This is an immensely difficult topic to discuss. For all the books that I have read, I'm sure I like at least 2 to 3 quotes in there, so imagine choosing just 10? In all honesty, it stressed me quite a bit.
Top Ten Book Quotes I Love
Oh, the Places You'll Go! by Dr. Seuss
You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And you are the one who'll decide where to go.
"corrode", v.
I spent all this time building a relationship. Then one night I left the window open and it started to rust.
She spent her days trying to forget the sound of his voice, her nights trying to remember.
So I wait for nothing, knowing full well that I am waiting for nothing. But somehow I cannot help but wait.
And yet, out of the blue, a moment would erupt so suddenly between us that the words I longed to tell him would almost slip out of my mouth.
I learned that there is good in this world, if you look hard enough for it. I learned that not everyone is disappointing, including me.
Atonement by Ian McEwan
We go on our hands and knees and crawl towards the truth.
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
There is not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad one. Most people are somewhere in between.
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
You're mad, bonkets, completely off your head. But I'll tell you a secret. All the best people are.
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
There was a girl, and her uncle sold her. Put like that it seems so simple.
No man, proclaimed Donne, is an island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived and then by some means or other, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes- forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'll mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection) but still unique.
Without individuals we see only numbers, a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, "casualties may rise to a million." With individual stories, the statistics become people- but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, this skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children?
We draw our lines around these moments of pain, remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain.
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
A life that is, like any other, unlike any other.
And the simple truth is this: There was a girl, and her uncle sold her.
"You're mad, bonkers, completely off your head. But I'll tell you a secret. All the best people are."
ReplyDeleteHeart.
Holds such a special place in my heart.
DeleteDr. Seuss wrote so many great things.
ReplyDeleteMy post .
He really did!
DeleteThis was one of the easiest TTT topics ever for me. There are SOOO many great quotations out there to choose from. I love the ones you picked!
ReplyDeleteHappy TTT!
Thank you and yes it was more trying to decide which 10 to share!
DeleteI love that Alice in Wonderland one!
ReplyDeleteMy TTT: https://jjbookblog.wordpress.com/2020/09/29/top-ten-tuesday-283/
It honestly makes me want to go back and re-read the whole thing.
DeleteFound you from TTT. Great selection. I loved Dr. Seuss best of all -- oh, the wisdom that children's books can hold! You other quotes about the good versus bad in people... all of them rang very true. ~ Lexlingua
ReplyDeleteThank you for visiting! And I know it's written in such an innocent and simple way but holds so much meaning.
DeleteAll the Bright Places sounds like a good read.
ReplyDeleteHere is our Top Ten Tuesday.
I probably enjoyed the movie better!
DeleteI love that you included a quote from A Monster Calls. It's one of those books that if I were to mark every quote that resonated with me, then every page would be caked in ink. Just absolutely brilliant writing.
ReplyDeleteI know! I think I'm overdue for a re-read, since it's been so long. But it is a fantastically well-written story.
DeleteOhhh these are beautiful Trace! Neil Gaiman deserves a whole paragraph to be honest, it's impossible to just quote a few lines from him. One of my favourite quotes is from a book called Amped, which few have probably heard of. 'You don't pick your revolution, it picks you.' For some reason that really stuck with me.
ReplyDelete