What’s your favorite line or paragraph you’ve ever read in a book?

From Life Of Pi: “Blesed be shock. Blessed be that which protects us from too much pain and sorrow. At the heart of life is a fusebox.” Yann Martel

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13.

It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

“Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands.” John Steinbeck, East of Eden

‘There is something comforting about the sight of strangers safe at home.’

The one I see first about not judging someone else’s life choices.

And btw, both books, Dark Ages and The Scylding are written like that. Killer dialogue. The whole story makes me think. It’s great.

“I was never so amazed in my life as when the Sniffer drew his concealed weapon from its case and struck me to the ground, stone dead.” Robertson Davies, ‘Murther and Walking Spirits.’

I’m trying but my phone is asking me to download. I already have messenger. It won’t open. I accepted your friend request.

“There was a sound of impact, a raspy, dry scream, and the vampire went down hard. It lay on the ground like a butterfly pinned to a card, arms and legs thrashing uselessly. Its chest and collarbone had been crushed. By an entire frozen turkey. A twenty-pounder. The plucked bird must have fallen from an airplane overhead, doubtlessly manipulated by the curse. By the time it got to the ground, the turkey had already reached its terminal velocity, and was still hard as a brick. The drumsticks poked up above the vampire’s crushed chest, their ends wrapped in red tinfoil. The vampire gasped and writhed a little more. The timer popped out of the turkey. Everyone stopped to blink at that for a second. I mean, come on. Impaled by a guided frozen turkey missile. Even by the standards of the quasi-immortal creatures of the night, that ain’t something you see twice.” “Blood Rites” by Jim Butcher one of my many favorite book quotes

A woman always has half an onion left over, no matter what size of the onion, the dish or the woman

All of Mutant Message down under

I get fond of people. It is quite irrational, but I get fond of them. Which is quite a different thing from the admiration and excitement of falling in love. Almost the opposite thing. They cry or they come some mental or physical cropper and hurt themselves, or they do something distressingly little and human and suddenly I find they’ve GOT me. I’m distressed. I’m filled with something between pity and an impulse of responsibility. I become tender towards them. I am impelled to take care of them. I want to ease them off, to reassure them, to make them stop hurting at any cost. I don’t see why it should be the weak and sickly and seamy side of people that grips me most, but it is. I don’t know why it should be their failures that gives them power over me, but it is.
– The secret places of the heart

The more you love, the more you can love–and the more intensely you love. Nor is there any limit on how many you can love. If a person had time enough, he could love all of that majority who are decent and just.

The student stood motionless with his hands thrust in his pockets, and did not take his eyes off the lights. He was not listening to the engineer, but was thinking, and was apparently in the mood in which one does not want to speak or to listen. After a prolonged silence he turned to me and said quietly:
“Do you know what those endless lights are like? They make me think of something long dead, that lived thousands of years ago, something like the camps of the Amalekites or the Philistines. It is as though some people of the Old Testament had pitched their camp and were waiting for morning to fight with Saul or David. All that is wanting to complete the illusion is the blare of trumpets and sentries calling to one another in some Ethiopian language.”
And, as though of design, the wind fluttered over the line and brought a sound like the clank of weapons. A silence followed. I don’t know what the engineer and the student were thinking of, but it seemed to me already that I actually saw before me something long dead and even heard the sentry talking in an unknown tongue. My imagination hastened to picture the tents, the strange people, their clothes, their armour.
“Yes,” muttered the student pensively, “once Philistines and Amalekites were living in this world, making wars, playing their part, and now no trace of them remains. So it will be with us. Now we are making a railway, are standing here philosophising, but two thousand years will pass — and of this embankment and of all those men, asleep after their hard work, not one grain of dust will remain. In reality, it’s awful!”
“You must drop those thoughts . . .” said the engineer gravely and admonishingly. “Why?”
“Because. . . . Thoughts like that are for the end of life, not for the beginning of it. You are too young for them.”
“Why so?” repeated the student.
“All these thoughts of the transitoriness, the insignificance and the aimlessness of life, of the inevitability of death, of the shadows of the grave, and so on, all such lofty thoughts, I tell you, my dear fellow, are good and natural in old age when they come as the product of years of inner travail, and are won by suffering and really are intellectual riches; for a youthful brain on the threshold of real life they are simply a calamity! A calamity!” Ananyev repeated with a wave of his hand. “To my mind it is better at your age to have no head on your shoulders at all than to think on these lines. I am speaking seriously, Baron. And I have been meaning to speak to you about it for a long time, for I noticed from the very first day of our acquaintance your partiality for these damnable ideas!”

“Today I settle all the family business” Michael Corleone, The Godfather

When the trumpets blew into the air, and the suitors stood in a line on the green grass before the King’s pavillion, Oriel drank in the winy air and stepped forward. He bowed to the King, and to the Queen. He went onto one knee before Merlis. “Lady,” he said.
Her grey eyes were cold on him. Her hair shone pale gold.
Oriel stood, to speak. “You of my heart.”
She did not smile, or show that she heard his voice
“I have sailed in the dangerous night across the sea to come before you,” Oriel said. “I have climbed the stony sides of impassable mountains, to stand here. I have endured servitude and slaughter, cruelty and cold, to come to you. Always, I have left the place I held to come to you.”
The lady Merlis was not impressed by such things, her face said.
“Lady, I would assay a dragon at your behest,” he said. “I would go without food or sleep until I had called the moon down from the sky, to please you. I would make walls with stones dug out of the earth with my bare hands, to keep you safe. I would spend every waking hour of my entire life waiting for you to smile upon me.”. . . – The Tales of the Kingdom Book 3: The Tale of Oriel by Cynthia Voigt.