, they never laugh; if you make mistakes, they never chide. They give to all who ask of them, and never demand payment . . . All the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion if God hadn't provided us with the remedy of books."

from The Book With No Name by Anonymous:

"It was late morning when the man they called Elvis strutted triumphantly into the Tapioca. He moved like he was jiving across a stage to the bead of 'Suspicious Minds', not just today, but always. It was as if he had an invisible set of headphones that constantly played the tune over and over in his head. Sanchez loved this guy and was kind of excited to see him. Not that he would show it. It wouldn't do to let Elvis know that he liked him. Elvis was too cool, and he'd make the bartender feel like a fool if it became obvious that Sanchez kind of - sort of - you know - idolized him.

Elvis looked cool, too. Well, he looked cool for someone who was always dressed as Elvis Presley. A lot of people think Elvis impersonators look ridiculous, a total embarrassment to themselves, but no one thought that about this guy. He reminded people of just how cool the King really was, before he wasn't"

From Winds of Fate by Mercedes Lackey:

"On the other hand, there was a feeling deep inside, connected, he now realized, with the mage-senses he seldom used, that Starblade was wrong, dead wrong. A Heartstone that badly damaged could not Heal itself, it could only get worse. And this calm they were experiencing was just a pause before things degenerated to another level."

I'm reading two books, so, from Charms for the Easy Life by Kaye Gibbons:

"Then he asked my grandmother if she thought the morphine should be discontinued. She reached up and twisted the valve shut herself. She told him to apply chaparral to the wound--a preparation he would have to acquire from her famous herbalist friend downtown. She gave him a list of other things she would want available in the hospital pharmacy, all specific for wounds: comfrey, echinacea, Saint-John's-wort, and aloe. He copied down the names of everything she needed, took five dollars out of his wallet, and sent an orderly on the errand downtown right away. Then he had iodine and bandages fetched so he could insert a proper drainage tube in the patient's leg himself, and he did so with his poplin suit on and trembling hands. He had the look of a child trying to tie his shoes correctly in spite of his mother's glaring-down eyes. And when he announced that he was finished, I turned around to see him searching my grandmother's face for approval, which she gave him with a little grunt and a nod."

From The Spanish Bow by Andromeda Romano-Lax

"Redemption came, as all things great and sorrowful did, by train"

From Little Beauties by Kim Addonizio

One thing I've noticed about Valium: it makes you happy, but also weepy. It sets you on that tightrope, and you could fall either way. Below you are the clowns, the animals dressed up to look equally ridiculous, the restless crowd. Below you, where the safety net is supposed to be, the spider is weaving away.

From The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block:

"Could there be anything more sad and more lonely than remembering what terrible things the future will bring."

"The silence meant absence and absence meant remembering, and so I made a racket."

"Into itself, the silence promised to absorb whatever I gave it: my delusions, my regrets, even the truth."

From Princess Ben by Catherine Murdock:

"Having for many decades been forced to endure ever more ridiculous tales of the circumstances surrounding my coming of age, holding my tongue through each long-winded narrative for fear that my cautious interjections would only prolong the blather, I now in the solitude of my dotage at last permit myself the indulgence of correcting the erroneous legends and embroidered falsehoods that to this day expand, heady as yeast, across the land."

From Q's Legacy by Helene Hanff:

"Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with books, I felt myself relax and I was suddenly at peace. I knew who I was and what I was doing there, and I had all day to find what I was looking for."

Je suis en train de relire Le Grand Meaulnes, un livre que j'ai lu il y a beaucoup d'années. Voici un passage qui m'impressionne singulièrement:
"Mais un homme qui a fait une fois un bond dans le paradis, comment pourrait-il s'accommoder ensuite de la vie de tout le monde? Ce qui est le bonheur des autres m'a paru dérision. Et lorsque, sincèrement, délibérément, j'ai décidé un jour de faire comme les autres, ce jour-là j'ai ramassé du remords pour longtemps... "
C'est ce que dit Meaulnes au moment quand François est au point de lui révéler qu'il a découvert Yvonne de Galais.

Tres interessant, almcnutt!

from Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson. This conversation takes places in some obscure place in the Philippines.

The priest seemed to sense Skip’s disarray. He was solicitous. “We all have a spiritual trial to go through. When I was a little boy I was very hateful toward the Jews because I said they were the crucifiers. I was very contemptuous of Judas too, because of his betrayal.”

“I see,” {Skip} Sands said, and saw nothing.

Carignan {the priest} seemed to struggle. The words stuck in his throat. He touched his mouth with his fingers. “Well, it’s very much for each person to experience alone,” he said, and whatever truth he meant to get at, his eyes were the visible scars of it.

“May I snap your picture?”

The priest suddenly looked studious and foreboding, his hands clasped together before his chest. Skip focused and tripped the shutter, and Carignan relaxed. He said, “You are something of pilgrim, eh? Me too. I went on a very long hike to the Pulangi River.”

“We can pray for each other,” Skip said.

“I don’t pray.”

“You don’t?”

“No, no, no. I don’t pray.”

From The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford:

"You see, Leonora and Edward had to talk about something during all those years. You cannot be absolutely dumb when you live with a person unless you are an inhabitant of the North of England or the State of Maine."

Byrd (DOB 1650) is married to Lucy 10 yrs his jr I think that Byrd's candid diary tells us more about the pre-revolution attitude toward women than any scholarly history.


"It was a tempestuous marriage. Lucy Park Byrd was a high-strung woman, given to tantrums. For reasons that baffled her husband, she was customarily indisposed, out of humor, melancholy, or in poor health."

"When Lucy herself was good -- or more precisely, when Byrd wanted to get back in her good graces after a quarrel -- he "rogered" or "flourished" her. A fight in the morning was followed by a "flourish" in the afternoon, and he observed on one occasion that 'the flourish was performed on the billiard table'."

"Byrd was normally up early, but when Lucy was out of sorts he stayed in bed to do a little wife-wooing. "I rogered her," he writes, "by way of reconciliation." Sex was seen as the cure for her recurring indispositions and bad humors, as when he reported that she had "a hysteric fit pretty violently which lasted about an hour." After the medication, she usually improved; as he observed, "I gave my wife a powerful flourish and gave her great ecstasy and refreshment." "


I just didn't expect Wilderness at Dawn to be this darn funny.

#294

Thanks, that's just great. I want to call people up and read it to them!

From Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides:

"Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in 'sadness', 'joy', or 'regret.' Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train car constructions like, say, 'the happiness that attends disaster'. Or: 'the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy.' I'd like to show how 'intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.' I'd like to have a word for 'the sadness inspired by failing restaurants' as well as for 'the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.' I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I entered my story, I need them more than ever."

>296 book_eater2:

I love that book. That quote is just spot on.

From Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a quote about forgiveness.

"What will you do with the misery you have chosen? Will you eat misery?"

#295. You're welcome.

From The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie:

"As soon as he fell asleep half the world started babbling in his brain telling wondrous travelers' tales....the visionary, revelatory dream-poetry of the quotidian had not yet been crushed by blinkered, prosy fact."

I say, down with blinkered, prosy fact!

From Wicked Gentlemen by Ginn Hale:

"I turned to the only other person in the waiting room with me at the moment. The office secretary looked back at me with all the charm of a halibut. I tried to study him with interest, imagining that somewhere behind his murky green eyes there might be the flicker of dark murderous longing. The secretary blinked and then returned to sorting stacks of paper on his desk. His only deep desire seemed to be for proper filing."

>282 alcottacre: Although that was my least favorite of the Pagan books, that's still a great quote! Thanks for reminding me :-)

#296

Great quote. "I don't believe in sadness..." but he is writing about emotion extremes such as sadness and joy. I think the opposite of sadness is apathy. Happiness falls somewhere inbetween. If happiness was an extreme then it wouldn't be a line like a timeline, but a three-dimensional triangle making them all equal. I just don't see it that way. "I've never has the right words to describe my life"

"...neither law, nor love, nor league of hell, nor might of the Valar, nor any power of wizardry, shall defend him from the pursuing hate of Feanor's sons, if he take or find a Silmaril and keep it. For the Silmarils we alone claim, until the world ends."

from The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien.

"...for she put forth her arts of enchantment, and caused her hair to grow to great length, and of it she wove a dark robe that wrapped her beauty like a shadow, and it was laden with a spell of sleep. Of the strands that remained she twined a rope, and she let it down from her window, and as the ends swayed above the guards that sat beneath the house, they fell into a deep slumber. Then Luthien climbed from her prison, and shrouded in her shadowy cloak she escaped from all eyes, and vanished out of Doriath."

from The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien.

From the foreword to Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety:

A certain number of people love it. They read it out loud to their husbands(or conversely their wives)...They say the book makes them feel validated and relieved. They say it reads like entries from their own journals. Some say they feel it has given them permission to be themselves.

Other people hate the book. They hate its premise. They hate its tone. They think it's whiny and self-indulgent and judgmental. The "madness" I write about, they say, is chiefly my own neuroses. Try a little attitude adjustment, they say, and things like the "New Problem That Has No Name" will simply go away.

From The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie:

"As soon as he fell asleep half the world started babbling in his brain....The visionary, revelatory dream-poetry of the quotidian had not yet been crushed by blinkered, prosy fact."

"The world is a bridge; pass over it but build no house on it."

"Who hopes for an hour hopes for an eternity. The world is an hour. What follows is unseen."

"For a woman like myself revenge is an unattainable luxury, like partridges or childhood."

"Witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits, or magic wands. Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough."

Part 3 starts a Href="here" >http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=41119"

from 'the once and future king' by t.h. white:

" but this is not my sword," said sir kay. " it was the only one i could get," said the wart. " the inn was locked." " it is a nice looking sword. where did you get it?"

Tortured for Christ by Richard Wurmbrand regarding Christian persecution in the 1940's and 1950's in communist Russia:

We Christians were sometimes forced to stand in wooden boxes only slightly larger than we were. This left no room to move. Dozens of sharp nails were driven into every side of the box, with their razor-sharp points sticking through the wood. While we stood perfectly still, it was all right. But we were forced to stand in these boxes for endless hours; when we became fatigued and swayed with tiredness, the nails would pierce our bodies. If we moved or twitched a muscle - there were the horrible nails.

What the Communists have done to Christians surpasses any possibility of human understanding. I have seen Communists whose faces while torturing believers shone with rapturous joy. They cried out while torturing the Christians, "We are the devil!"