Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Quotes

Hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, this week's topic: Top Ten Favorite Quotes

1.  “Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding. Find out what you already know and you will see the way to fly.”
Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

2.  “I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once.”
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

3.  “If you can sit in silence with a person for half an hour and yet be entirely comfortable, you and that person can be friends. If you cannot, friends you'll never be and you need not waste time in trying.”
L.M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle

4.  “I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what could I tell her about those things that she didn't already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race-that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.”
Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

5.  “I remember it as October days are always remembered, cloudless, maple-flavored, the air gold and so clean it quivers.”
Leif Enger, Peace Like a River

6.  “I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright,
And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years,
Driven by the spheres,
Like a vast shadow moved, in which the world
And all her train were hurled.”
Madeleine L'Engle, A Ring of Endless Light

7.  “It had flaws, but what does that matter when it comes to matters of the heart? We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because. That's as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.”

8.  “Crowds of people moved through the streets with a dream-like violence.”
Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust

These last two I'm gonna cheat by taking multiple quotes from two awesome books:
9.  “Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.”
Patti Smith, Just Kids 

“We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity.”
Patti Smith, Just Kids 


10.  “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye 

“I am always saying "Glad to've met you" to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye 

“That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say "Holden Caulfield" on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say "Fuck you." I'm positive, in fact.”
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye   

6 comments:

  1. I love that quote from The Fault in Our Stars too. That was one of my favorites along with "My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations."

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  2. Great quotes! I loved the book Just Kids, the quotes you picked from it are wonderful.

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  3. Great picks! I loved the first J.D. Salinger quote. I so wish that, too.
    And we have a quote in common. :D

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  4. Great list! Especially love the Book Thief one...awesome book and awesome quote!

    Jennifer @ Feminist Fairy Tale Reviews
    http://feministfairytalereviews.blogspot.com/2012/05/top-ten-tuesday-23-book-quotes.html

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  5. The whole dang The Book Thief is quotable! But the one you chose is absolutely beautiful.

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  6. Oh my goodness, I have chills with the Rothfuss quote. I'm almost finished with book one, and I can't even begin to imagine what can happen between where I'm at and this quote!!

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