He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that all human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. – Love in a Time of Cholera by Gabriel Marquez
“I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” (Rainer Maria Rilke…from Letters to a Young Poet)
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
“The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain. They set their clocks by deathwatch beetles, and thrive the centuries. They were the men with the leather-ribbon whips who sweated up the Pyramids seasoning it with other people’s salt and other people’s cracked hearts. They coursed Europe on the White Horses of the Plague. They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale. Some must have been lazing clowns, foot props for emperors, princes, and epileptic popes. Then out on the road, Gypsies in time, their populations grew as the world grew, spread, and there was more delicious variety of pain to thrive on. The train put wheels under them and here they run down the log road out of the Gothic and baroque; look at their wagons and coaches, the carving like medieval shrines, all of it stuff once drawn by horses, mules, or, maybe, men.” Something Wicked this Way Comes
Couldn’t decide which line I liked best so here is all of Invictus: Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.
I love he scene in A Tale of Two Cities with Miss Pross fighting Madame Defarge “with the vigorous tenacity of love, always so much stronger than hate…”
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leafs a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.
“Vampires perform their own miracles. They steal a hundred fresh loaves and fishes, and redistribute a few moldy slices and rotten heads. Their miracle of scarcity is genuine, you see, the vampires have no idea how they achieve this miracle. It baffles them. It angers them. It outrages them. Yet, it does not discourage them” (p. 66, “Vampire Nation” by Thomas Sipos: “vampires” = “communists”).
It dropped so low in my regard I heard it hit the ground and go to pieces on the stones at bottom of my mind. Yet blamed the fates that fractured less than I reviled myself for entertaining plated wares upon my silver shelf.
A great many books I have read always seem have something I remember. Heres one: “You don’t have to live forever, you just have to live” from Tuck Everlasting. I suggest as you live, take a book along to read.
“It was important, Dumbledore said, to fight, and fight again, and keep fighting, for only then could evil be kept at bay, though never quite eradicated…”
This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. Hamlet Act 1, scene 3, 78-80
“Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It’s splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.” ― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
There are so many but here’s one..”People disappear when they die. Their voice,their laughter, the warmth of their breath.Their flesh.Eventually their bones.All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural.Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist.We can rediscover them, their humor ,their tone of voice, their minds…all this even though they are dead…that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is by miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.” – The Thirteenth Tale ,Diane Setterfield
It was not my favorite book, but this quote from Ann Harleman’s Bitter Lake has stuck with me for years. Speaking of her daughter, the main character muses, “I thought of how she’d been at three, at six, at nine. No one warns you about the losses. No one tells you you’ll miss them, those earlier children. They disappear, but are they still there, sealed one inside the next like those little wooden Russian dolls?”
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair… Charles Dickens
I am enjoying these conversations more than any other club I have joined. I am in the process of downloading and listening to “Rebecca” on Audible based on all of recent comments of this treasure I read years ago. And, I am loving these wonderful quotes from so many other treasures.
“What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are.” -C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew
@Kim it is such a lovely start to a book. I fell in love with the characters of Cannery Row. Read Sweet Thursday next. It is a follow up to Cannery Row post WWII.
“For this is the great secret, which was known to all educated men in our day: that by what men think, we create the world around us, daily new”. Morgaine le Faye, The Mists of Avalon.
From “The Alchemist” which I just read last week because it was on the list!
Isn’t wine prohibited here?” the boy asked. “It’s not what enters men’s mouths that’s evil,” said the alchemist. “It’s what comes out of their mouths that is.
I must’ve read the book fifty times now (reading with every class every semester makes it add up fast ?). It never gets old. And, the audio is so wonderful since it’s read by Jeremy Irons. Can’t do better than that! (I’ll sometimes play part for my class and it’s always funny when a kid figures out that it’s “Scar” from the Lion King reading the book ?)
It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer. – First paragraph of Bradburys Dandelion Wine. It never gets old and I have read it every summer for 20 years now.
I can’t resist adding a second quote (the other quote was my favorite non-fiction quote…this one is my all time favorite work of fiction. It’s from “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston ❤️
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”
Don’t Panic
I collect great quotes from books. Here’s a favorite: “In war the first casualty is human dignity.” From “The Spy”, by Paulo Coelho
[:] Frankly, my dear. . . .
“I don’t give a damn” haha
He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that all human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
– Love in a Time of Cholera by Gabriel Marquez
And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.
When Huckleberry Finn days he’d rather go to hell than abandon Jim.
Scarlet, I don’t give a damn.
“Frankly , my dear, I don’t give a damn” gotta love Rhett ! haha
@Joshalyn thanks for the corrections
Hey Boo.
“I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” (Rainer Maria Rilke…from Letters to a Young Poet)
“You have been a good steward of your suffering.” Fred Buechner, “The Clown in the Belfry”
I need to ponder that one. Very deep!
This is just wonderful – I mean reading all these fabulous quotes. I love it!
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
Good, spooky book. And the Julie Harris movie version is a classic.
“The gull sees farthest who flies highest”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull
“The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain. They set their clocks by deathwatch beetles, and thrive the centuries. They were the men with the leather-ribbon whips who sweated up the Pyramids seasoning it with other people’s salt and other people’s cracked hearts. They coursed Europe on the White Horses of the Plague. They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale. Some must have been lazing clowns, foot props for emperors, princes, and epileptic popes. Then out on the road, Gypsies in time, their populations grew as the world grew, spread, and there was more delicious variety of pain to thrive on. The train put wheels under them and here they run down the log road out of the Gothic and baroque; look at their wagons and coaches, the carving like medieval shrines, all of it stuff once drawn by horses, mules, or, maybe, men.” Something Wicked this Way Comes
When in doubt, go to the Library – J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter (can’t remember which one.)
“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whispering and the champagne and the stars.” — The Great Gatsby
We loved with a love that was more than love
Couldn’t decide which line I liked best so here is all of Invictus:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
Perfection. ❤
@Kitti, right? Powerful, succinct imagery. Love it.
Love this…every time?
Thank you!
I love he scene in A Tale of Two Cities with Miss Pross fighting Madame Defarge “with the vigorous tenacity of love, always so much stronger than hate…”
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leafs a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Robert Frost via The Outsiders by S E Hinton
Favorite so far. Thank you for posting. Stay Gold.
“Vampires perform their own miracles. They steal a hundred fresh loaves and fishes, and redistribute a few moldy slices and rotten heads. Their miracle of scarcity is genuine, you see, the vampires have no idea how they achieve this miracle. It baffles them. It angers them. It outrages them. Yet, it does not discourage them” (p. 66, “Vampire Nation” by Thomas Sipos: “vampires” = “communists”).
From Edith Warton’s Age of Innocence: “The burst into the night filled with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate.”
It dropped so low in my regard I heard it hit the ground and go to pieces on the stones at bottom of my mind. Yet blamed the fates that fractured less than I reviled myself for entertaining plated wares upon my silver shelf.
Emily Dickinson
” The little boys came early to the hanging.” Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
I am reading this book right now!
I hope to read every Ken Follett book before I die!
I haven’t read the sequel yet but my friend did and said it was really good.
“how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads”?
“Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your Father’s passing.” Gets me everytime.
A great many books I have read always seem have something I remember. Heres one: “You don’t have to live forever, you just have to live” from Tuck Everlasting. I suggest as you live, take a book along to read.
Since I am reading these again, four wisdoms from Inspector Gamache : I’m sorry. I don’t know. I need help. I was wrong.”
Wonderful.
“It was important, Dumbledore said, to fight, and fight again, and keep fighting, for only then could evil be kept at bay, though never quite eradicated…”
She walks in beauty…
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man. Hamlet Act 1, scene 3, 78-80
“Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It’s splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
There are so many but here’s one..”People disappear when they die. Their voice,their laughter, the warmth of their breath.Their flesh.Eventually their bones.All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural.Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist.We can rediscover them, their humor ,their tone of voice, their minds…all this even though they are dead…that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is by miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.” – The Thirteenth Tale ,Diane Setterfield
“She seemed intent on proving she had a heart by breaking it”. The Scarlet Letter.
And just because it’s mothers day weekend…
” I love you right up to the moon – and back”
“Only Connect” E M Forster.
It was not my favorite book, but this quote from Ann Harleman’s Bitter Lake has stuck with me for years. Speaking of her daughter, the main character muses, “I thought of how she’d been at three, at six, at nine. No one warns you about the losses. No one tells you you’ll miss them, those earlier children. They disappear, but are they still there, sealed one inside the next like those little wooden Russian dolls?”
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens and Mark Twain are my favorite authors.
As you wish…
I am enjoying these conversations more than any other club I have joined. I am in the process of downloading and listening to “Rebecca” on Audible based on all of recent comments of this treasure I read years ago. And, I am loving these wonderful quotes from so many other treasures.
“What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are.” -C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew
“Being alive isn’t the same thing as living.” (Beautiful Ruins)
The first paragraph of Cannery Row by Steinbeck. It’s the most perfect paragraph ever!
Just bought this today! I’m so glad you didn’t post the quote! lol
@Kim it is such a lovely start to a book. I fell in love with the characters of Cannery Row. Read Sweet Thursday next. It is a follow up to Cannery Row post WWII.
“For this is the great secret, which was known to all educated men in our day: that by what men think, we create the world around us, daily new”. Morgaine le Faye, The Mists of Avalon.
It was the best of times – it was the worst of times! – A Tale of two cities!
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Maya Angelou
From “The Alchemist” which I just read last week because it was on the list!
Isn’t wine prohibited here?” the boy asked. “It’s not what enters men’s mouths that’s evil,” said the alchemist. “It’s what comes out of their mouths that is.
One of my favorite books to teach my Sophomores! It’s full of wonderful quotes!
I did the audiobook and it was the first time that I felt the need to use the bookmark function to hold all of those wonderful quotes in place.
I will also, of course, be picking up a copy at my next boom fair!
I must’ve read the book fifty times now (reading with every class every semester makes it add up fast ?). It never gets old. And, the audio is so wonderful since it’s read by Jeremy Irons. Can’t do better than that! (I’ll sometimes play part for my class and it’s always funny when a kid figures out that it’s “Scar” from the Lion King reading the book ?)
Also a quote from the Bible Matthew 15:11
Reader, I married him!
Jane Eyre
Awesome!
Yes!
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier.
She wrote some wonderful short stories too!
“You cannot fully grieve the loss of something you never knew.” – Leopold Aldo in Sand County Almanac.
It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed.
Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer. – First paragraph of Bradburys Dandelion Wine. It never gets old and I have read it every summer for 20 years now.
“When the day shall come, that we do part, if my last words are not I love you– ye’ll ken it was because I didna have time” – Outlander
My favorite book.
So glad you chose this one–I was thinking about it.
“What you learn for yourself, you will know forever.”
A Conspiracy of Kings, Megan Whalen Turner
I can’t resist adding a second quote (the other quote was my favorite non-fiction quote…this one is my all time favorite work of fiction. It’s from “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston ❤️
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”
“Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more.”
I’ve used this quote a few times in my life.
@Louanne , I feel like I’ve used it every day for months now.
There are days I say this to myself and then give it a shot…. I click my heels together 3 times. ?
A speech: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” – Frank Roosevelt’s inaugural address.
Love this one. I also love Winston Churchill’s many speeches, especially their finest hour speech.
Two, both by Henry David Thoreau:
“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”
“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
I also loved “I’d rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than to be crowded on a velvet cushion”. HDT
“There’s no place like home”
Baum
Good one
My favorite poem of all time is Richard Corey. I cant pick one line. Its just good all over.
“Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.” -The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon (translated by Lucia Graves)
Wise men speak when they have something to say; fools speak because they have to say something.
—Plato.