Favorite or Memorable Book Quotes

I felt like we needed a thread for favorite book quotes since we have one for song lyrics and movies.

Whether it be an entire passage from a book that hits you in some profound way or it's just a short phrase that is so beautifully put together that you have to read it more than once just to savor it, here is a thread for those quotes that you come across on your reading journeys. :)


One of my favorites (and the quote that prompted me to actually start jotting down book quotes in a journal) is from:

The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury - "Moonlit reflections trembled in the glass like schools of disturbed silver minnows."

"bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronn tuonnth
unntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!"

James Joyce
Finnegans Wake

Awesome thread idea, Amanda!

A couple of quotes from one of my favorite books, "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakob

1. “Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal—there's the trick!”

2. "Love leaped out in front of us like a murderer in an alley leaping out of nowhere, and struck us both at once."

3. “Is that vodka?" Margarita asked weakly.
The cat jumped up in his seat with indignation.
"I beg pardon, my queen," he rasped, "Would I ever allow myself to offer vodka to a lady? This is pure alcohol!"

“Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."

"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

The Call of Cthulhu

sk

"I know not whether Laws be right, Or whether Laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol Is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, A year whose days are long."

The Ballad of Reading Gaol - Oscar Wilde

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others"

Animal Farm - George Orwell

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Tommy

"bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronn tuonnth
unntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!"

James Joyce
Finnegans Wake

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:wtf: I've never read it, but I'd say that is memorable!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by RainInSpain

Awesome thread idea, Amanda!


2. "Love leaped out in front of us like a murderer in an alley leaping out of nowhere, and struck us both at once."

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I really like that . :)



Came across this while reading Hive Monkey by Gareth Powell and it made me snicker:
"Who are you calling foul-mouthed, you twat?"

“You see? Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box abd cover it with wet weeds to die?

Or one might take the tip of the pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point where a stunning realization strikes home: The pencil tip is not solid; it is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravity. Viewed at their actual size, the distances between these atoms might become league, gulfs, aeons. The atoms themselves are composed of nuclei and revolving protons and electrons. One may step down further to subatomic particles. And then to what? Tachyons? Nothing? Of course not. Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity.”

-The Man in Black, The Gunslinger

Deep, very deep.

It's one of my all time favorite exchanges between two characters ever. No lies (well, few lies), mockery or self righteousness between them - just two adversaries speaking as equals.

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Originally Posted by fernandito

“You see? Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box abd cover it with wet weeds to die?

Or one might take the tip of the pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point where a stunning realization strikes home: The pencil tip is not solid; it is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravity. Viewed at their actual size, the distances between these atoms might become league, gulfs, aeons. The atoms themselves are composed of nuclei and revolving protons and electrons. One may step down further to subatomic particles. And then to what? Tachyons? Nothing? Of course not. Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity.”

-The Man in Black, The Gunslinger

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Yes. :wub:

This is one of my favorite passages ever, as well. After all the years that have passed since first reading it, it has never left my mind.
I can never think of the vastness of the universe or the intricacies of the world we live in without thinking of this quote. :)

[QUOTE=Girlystevedave;924824]

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Tommy

"bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronn tuonnth
unntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!"

James Joyce
Finnegans Wake

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:wtf: I've never read it, but I'd say that is memorable!

I know right? That is on the first page, it's what made me buy the book. Well that and I love Joyce. Took me a year to get through (it's great for reading right before you fall asleep). Something like 80 different languages and yeah, it's something special!

:lol1:

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Originally Posted by Tommy

Took me a year to get through (it's great for reading right before you fall asleep). :

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Wow, you make it sound so....appealing.

Spoiler:

Not.

:lol:

"One must be a sea in order to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure. Listen, for I teach you the Overman. He is that sea. In Him can your great content be submerged."

--Friedrich Nietszche, Also Sprach Zarathustra

"I’m pretty much fucked.


That’s my considered opinion.


Fucked."


The Martian, Andy Weir

[QUOTE=Tommy;925488]

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Girlystevedave

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Tommy

"bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronn tuonnth
unntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!"

James Joyce
Finnegans Wake

---

:wtf: I've never read it, but I'd say that is memorable!

I know right? That is on the first page, it's what made me buy the book. Well that and I love Joyce. Took me a year to get through (it's great for reading right before you fall asleep). Something like 80 different languages and yeah, it's something special!

:lol1:

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Seriously... What is it even about? Could you decipher anything from it?

"I thought you were the Weather Man," said Milo, very confused.

"Oh no," said the little man, "I'm the Whether Man, not the Weather Man, for after all it's more important to know whether there will be weather than what the weather will be." And with that he released a dozen balloons that sailed off into the sky.

Norton Juster
The Phantom Tollbooth

So many, I'll have to look them up tomorrow. For now I'll leave it with ones I've memorized (sic).

"Man does not like to calculate his happiness, he only wishes to count his troubles."
- NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND, Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Don't miss anyone, then you'll end up missing everyone."
-CATCHER IN THE RYE, J.D. Salinger

"Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need."
-CANDIDE, Voltaire

[QUOTE=jsmcmullen92;953994]

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Tommy

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Girlystevedave

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Tommy

"bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronn tuonnth
unntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!"

James Joyce
Finnegans Wake

---

:wtf: I've never read it, but I'd say that is memorable!

I know right? That is on the first page, it's what made me buy the book. Well that and I love Joyce. Took me a year to get through (it's great for reading right before you fall asleep). Something like 80 different languages and yeah, it's something special!

:lol1:

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Seriously... What is it even about? Could you decipher anything from it?

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Some say everything, some say nothing, some say it is a dream but when you read it you know that no one really dreams like that. There are puns, jokes, cryptograms, puzzles and the names of over 100 different rivers. It's hard to explain why I like it so much because I don't really understand it, not sure if anyone does. It almost feels like an abstract, novel-length poem. Some reviews called it a dazzling failure because they thought Joyce was reaching for something but didn't achieve it. I disagree. I think it is the boldest experiment in literature to date. I think people somewhat miss the point when trying to understand what it is about. I believe it is best to just be experienced and to not get too bogged down in an explanation.

Michael Chabon wrote a nice piece about it a few years back. At one point he talks about his 11 year old son asking him what the book is about and his potential answers are pretty good but they still don't really answer the question.

"Attempting to give some other, perhaps simpler, answer to my son, I could have found support among derisive critics, cautious admirers and ardent partisans of the book for any of following alternatives:

(a) Hell if I know, kid.

(b) Nothing.

(c) Recurrence, figured through the heavy use of recurrent initials (HCE, ALP), recurrent digits (1132, 566), recurrent imagery (giants, towers, heaps and mounds), recurrent characters from jokes and literature (a Russian general who gets shot in the ass, Swift’s Vanessa), recurrent historical figures (Parnell, Napoleon, Saint Patrick), recurrent dyads (Adam and Eve, Mutt and Jeff), trinities (the Trinity), quartets (the Evangelists) and duodectets (jurors, apostles), recurrent snatches and snippets of balladry, recurrent garbled quotations from Swift, the Duke of Wellington, Mark Twain, etc.

Such recurrence is presumed to be an attribute of dreams, which thus (another, more dubious presumption, here derived from a fairly obscure Renaissance historiographer named Giambattista Vico, partial eponym of that commodius vicus that had stumped me back in Pittsburgh) becomes a metaphor for the whole of recurrent human history, from Adam and Eve to the martyred Parnell, from the Big Bang, a theory which Joyce seems vaguely to have intuited, to television, whose advent, in a novel published the same year that RCA introduced its first practical system at the New York World’s Fair, Joyce seems, nearsightedly, to have predicted.

(d) Everything, ever.

(e) Its author’s own super-cleverness, the daedalian prison in which Joyce starved his genius, having forgotten that, since a labyrinth is as hard to penetrate as to escape, most of Asterion’s intended meals must have failed to make it to the jaws and waiting belly at the labyrinth’s center.

(f) Rebellion, the style of the book constituting a colonial uprising in words, its sentences a series of blows against the empire of English, saboteur sentences that foul the reservoirs, cut the power lines, leave open the latches, throw infinite monkey wrenches into the works of the master language, which it was Joyce the Irishman’s bitter and ironic triumph to have mastered. Vandalism, revenge, the unhinged glee of insurrection.

(g) The reliable readiness of critics, doctoral candidates, and know-it-alls to enshrine difficulty for its own sake, to rise to the bait of erudite obscurity that Joyce laid for us in this, the greatest literary prank ever played (outside of revealed religion). By this accounting for Finnegans Wake—one of whose recurring figures is a deceptive tailor—the clothes have no emperor, and it is the few, not the many, who fall for the deception. As evidence for this claim are adduced numerous eyewitness accounts of Joyce’s going through the text, as with a pink semantic eraser, to efface, misspell, confound, delete, and repurpose the words of sentences that thereunto had been relatively (and thus excessively) clear and comprehensible.

(h) Joyce’s helplessness in the face of language, his glossolalia, the untrammeled riverine flow of words and wordplay in which James Joyce plunged, and swam, and drowned; the compulsive neologism that echoes, typifies, and indeed in a clinical sense accounts, genetically, for the schizophrenia—at times characterized by uncontrollable bursts of surprising and beautiful utterances—that afflicted his daughter, Lucia, and led to her eventual institutionalization.

(i) Incest, real or imagined, between father and daughter, between brother and sister; the memory of a sexual transgression (or of the wish to commit it) that the book repeatedly buries and exhumes, accuses and tries, denies and confesses, with a willing and helpless compulsion. Indeed at times the book seems to want us to understand that (not unlike Ada, whose narrator attempts to devise an entire alternate universe—a dreamland—in which incest can be an act of perfection and not of shame) its narrative has been constructed as kind of monstrous apology or rationalization for that crime or that desire."

Here is the link.

As far as what I got from it...I think I love it so because of it's audaciousness really. I felt like anything was writable after that, the sky's the limit ya know?

I still have to read Joyce. Have never seen a copy of Finnegans Wake in my life but I bought nice editions of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners.

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Originally Posted by Mattrick

I still have to read Joyce. Have never seen a copy of Finnegans Wake in my life but I bought nice editions of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners.

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I would definitely recommend those two to start with and Not Ulysses or Finnegans Wake unless you are the brave adventurous type. :) I bought my paperback copy of FW about 20 years ago at B&N and I noticed maybe about ten years ago that they stopped having it on their shelves. It was never a very heavily read book but I fear no one at all reads it any more now.

“When you fear to fail, you fear something that has not happened yet. You predict your own failure, and by inaction, lock yourself into it.”
― Robin Hobb, Ship of Destiny

“We can only learn so much and live.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal