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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

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Aibu to ask for your favourite quotes from books

226 replies

Ohrobin · 19/02/2019 20:59

Just that please!

Fav quotes from books and who wrote the book.

Cheers!

Mine is from Winnie the pooh - "how lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard"

OP posts:
BeckyButterworth · 20/02/2019 21:27

Oops, Wiggins not WiggensBlush

MissCharleyP · 20/02/2019 21:27

I left the room with silent dignity, but caught my foot in the mat.

Clawdy · 20/02/2019 21:30

MissCharleyP where is that line from?

Blompitude · 20/02/2019 21:37

Another one from Hotel du Lac:

"And then she saw Geoffrey. And then she saw, in a flash, but for all time, the totality of his mouselike seemliness."

chillipip · 20/02/2019 21:47

I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.

-Looking for Alaska - John Green

AskingQuestionsAllTheTime · 20/02/2019 21:48

"I left the room with silent dignity, but caught my foot in the mat."

Is that from Diary of a Nobody?

Becky, store it somewhere; I didn't mind typing it out once but I am not going to do it again!

.
All power corrupts, but we need electricity. (Diana Wynne Jones, Archer's Goon.)

IWouldBeSuperb · 20/02/2019 21:55

Oh, where is that from, EwItsAHooman?

EwItsAHooman · 20/02/2019 21:58

The Poisonwood Bible. My youngest DC is my last and it sums up exactly how I feel about her.

lottielady · 20/02/2019 22:00

Wodehouse on fascism:

"It is about time," I proceeded, "that some public-spirited person came along and told you where you got off. The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting 'Heil, Spode!' and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: 'Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?'

Grin
paperdreams16 · 20/02/2019 22:08

"But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing." (A.A Milne - just typing that makes me tear up!)

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life” (Jack Kerouac - On The Road)

"How wild it was, to let it be." (Cheryl Strayed - Wild)

And a recent one - "Thank you for making me shiny" from Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman. That one got me.

lottielady · 20/02/2019 22:09

“silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there,walked alone.”

Shirley Jackson.

Catquest1 · 20/02/2019 22:31

One of my favourites is from Watermelon although i cant remember it exactly but its along the lines of:

"Helen? She's missing - Presummed drunk"

Makes me chuckle every time

flitwit99 · 20/02/2019 22:43

Stay gold, Ponyboy

Makes me want to cry just reading those 3 words

JRMisOdious · 20/02/2019 22:46

A play, does that count? Oscar Maddison in The Odd Couple by Neil Simon

“I can't take it anymore, Felix, I'm cracking up. Everything you do irritates me. And when you're not here, the things I know you're gonna do when you come in irritate me. You leave me little notes on my pillow. Told you 158 times I can't stand little notes on my pillow. "We're all out of cornflakes. F.U." Took me three hours to figure out F.U. was Felix Ungar”

flitwit99 · 20/02/2019 22:47

I left the room with silent dignity, but caught my foot in the mat.

Grin
MumUnderTheMoon · 20/02/2019 23:05

"Not my daughter, you bitch" Molly Weasley, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling. Best line in all of the books, I tear up every time I read it.

WoollyMummoth · 20/02/2019 23:12

“My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Healthcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

Lucked · 20/02/2019 23:46

I also love the way John Irving writes, so many quotes from his books

“What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses”

“It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.”

“You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.”

“A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy”

And of course..

“Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England“

JaneJeffer · 21/02/2019 00:59

I loved this bit from The Sea by John Banville
"There was a time when I quite liked what I saw in the looking-glass, but not anymore. Now I’m startled, and more than startled, by the visage that so abruptly appears there, never at all the one that I expect. I have been elbowed aside by a parody of myself, a sadly dishevelled figure in a Halloween mask made of sagging, pinkish- grey rubber that bears no more than a passing resemblance to the image of what I look like that I stubbornly retain in my head."

AgnesNaismith · 21/02/2019 01:27

This passage from Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier struck me the most when I read it. I always get a sadness leaving hotels too, the whole book is a haunting tribute to memories and time -

‘Packing up. The nagging worry of departure. When shutting drawers and flinging wide an hotel wardrobe, or the impersonal shelves of a furnished villa, I am aware of sadness, of a sense of loss. Here, I say, we have lived, we have been happy. This has been ours, however brief the time. Though two nights only have been spent beneath a roof, yet we leave something of ourselves behind. Nothing material, not a hair-pin on a dressing-table, not an empty bottle of Aspirin tablets, not a handkerchief beneath a pillow, but something indefinable, a moment of our lives, a thought, a mood. This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. Today we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.‘

And since reading it - ‘last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’ gives me shivers.

mrsmuddlepies · 21/02/2019 08:01

“And again there are no words.

Words exist that can, used by a poet, achieve a dim monochrome of the body's love, but beyond that they fail clumsily.

My love flowed out to her, hers back to me. Mine stroked and soothed. Hers caressed. The distance - and the difference - between us dwindled and vanished. We could meet, mingle, and blend. Neither one of us existed any more; for a time there was a single being that was both. There was escape from the solitary cell; a brief symbiosis, sharing all the word ...”
John Wyndham, The Chrysalidss*

Kaisawheel · 21/02/2019 08:29

"Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens"

AND
"Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds it's way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory."

Both from Shadow of the Wind

Blompitude · 21/02/2019 09:37

Imagine getting a letter like this:

"I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F. W.

I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening or never.” (Captain Wentworth in Persuasion)

JaneJeffer · 21/02/2019 09:50

"Is there nothing you could take to give you present relief? A glass of wine; shall I get you one?"
Mr. Darcy. What a man!

ItsInTheSpoon · 21/02/2019 10:07

@Blompitude yes, I used to love Persuasion because of a belief that could happen in reality. I am sadder and wiser these days... and P was written by a woman, not a man. Of course I know that there are nice men, just none for me!