Top Ten Quotes (Reprise)

The Broke and Bookish

 These are some of my favorite quotes.  

I reprised this list from one I made a few years ago.

1. "That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you onto another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It's geometrically progressive- all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment." 

---The Guernsey Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrons, pgs 11-12.

2. "When I visit the back corners of my life again after so long a time, littlest things jump out first." "Even when it stands vacant the past is never empty." 

---Whistling Season by Ivan Doig, pages 1 and 344.

3. "I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story." 

---The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, pg. 246.

4. "Remembering is a word I use for praying. Sometimes it's like waiting for music to come out of silence." 

---Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork, pg. 147.

5. "...even after fifty years it retains its aura of brimstone and taboo...what people remember isn't the book itself, so much as the furor. Ministers in church denounced it as obscene...the library was forced to remove it from the shelves...There's nothing like a shovelful of dirt to encourage literacy." 

 ---The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, p. 39.

6. "The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid." 

---Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen.

7. "...until Ammu shook her and told her to stoppit and she stoppited. Around them the hustling-jostling crowd. Scurrying hurrying buying selling luggage trundling porter paying children shitting people spitting coming going begging." 

---The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.

8. "Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering." 

---The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, pg. 11.

9. "His question caught her off-guard, and she didn't know what to do with it. The part of her that was open to the universe was facing in another direction just then." 

---Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins, p. 327.

10. "Shall we go to Bethlehem, boys, or shall we dance?"

 ---The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog by Dave Barry.

11. "I try to fend off the oceanic sadness, but I can't. It's such a colossal effort not to be haunted by what is lost, but to be enchanted by what was." 

---The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson, p.275.

12. "We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to totally suck." 

---Feed by M.T. Anderson, p. 1.

 13. "You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope." ---Captain Wentworth in Persuasion by Jane Austen