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jewels 09-29-2009 08:32 AM
Fabulous Book Quotes
 
Ever find yourself reading something and come upon a great line that you felt was too great not to share?

It can be funny, ironic, ridiculous or brilliant and totally out of context. Doesn't matter. This is your thread. Fiction, non-fiction, blogs. Whatever. Just be sure to credit the author and the work.

My inspiration was Chuck Palahniuk's Invisible Monsters. I'm on the final pages and still haven't decided how I feel about the book, but found some great lines in it. There were many great ones, but this just cracked me up:

"I can get us back into the States," she says. "but I'm going to need a condom and a breath mint."

Poppinjay 09-29-2009 11:21 AM
Quote:
I was to think of these days many times. Of Jem, and Dill, and Boo Radley, and Tom Robinson, and Atticus. He would be in Jem's room all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.
-Scout To Kill A Mocking Bird

levite 09-29-2009 11:25 AM
"'Torah! Torah! Torah!' -The cry of the kamikaze rabbis.'"

-From Christopher Moore's Lamb: The Gospel According To Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal.

CinnamonGirl 09-29-2009 01:50 PM
Ohhh, I love this thread :) Two for now, which happen to be two of my favorites that I can recite from memory:


"...for though she was ordinary, she possessed health, wit, courage, charm, and cheerfulness. But because she was not beautiful, no one ever seemed to notice these other qualities, which is so often the way of the world." (from The Ordinary Princess)

"Caitlin isn't someone to get over. She's someone to come to terms with, the way you have to come to terms with your parents, your siblings. You can't deny they ever happened. You can't deny you ever loved them, love them still, even if loving them causes you pain." (from Summer Sisters)

Plan9 09-29-2009 01:59 PM
Aaah, my favorite quote of all time...

Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard Bachman
Sanity: You can go through your whole life telling yourself that life is logical, life is prosaic, life is sane. Above all, sane. And I think it is. I've had a lot of time to think about it. And what I keep coming back to is Mrs. Underwood's dying declaration: So you understand that when we increase the number of variables, the axioms themselves never change.

I really believe that.

I think; therefore I am. There are hairs on my face; therefore I shave. My wife and child have been critically injured in a car crash; therefore I pray. It's all logical, it's all sane. We live in the best of all possible worlds, so hand me a Kent for my left, a Bud for my right, turn on Starsky and Hutch, and listen to that soft, harmonious note that is the universe turning smoothly on it's celestial gyros. Logic and sanity. Like Coca-Cola, it's the real thing.

But as Warner Brothers, John D. MacDonald, and Long Island Dragway know so well, there's a Mr. Hyde for every happy Jekyll face, a dark face on the other side of the mirror. The brain behind that face never heard of razors, prayers, or logic of the universe. You turn the mirror sideways and you see your face reflected with a sinister left-hand twist, half mad and half sane. The astronomers call that line between light and dark the terminator.

The other side says that the universe has all the logic of a little kid in a Halloween cowboy suit with his guts and his trick-or-treat candy spread all over a mile of Interstate 95. This is the logic of napalm, paranoia, suitcase bombs carried by happy Arabs, random carcinoma. This logic eats itself. It says life is like a monkey on a stick, it says life spins as hysterically and erratically as the penny you flick to see who buys lunch.

No one looks at that side unless they have to, and I can understand that. You look at it if you hitch a ride of with drunk in a GTO who puts it up to one-ten and starts blubbering about how his wife turned him out; you look at it if some guy decides to drive across Indiana shooting kids on bicycles; you look at it if your sister says, "I'm going down to the store for a minute, big guy" and then gets killed in a stick-up. You look at it when you hear your dad talking about slitting your mom's nose.

It's a roulette wheel, but anybody who says the game is rigged is whining. No matter how many numbers there are, the principle of the little white jittering ball never changes. Don't say it's crazy. It's all so cool and sane.

And all that weirdness isn't just going on outside. It's in you too, right now, growing in the dark like magic mushrooms. Call it the Thing in the Cellar. Call it the Blow Lunch Factor. Call it the Loony Tunes File. I think of it as my private dinosaur, huge, slimy, and mindless, stumbling around in the stinking swamp of my subconscious, never finding a tarpit big enough to hold it.

mixedmedia 09-29-2009 02:24 PM
there are so many, I wish I could remember some of them...I don't take the time to mark passages unfortunately

but there's no doubt i could find hundreds in the writings of Alice Munro alone.

pig 09-29-2009 03:02 PM
The older I get, the more I enjoy this quote:

"War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner." -— Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West)

This next one doesn't sound right from my memory, but google says it's the actual quote:

"People tend the take everything too seriously. Especially themselves. Yep. And that's probably what makes 'em scared and hurt so much of the time. Life is too serious to take that seriously." - Tom Robbins (Skinny Legs and All)

note: Bolding above is my discretion, not in the original text of the quote.

Maybe more later.

SSJTWIZTA 09-29-2009 05:31 PM
"When the bars closed at two, five of the outlaws came over to my apartment for an all-night drinking bout. The next day I learned that one was an infamous carrier of vermin, a walking crab farm. I went over my living room carefully for signs of body lice and other small animals, but found nothing. I waited nervously for about ten days, thinking he might have dropped eggs that were still incubating, but no vermin appeared. We played a lot of Bob Dylan music that night, and for a long time afterward I thought about crabs every time I heard his voice. "

noodle 09-29-2009 05:58 PM
"'You must make yourself over again,' Ernest wrote to me. 'You must cease to be. You must become another woman—and not merely in the clothes you wear, but inside your skin under the clothes. You must make yourself over again so that even I would not know you—your voice, your gestures, your mannerisms, your carriage, your walk, everything.'" Jack London, The Iron Heel

"'Everyone misbehaves,' said Eddie. 'That's nature. Everyone gets away with as much as they can get away with. And the more they can get away with, the more they will.'" Robert Rankin, Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse

ratbastid 09-29-2009 06:09 PM
Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, 'Why, why, why?'

Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land,
Man got to tell himself he understand.

- Bokonon, Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

You could pretty much do this whole thread with quotes from Cat's Cradle

amonkie 09-29-2009 06:19 PM
The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude. - The Awakening, Kate Chopin

The reality is in this head. Mine. I'm the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, and sometimes other orifices also.
--The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon

djtestudo 09-29-2009 08:20 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by levite (Post 2710039)
"'Torah! Torah! Torah!' -The cry of the kamikaze rabbis.'"

-From Christopher Moore's Lamb: The Gospel According To Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal.
I'm reading that right now. I laughed so hard at that line...

jewels 09-30-2009 03:14 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by mixedmedia (Post 2710117)
there are so many, I wish I could remember some of them...I don't take the time to mark passages unfortunately.
No marking or memory required. :p When you read a book and hit one, post it.

powerclown 10-05-2009 09:22 AM
"It didn't look. A hugeheaded bald and slobbering primate that inhabited the lower reaches of the house, familiar of the warped floorboards and the holes tacked up with foodtins hammered flat, a consort of roaches and great hairy spiders in their season, perenially benastied and afflicted with a nameless crud."

-Child of God, by Cormac McCarthy

m0rpheus 10-05-2009 08:37 PM
Quote:
"There he goes, One of God's Own Prototypes; a High-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live and too rare to die."
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

Quote:
It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Quote:
They may be called the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the Patrol. Whatever the name, their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is identical: it is, round about Chapter Three (or ten minutes into the film) to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and be slaughtered. No one ever asks them if they want to.
This book is dedicated to those fine men.
Dedication for Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

Willravel 10-05-2009 09:12 PM
Quote:
In a soundless concussion of light, Earth's core gave up its hoarded energies. For a little whole the gravitational waves crossed and re-crossed the Solar System, disturbing ever so slightly the orbits of the planets. Then the Sun's remaining children pursued their ancient paths once more, as corks floating on a placid lake ride out the tiny ripples set in motion by a falling stone.

There was nothing left of the Earth: They had leeched away the last atoms of its substance. It had nourished them, through the fierce moments of their inconceivable metamorphosis, as the food stored in a grain of wheat feeds the infant plant while it climbs toward the sun.
- Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke

CinnamonGirl 10-19-2009 08:38 PM
From one of my favorite short stories, "The Cats of San Martino":


Quote:
"You are gentle and respectful with creatures smaller than yourself," the Siamese added. "And though you're hurting, you act with honesty, humor, and resilience. All these things we find beautiful."

Frosstbyte 10-20-2009 12:47 AM
Probably the first quotation from a book I ever quoted with any frequency was:

Quote:
All we can know is that we know nothing, and that is the acme of human knowledge.
-Lev Tolsoy, War and Peace

Another favorite that quite literally got me through the bar exam is the fear litany from Frank Herbert's Dune

Quote:
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind killer.
Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over and through me.
And when it is gone, I shall turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
I'm sure I'll think of more, but those are the two off my head.

CinnamonGirl 11-01-2009 07:59 PM
From Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean:

Quote:
"Lord," said Janet, "what fools these mortals be. Did I forget to tell you I'd respect you in the morning?"

"Not exactly," said Thomas, sitting down on the end of her bed and winding his long fingers up into knots. "It did occur to me that the effect of good literature may be as dizzying as that of alcohol."

"If it is, I haven't been sober for years."

And from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, by Melissa Bank:

Quote:
Everywhere you go, you see women more beautiful than yourself. You imagine him being attracted to them.

You're drinking gasoline to stay warm.

Strange Famous 11-02-2009 11:45 AM
1 Attachment(s)
this...

roachboy 11-02-2009 12:42 PM
Quote:
And this is only the beginning; the walls in the living room will provide nowhere near enough space, particularly since his paper slips must be affixed neither too high nor too low; otherwise, every time Geiser forgets what he so carefully cut out an hour ago, he will have to climb on a chair or crouch on his heels to read his pieces of paper. This is not only laborious, it also prevents an overall review, and once already the chair has nearly capsized. Where, for example, is the information about the conjectural brain of the Neanderthal man? Instead, one finds oneself back with the drawing of the golden section. Where is the information about mutations, chromosomes, etc.? It is all so exasperating: Geiser is quite certain that there is an item somewhere about the quantum theory (as if it were not laborious enough, copying out texts full of scientific words, sometimes even two or three times in order to get them right). What belongs where? Some slips, especially the larger ones, start to curl when they have been on the wall for a while; they refuse to lie flat. That presents another difficulty. To read them, one has to use both hands. Some curl at the bottom, others at the sides. There is nothing one can do about it. Each day they curl more and more (probably because of the humidity), and there is no glue in the house; otherwise he could stick them to the wall, though that would have the added disadvantage of making it impossible for him to substitute an item when a new and more important one was discovered. The golden section, for example, is not all that important, and he can remember how many people are in the canton of Ticino, how high the Matterhorn is (4,505 meters above sea level), or when the Vikings reached Iceland. He is not so decrepit as all that. The paper slips will lie flat only if one uses four thumbtacks on each, but his supply is not large. So they will just have to curl; when one opens a window, creating a draft, the whole wall flutters and rustles.
max frisch--man in the holocene.

what a fine book. i hadn't thought of it for a long time until i stumbled across this thread.
i'm not sure this is my favorite bit from this book, or my favorite bit from amongst a range of books, but i like it lots and so there we are.

seamaiden 11-02-2009 05:03 PM
"There are various degrees of death, and time spares us none of them. Yet something endures, for which a word is needed. Soul"

Ursula K. LeGuin - The compass Rose

oliver9184 11-05-2009 08:28 AM
Quote:
"Imagine yourself surrounded by the most horrible cripples and maniacs it is possible to conceive, and you may understand a little of my feelings with these grotesque caricatures of humanity about me."
The Island of Doctor Moreau by H G Wells (1896)

fresnelly 11-05-2009 08:55 AM
I can't remember it now but in the Great Gatsby there was a quote about taking the dancefloor and sunlight on their feet that stopped me cold.

oliver9184 11-05-2009 11:04 AM
It's not just one line but...

Quote:
"Patrick you are being a lunatic," she says, shaking her head, now looking over the wine list.
"Goddamnit, Evelyn. What do you mean, being?" I say. "I fucking am one."
American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis, 1991

levite 11-05-2009 11:34 AM
"He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it."

-Moby-Dick

I just finished re-reading it. I always forget how much I love it. There are moments of absolute supremacy in that book...and then there's a twelve-chapter tangent about whale butchery.... Still, skimming over that part, it's one amazing book.

oliver9184 11-05-2009 03:01 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by levite (Post 2725321)
...and then there's a twelve-chapter tangent about whale butchery....
Isn't that the best bit?

Salem 11-18-2009 01:47 PM
Quote:
You'll always be a slave to the present because the present is more powerful than the past, no matter how long ago the present happened.
Ann-Marie MacDonald - Fall On Your Knees.

That quote stuck out to me so, so much, I think about it often. I just love it.

CinnamonGirl 11-26-2009 06:51 PM
From A Clash of Kings: "Love is a poison. A sweet poison, yes, but it will kill you all the same."

CinnamonGirl 12-14-2009 01:58 PM
I love the Velveteen Rabbit :)

Quote:
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But those things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

LordEden 12-17-2009 11:19 AM
Fight Club

Quote:
Originally Posted by Narrator
I've met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, "Why?"
Why did I cause so much pain?
Didn't I realise that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness?
Can't I see how we're all manifestations of love?
I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God's got this all wrong.
We are not speical.
We are not crap or trash, either.
We just are.
We just are, and what happens just happens.
And God says, "No, that's not right."
Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can't teach God anything.

Plan9 12-17-2009 11:29 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Stephen King
"He was a loser, you know. Every high school has to have at least two; it's like a national law. One male, one female. Everyone's dumping ground. Having a bad day? Flunked a big test? Had an argument with your folks and got grounded for the weekend? No problem. Just find one of those poor sad sacks that go scurrying around the halls like criminals before the homeroom bell and walk it right to him. And sometimes they do get killed, in every important way except the physical; sometimes they find something to hold onto and survive. Arnie had me. And then he had Christine."

CinnamonGirl 01-16-2010 10:56 AM
I was reading through old lj entries, and found this one quoted... It's from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman. I haven't read it, so I'm not sure where I stumbled onto this quotation in the first place, but rereading it made me want to go buy the series.

Quote:
Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up a whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' or 'how very perceptive' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love.

CinnamonGirl 02-17-2010 08:57 PM
Quote:
Zane shook his head. "We don't belong with them, Vin. We don't belong in their world. We belong here, in the mists."

"I belong with those who love me," Vin said.

"Love you?" Zane asked quietly. "Tell me. Do they understand you, Vin? Can they understand you? And can a man love what he doesn't understand?"

from The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson...really getting into this one.

nomcat 02-18-2010 10:19 AM
Quote:
I threw down my enemy, and he fell from the high place and broke the mountain-side where he smote it in his ruin.
I'm a Tolkien geek, and this is one of my favourite lines from LOTR.

levite 02-18-2010 12:17 PM
"Immanence and its antithesis are identical, and in a way, meaningless, for are we not taught, '...the world entire is filled with God's presence...'? He who steps forward spiritually, drawing closer to the Source, and he who falls back, retreating, are equally connected to the Blessed Creator. For the process of spiritual advancement, and the process of repentence from transgression, are two sides of the same thing, being not alterations of material being, but of inner nature. Oneself changes: the Creator is ever present."

from Sefer Me'or Enayim (Illumination for the Eyes), by Rabbi Menachem Nachum Twersky of Chernobyl (1730-1797). Translation mine.

FoolThemAll 02-18-2010 02:25 PM
Quote:
So there is no point in anyone trying to learn from me what I know I do not know - unless, perhaps, one wants to know how not to know what, as one ought to know, no one can know.
- City of God, St. Augustine

Quote:
It should worry one to see with what hypochondriac profundity a former generation of Englishmen have discovered the ambiguity at the bottom of laughter. Thus Dr. Hartley has remarked: "When laughter first manifests itself in the infant, it is an incipient cry, incited by pain, or by a feeling of pain suddenly inhibited, and recurring at brief intervals." What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?
- Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

LordEden 02-18-2010 05:36 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman - Dragonlance Chonicles

Raistlin's strange eyes stared into the southlands, barely visible between a gap in the tall mountains. The wind still blew from the south, but it was beginning to veer again. The temperature was falling. Tanis felt Raistlin's frail body shiver. Looking at him in the moonlight, Tanis was startled to see the mage's resemblance to his half-sister, Kitiara. It was a fleeting impression and gone almost as soon as it came, but it brought the woman to Tanis's mind, adding to his feelings of unrest and disquiet. He restlessly tossed a piece of bark back and forth, from hand to hand.

"What do you see to the south?" Tanis asked abruptly.

Raistlin glanced at him. "What do I ever see with these eyes of mine, Half-Elf?" the mage whispered bitterly. "I see death, death and destruction. I see war." He gestured up above. "The constellations have not returned. The Queen of Darkness is not defeated."

"We may not have won the war," Tanis began, "but surely we have won a major battle-"

Raistlin coughed and shook his head sadly.

"Do you see no hope?"

"Hope is the denial of reality. It is the carrot dangled before the draft horse to keep him plodding along in a vain attempt to reach it."

"Are you saying we should just give up?" Tanis asked, irritably tossing the bark away.

"I'm saying we should remove the carrot and walk forward with our eyes open," Raistlin answered. Coughing, he drew his robes more closely around him. "How will you fight the dragons, Tanis? For there will be more! More than you can imagine! And where now is Huma? Where now is the Dragonlance? No, Half-Elf. Do not talk to me of hope."

Tanis did not answer, nor did the mage speak again. Both sat silently, one continuing to stare south, the other glancing up into the great voids in the glittering, starlit sky.
The bold words have stuck with me for years after my 12 year old eyes read this passage.

pan6467 02-19-2010 12:28 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by fresnelly (Post 2725264)
I can't remember it now but in the Great Gatsby there was a quote about taking the dancefloor and sunlight on their feet that stopped me cold.
F Scott is my favorite author and of course Gatsby is my favorite book (probably have read it some 50 times and every time pick up something new.)

That said my favorite quote, which is the very last line of the book:

Quote:
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
There's the first sentences which I am enthralled with and have since reading it the first time, tried to remember it and live by these words:

Quote:
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
And probably the best part of the book:

Quote:
A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired."

CinnamonGirl 04-29-2010 12:21 PM
From Danny the Champion of the World:

Quote:
Most of the really exciting things we do in our lives scare us to death. They wouldn't be exciting if they didn't.


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