Random Quotes: p123, para5, next 3 sentences

[Liz]

'Ow!'

'Perhaps it'd be best if you sat down and I'll look around.'

The workshop was long and, of course, low, with another small door at the far end.

 

MEN AT ARMS

Terry Pratchett

[Kylie]

My first thought was that I had ruptured an artery, and was bleeding to death, and should be discovered, later on, looking like a second Marat, as I remember seeing him in Madame Tussaud

[Guest ii]

"... An anchient family to be so driven away! Strangers filling their place!" No, except when she thought of her mother, and remembered where she had been used to sit and preside, she had no sigh of that description to heave.

 

Persuasion

Jane Austen

[pontalba]

"Now you will ask me why I stayed there. I could say, I do not know, could give ten thousand paltry reasons, all untrue, and be believed:--that I stayed for food, who could have combed ditch-banks and weed-beds, made and worked a garden as well at my own home in town as here, not to speak of neighbors, friends whose alms I might have accepted, since necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride; that I stayed for shelter, who had a roof of my own in fee simple now indeed; or that I stayed for company, who at home could have had the company of neighbors who were at least of my own kind, who had known me all my life and even longer in the sense that they thought not only as I thought but as my forbears thought, while here I had for company one woman whom, for all she was blood kin to me, I did not understand and, if what my observation warranted me to believe was true, I did not wish to understand, and another who was so foreign to me and to all that I was that we might have been not only of different races (which we were), not only of different sexes (which we were not), but of different species, speaking no language which the other understood, the very simple words with which we were forced to adjust our days to one another being even less inferential of thought or intention than the sounds which a beast and a bird might make to each other. But I don't say any of these."

 

Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner

[Kylie]

'What is going on here is a burning of books before they have been written.'

The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham

 

Pontalba, that's quite a paragraph

 

Why is this thread suddenly called 'Random Quotes: p124, para5, next 3 sentences'? Does that seem strange to anyone else? Am I missing something?

[Kell]

Why is this thread suddenly called 'Random Quotes: p124, para5, next 3 sentences'? Does that seem strange to anyone else? Am I missing something?

I changed it as that's what the random quotes challenge originally was, but folks seldom go right back to the very first post. (It's actually page 123, but I mistyped - I've corrected it now).

 

The original post said:

Grab the nearest book.

Open the book to page 123.

Find the fifth sentence.

Post the text of the next 3 sentences in a reply here, along with the title & author of the book

 

We've just had so many new members since then I thought I'd add it to the title so everyone could see it, as often it's difficult just to pick a quote from a book you're reading (I know if I was asked just to pick a quote from a book I'd struggle to think of one).

[Kylie]

Ah, thanks for clearing that up, Kell! You're right. New members probably wouldn't go back to the beginning of such a thread as this (I know I didn't!)

 

I'll keep this in mind the next time I post a quote. Usually I only post if a quote jumps out at me, such as the burning books quote I posted earlier.

[~V~]

More often than not the central French words belonged to the written medium, mainly of the fourteenth century. It has been estimated that by this date about 21 per cent of the English vocabulary derived from French, in comparison with about 9 per cent soon after the conquest. But most of these words were relatively 'exotic', belonging to the specialist discourses of church, law, chivalry (knightly behaviour) and the running of country estates.

 

English: history, diversity and change - David Graddol, Dick Leith and Joan Swann

 

(Do I get a prize for dullest quote?)

[angerball]

"I was thinking of maybe a nice Thai restaurant", I suggested.

They looked at me with that flummoxed, dead-end expression that you have to be fourteen years old to produce with conviction.

"Or perhaps an Indian?" I offered hopefully and got the same no-one-home look.

 

- Down Under by Bill Bryson

[Liz]

Was it to alter now with every mood to which he yielded? Was it to become a monstrous and loathsome thing, to be hidden away in a locked room, to be shut out from the sunlight that had so often touched to brighter gold the waving wonder of its hair? The pity of it! the pity of it!

 

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (re-read)

Oscar Wilde

[Liz]

Life is life, and kind is kind. What I wanted was to take one more magnificent trip to the West Coast and get back in time for the spring semester in school. And what a trip it turned out to be!

 

ON THE ROAD

Jack Kerouac

[nicnic]

'I found them first, and it was accidental, and I told no one, so it wasn't my fault. Roy was a boy who had no parents and lived alone. He was rarely at school and he was a cutter'

 

From a story called 'The Healer' in 'The Girl with the Flammable Skirt' by Aimee Bender

[Ratna]

'In his final messages, the ones sent by carrier pigeon, he had described the old man so that she could not mistake him when he reached Los Angeles, as Robert knew by then he would. Tall and stooped, wrapped in a long gray cloak and wearing a wide-brimmed hat, he was the personification of evil. The eyes were what you remembered, Robert wrote.'

 

Genesis of Shannara - Armageddon's Children, by Terry Brooks.

[Liz]

"My ancestor Henry VIII, for instance, wrote a book. Against heresy. That is why one is still called Defender of the Faith."

 

THE UNCOMMON READER

Alan Benntt

[rosegarden]

Philip began to perspire slightly. 'I gathered he was well known, by the people he was going to see, as an authorised representative of the earl'.

'What was his name?'

 

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

 

Carole

[angerball]

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

 

Oh, fantastic book, Rosegarden! The sequel comes out next month - can't wait!

[poppy]

'I think there's something a bit special about me, Miss Lightowler,' I said. 'I think I need to be a writer.'

 

'Don't be silly Daphne,' she said, not even looking at me again. 'You'll go to Tech and you'll be a typist.'

 

Oracles and Miracles - Stevan Eldred-Grigg

[muggle not]

Millions aree condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobodyh knows how many rebellions, besdides political rebellions, ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be veryt calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrowminded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playingon the piano and embroidering bags.

 

Jane Eyre by Charlotte bronte

[Echo]

"The bed was warm, soft, pillowy, and she turned over and felt herself sinking into the black warmth. She sighed -- and as she did so, she felt something solid and heavy on her chest, like a huge weight. A glimmer of understanding forced its way back into her consciousness: she was not in her bed after all; this was not a dream; she was truly sinking into the black bottomless depths of the North Atlantic, her lungs at their last extremity.

 

I was murdered, was the last thought that went through her mind as she drifted down, and then she sighed once again, the last of her air escaping her mouth in an eruption of silent horror more intense than the wildest cry."

 

The Wheel of Darkness by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

[Liz]

"Now he surprises you with Bonetti's attack."

But Inigo was not surprised for long. Again his feet shifted; he moved his body a different way.

 

THE PRINCESS BRIDE

William Goldman

[Kell]

Aww, Liz - that's one of my favourite books!

 

I was going to post p123, para5, 3 sentences from The Stand by Stephen King, but there's only 1/12 sentences on that page, as it's the end of the chapter! So, I shall do the same, but from page 124 instead (which actually takes me to the 1st 3 sentences on p125!):

 

"We're getting low on gas," Poke said.

"Wouldn't be if you didn't drive so hmmmin fast," Loyd said. He took a sip of his third milkshake, gagged on it, powered down the window, and threw out all the leftover cr*p, including the three milkshakes neither of them had touched.

 

In case anyone's wondering, all this is still pre-plague, and Loyd and Poke are on their killing spree...

[angerball]

"Wulfric? This is new!"

"I know. I mean, I've known him since we were small, when he used to pull my hair and run away."

 

- World Without End by Ken Follett.

[Janet]

'Deed you ain't! You never said no truer thing 'n that, you bet you.' And once he said: 'Hear him beg! and yit if we hadn't got the beat for him and tied him, he'd a killed us both.

 

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

[rosegarden]

'Ok, we didn't see one. But you could say that anything was an angel. Any girl, anyway.

 

Nick Hornby - A Long Way Down

 

Carole

[Liz]

Ridcully looked around at the side. The handle seemed to be going up and down by itself.

'I'm not having this,' he muttered, 'not in my damn university.'

 

SOUL MUSIC

Terry Pratchett