Top Ten Tuesday is a meme created by The
Broke and the Bookish. As always, I'm a day late and a dollar short - or a
week late in this case as last week's list was top ten quotes from books you
read this year. However, this week's list is actually a Thanksgiving freebie.
Therefore, I am thankful for the chance to list my quotes now (and include more
than 10 - you should have seen this list before I cut it down this far)!
Quoty Quote Quotes
2015 Style
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
“My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory
depression.”
“You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all. I mean before they came here I could stand it... But now it has changed. You can't go back, he thought. You can't go from people to nonpeople."
Fangirl
“To really be a nerd, she'd decided, you had to prefer
fictional worlds to the real one.”
The Girl with All the Gifts
“Melanie thinks: when your dreams come true, your true has
moved. You've already stopped being the person who had the dreams, so it feels
more like a weird echo of something that already happened to you a long time
ago.”
“And then like Pandora, opening the great big box of the world and not being afraid, not even caring whether what’s inside is good or bad. Because it’s both. Everything is always both. But you have to open it to find that out.”
Never Let Me Go
“I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific,
efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh,
cruel, world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her
breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and
she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go.”
The Joy Luck Club
“So this is what I will do. I will gather together my past
and look. I will see a thing that has already happened. the pain that cut my
spirit loose. I will hold that pain in my hand until it becomes hard and shiny,
more clear. And then my fierceness can come back, my golden side, my black
side. I will use this sharp pain to penetrate my daughter's tough skin and cut
her tiger spirit loose. She will fight me, because this is the nature of two
tigers. But I will win and giver her my spirit, because this is the way a
mother loves her daughter.”
Station Eleven
“WHAT WAS LOST IN THE COLLAPSE: almost everything, almost
everyone, but there is still such beauty. Twilight in the altered world, a
performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a parking lot in the mysteriously
named town of St. Deborah by the Water, Lake Michigan shining a half mile
away.”
“I've been thinking lately about immortality. What it means to be remembered, what I want to be remembered for, certain questions concerning memory and fame. I love watching old movies. I watch the faces of long-dead actors on the screen, and I think about how they'll never truly die. I know that's a cliché but it happens to be true. Not just the famous ones who everyone knows, the Clark Gables, the Ava Gardners, but the bit players, the maid carrying the tray, the butler, the cowboys in the bar, the third girl from the left in the nightclub. They're all immortal to me. First we only want to be seen, but once we're seen, that's not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.”
The Night Circus
“Prospero the Enchanter's immediate reaction upon meeting
his daughter is a simple declaration of: "Well, fuck.”
“Stories have changed, my dear boy,” the man in the grey suit says, his voice almost imperceptibly sad. “There are no more battles between good and evil, no monsters to slay, no maidens in need of rescue. Most maidens are perfectly capable of rescuing themselves in my experience, at least the ones worth something, in any case. There are no longer simple tales with quests and beasts and happy endings. The quests lack clarity of goal or path. The beasts take different forms and are difficult to recognize for what they are. And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise. Things keep overlapping and blur, your story is part of your sister’s story is part of many other stories, and there in no telling where any of them may lead. Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon, or a wolf and a scarlet-clad little girl. And is not the dragon the hero of his own story? Is not the wolf simply acting as a wolf should act? Though perhaps it is a singular wolf who goes to such lengths as to dress as a grandmother to toy with its prey.”
On Writing
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
Blue Lily, Lily Blue
“It was true that Blue was just shy of five feet and it was
also true that she hadn't eaten her greens, but she'd done the research and she
didn't think the two were related.”
“What an impossible and miraculous and hideous thing this was. An ugly plan hatched by an ugly boy now dreamt into ugly life. From dream to reality. How appropriate it was that Ronan, left to his own devices, manifested beautiful cars and beautiful birds and tenderhearted brothers, while Adam, when given the power, manifested a filthy string of perverse murders.”
The Penelopiad
“Who is to say that prayers have any effect? On the other
hand, who is to say they don't? I picture the gods, diddling around on Olympus,
wallowing in the nectar and ambrosia and the aroma of burning bones and fat,
mischievous as a pack of ten-year-olds with a sick cat to play with and a lot
of time on their hands. 'Which prayer shall we answer today?' they ask one
another. 'Let's cast the dice! Hope for this one, despair for that one, and
while we're at it, let's destroy the life of that woman over there by having
sex with her in the form of a crayfish!' I think they pull a lot of their
pranks because they're bored.”
The Darkest Part of the Forest
“Children can have a cruel, absolute sense of justice.
Children can kill monsters and feel quite proud of themselves.”
The Goldfinch
“And I add my own love to the history of people who have
loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire,
and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them
while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly
from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.”
“Because--isn't it drilled into us constantly, from childhood on, an unquestioned platitude in the culture--? From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it's a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what's right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: "Be yourself." "Follow your heart." Only here's what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted--? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight toward a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?...If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement the New York Times and brunch on Sunday, all with the promise of being somehow a better person? Or...is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?”
The Outsiders
“Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold.”
