Jump to content

Quotes from Books


Ben

Recommended Posts

I didn't see a thread out there for favorite quotes from books, sorry if this is a duplicate.

 

I was just reading City of Bones by Cassandra Clare and happened across one of my favorite Shakespeare quotes:

 

"I have not slept. Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interm is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream: The Genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council; and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection."

 

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

 

Now, I have never actually read Julius Caesar, but a while ago I had written down that quote in a little notebook I keep full of them. Until now I had forgotten where it had first crossed my path, so when I picked up City of Bones this morning it was like a nice little surprise waiting on the first page. :lol:

 

What are your favorite quotes from books?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 80
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

Hey don't mean to ruin your thread or anything but I remembered making this thread a while back which I think is just the same as this one: http://bookclubforum.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=9971&highlight=Ben%27s+Quotes On another note, I love quotes in general - books, films, anything, I love them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...

One tiny little snippet from Fallen by Lauren Kate which I liked:

 

"Todd's shoulders caved forward like parantheses...' I just love the mental image that line gives me, and I don't think I'll ever be able to watch anothe person shoving their hands in their pockets without thinking of parantheses :lol:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest Eliza1

"Those eyes, and their urban severity . . . Like the desolating gaiety of a fundless paediatric hospital (Welcome to the Peter Pan Ward), or like a criminal's cream Rolls-Royce, parked at dusk between a tube station and a flower stall, the eyes of Keith Talent shone with tremendous accommodations made to money." Martin Amis - London Fields

 

It's passages like that one that made me read the book a second, a third and a fourth time. It's not cheerful but he has a skill to make even the ugly aspects of civilization seem mystical or even beautiful.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This is from Mark Helprin's Ellis Island and Other Stories.

There are so many quotes by him I love, but this one spoke to me today.

 

 

"Perhaps things are most beautiful when they are not quite real; when you look upon a scene as an outsider, and come to possess it in its entirety and forever; when you live in the present with the lucidity and feeling of memory; when, for want of connection, the world deepens and becomes art."

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This just cracked me up. It's an alien prince trying to order a drink in an English pub in a Doctor Who novel.

 

Ferran nodded, and went to order the drink. He walked up to the bar, tried to accost the serving maid, but the more obvious he made his impatience, the more the girl seemed to ignore him.

‘Fetch your master!’ he demanded.

The woman glared at him. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Not granted,’ Ferran told her. ‘Fetch your master.’

She called out, ‘Vic.’ This human was fat, jolty.

‘Can I help you, sir?’

‘Yes. A Pernod, a black, a lager. And I want to see this wench punished.'

 

Hahaha :lol:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

From Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination:

 

'Take a war to make you spend. Take a jam to make you think. Take a challenge to make you great. Rest of the time you sit around lazy, you. Pigs, you! All right, God damn you! I challenge you, me. Die or live and be great. Blow yourselves to Christ gone or come and find me, Gully Foyle, and I make you men. I make you great. I give you the stars.'

Link to comment
Share on other sites

From Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese

 

Because, Marion, you are an instrument of God. Don't leave the instrument sitting in it's case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for" Three Blind Mice" when you can play the" Gloria:)?"

 

My favourite quote at the moment

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I just came across this one in Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens:

 

"Twemlow, having no lady assigned him, goes down in the rear with his hand to his forehead. Boots and Brewer, thinking him indisposed, whisper, 'Man faint. Had no lunch.' But he is only stunned by the unvanquishable difficulty of his existence."

 

Classic Dickens!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have always loved these lines from Jane Austen's Persuasion, they're so full of pain and longing and loss..

 

Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...

Here are few I love from Tom Robbins:

 

The afternoon passed more slowly than a walnut-sized kidney stone.

Politics is for people who have a passion for changing life but lack a passion for living it.

 

There is no such thing as a weird human being. It's just that some people require more understanding than others.

 

Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have always known it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

'' I wanted to race some more but Burt said that's enough for one day. He let me hold Algernon for a minit. Algernon is a nice mouse. Soft like cotton. He blinks and when he opens his eyes their black and pink on the edges. ''

 

- Flowers for Algernon

 

I liked this part immediately as I read it, it's so warm and friendly. And it might have reminded me of myself around animals a bit :blush:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...

"There is plenty of work for love to do. Yes. There was breakfast to be made, and letters to be answered, and the problems in clients' lives to be sorted out. There was quite enough to do without worrying about the sun consuming the earth."

 

In the words of the lovely Mma Ramotswe, in "Tea time for the traditionally built" by Alexander McCall Smith

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 10 months later...

This might be an incredibley girly thing to do, but I have a file on my computer for all my favourite quotes (most of them from books) that I add to whenever I come across one that makes me pause. This doesn't happen ever so often, but that makes the ones that do even more meaningful. For instance, the last two;

 

It didn’t feel like the pain had weakened over time, rather that I’d grown strong enough to bear it.

Bella, New Moon – Stephanie Meyer

 

I realised that maybe the need to be remembered is stronger than the need to remember

Elly, When God Was a Rabbit - Sarah Winman

 

:sign0163:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Some of my favourites, which are not necessarily from books are:

 

I used to be an aetheist until I realised I am God - Deepak Chopra

 

If you stick your head in the sand all your life, all people will see is an arse ! - this one came from a fridge magnet that I picked up at our village fair

 

and

 

The man who deliberates fully before he takes a step will spend his life on one leg - Anthony De Mello

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Most of my books have page numbers noted on the front page (in pencil!) that remind me of where my favorite quotes are. I also have loads dotted about in varies documents on my computer. I used to have a wall covered in typed out quotes I'd done on the computer and stuck up in my room! All on purple and lilac paper. I'm not sure if thats a bit mad.

 

I'm completely quote obsessed. Books, tv, films, songs, anywhere...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

I have LOTS of favourite quotes. I was just thinking about how much I like Carlos Ruiz Zaphons 'The Angels Game' so here's a couple of my favourites from that...

 

"Don't be afraid of being scared. To be afraid is a sign of common sense. Only complete idiots are not afraid of anything."

 

 

"I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling."

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 year later...

Bump! This is a paraphrase of a fairy story told over 3 pages. I include all of it to provide context for my favourite quote, which is the last line in bold. The speaker has a stutter, which I've included.

 

"You know about the Daoine Sithe? They have all sorts of tricks. People who annoy them - th-they spoil everything for them. They can suck the insides out of stuff and leave it looking just the same. They suck the goodness out of everything and leave it just a h-hollow shell. When you touch it it crumbles. To dust. They do that to gold and j-jewels, cattle, houses, anything."

 

"Can they do it to people?"

 

"I don't know. There are lots of things they've ruined and people don't even know. Some people say they've done it to the whole w-world already."

 

- Island, Jane Rogers.

 

I just love that last line. How fantastically dark is that idea?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 months later...

A favorite of mine:

 

'There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.' - The Call of the Wild, Jack London

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...