Jump to content

Quotes from Books


Ben

Recommended Posts

Okay, I've not seen this thread around but feel free to delete this one if there is one about. Obviously the clue to the thread is in the title. When we are reading I'm sure I'm not the only one who comes across a good quote or line from some character in a book. I thought that as we find them in the books that we are reading, we could post them here. :lol: I'll start with the one in my signature.

 

'I'm not worried, Harry,' said Dumbledore, his voice a little stronger despite the freezing water. 'I am with you.'

- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

 

Edited by Ben
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 80
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

:lol: I'll start with the one in my signature.

 

 

Me too as I love it :lol:

 

Inhale. Take in as much air as you can. This story should last about as long as you can hold your breath, and then a little bit longer. So listen as fast as you can.

 

Chuck Palahniuk - Haunted 'Guts by Saint Gut-Free'.

Edited by Nicola
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I could post so much here, but let's just settle with:

 

'I cannot express it, but surely you and every body have a notion that there is - or should be - an existence of yours beyond yourself? What were the use of my creation, if it were entirely contained here?'

 

And everything Oscar Wilde ever said. That man was a satirical genius.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

What a great thread Ben :lol:

 

'But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.'

 

~ Haruki Murakami from 'The Wind-up Bird Chronicle'

 

'Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart.'

 

~ Haruki Murakami from 'Kafka on the Shore'

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

'Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart.'

 

~ Haruki Murakami from 'Kafka on the Shore'

 

I really like this quote Gyre :lol:

 

I think my favourite quote has to be from Wuthering Heights.

 

Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss where I cannot find you! Oh God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!

 

Heathcliff's desperation is quite haunting :lol:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Wracking my brain, I know it's my birthday but I'm not even sozzled yet.:lol: I like short, snappy one-liners and Mike Ripley's full of them. So it's gonna have to be my sig. :smile2:

 

Happy birthday, honestfi. :D

 

"Let me work the dark trick, Quinn" - Lestat, Blackwood Farm by the incomparable Miss Rice. It's not a particularly meaningful quote, I know, but it's something that just stuck with me eversince I read that book. :lol:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

"Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you where or might have been was not otherwise what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise."

 

From Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, said by the Duchess. :lol:

 

 

I love it! It's one of those 'eh?' quotes where you have to think about it for a wee minute :lol:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

One of my all-time favourite quotes comes from a book I actually thought was pretty rubbish:

 

"What is normal? Normal is only ordinary; mediocre. Life belongs to the rare, exceptional individual who dares to be different."

 

It's from My Sweet Audrina by Virginia Andrews and is said by Audrina's father to Audrina when she complains about not being normal. This quote definitely helped me through my difficult teen years when I was definitely different to the other kids in my school!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Some brilliant quotes here, keep them coming. :D Kell I especially love that one and can relate to it. I'm looking for one I can put in my signature, also, so be warned of my pinching skills. :lol:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

There was a high wind blowing a new moon through the clouds billowing above the chimney tops.

- An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge

 

I just started reading this the other day and this line jumped out at me - I could just picture it perfectly. :D

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 months later...

Here is one of my favorite quotes:

 

The gentleness of a dove is something we cannot understand. Sometimes a fighter, it is not all of one color. But most of all it is moved by quiet love and a wish for simple life among the trees. And when it dies, it breaks us apart, for it never thinks of itself. But God protect it if it should die alone, and God protect it's poor family.

 

This is from the short story A Dove of the East by Mark Helprin.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This one was the first to come to mind for me, since I just wrote it down in my new journal I keep in my bag (I write it in every journal I get :welcome2:).

 

From The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield:

 

"Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs, impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole."

Link to comment
Share on other sites

"Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs, impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole."

Pretty - I want to read The Thirteenth Tale even more now. Me likes web imagery (why, I even worked it into my dissertation title, it being my main metaphor for the pattern of the Shakespearean sonnet :welcome2:!)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You can transmute love, muddle it, ignore it, but you can never pull it out of you.- A Room with a View by E.M.Forster. I think it's simply beautiful.

 

The road is the life.-On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I don't know, it just really stayed in my mind, like it reveals some great truth.

 

There are many others, but I'm not sure if I can translate them correctly...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Pretty - I want to read The Thirteenth Tale even more now. Me likes web imagery (why, I even worked it into my dissertation title, it being my main metaphor for the pattern of the Shakespearean sonnet :exc:!)

 

That sounds very intriguing, BookJumper! I loved The Thirteenth Tale :tong:. I'm anxiously awaiting anything else by Setterfield.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

That sounds very intriguing, BookJumper!
Thank you. Reweaving Shakespeare's Web: Translating the Sonnets in Theory and Practice, I do believe it was called.

(... please don't encourage me :tong: I do have this execrable tendency to foist my work onto people...)

 

Back on topic, one of my many favourites from Helene Hanff's 84 Charing Cross Road:

 

"WELL!!

All I have to say to YOU, Frank Doel, is we live in depraved, destructive and degenerate times when a bookshop - a BOOKSHOP - starts tearing up beautiful old books to use as wrapping paper... You tore that book up in the middle of a major battle and I don't even know which war it was... I want the Q anthology, ... Why don't you wrap it in pages LCXII and LCXIII so I can at least find out who won the battle and what war it was?"

Link to comment
Share on other sites

"Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me. I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all."

 

- H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

 

 

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

 

- H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

Link to comment
Share on other sites

one of my favorite quotes from any book is from Hunter Thompson's The Rum Diary.

 

"it was the tension between these two poles- a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other- that kept me going".

 

I had an inkling that you might be a Thompson fan. :tong: I am one also. But so far I've only read The Rum Diary and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I have others on my TBR pile though.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.


×
×
  • Create New...