Aibu to ask for your favourite quotes from books

[Ohrobin]

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"

from Chris Paling's book Reading Allowed: True Stories and Curious Incidents from a Provincial Library

The anchorman invited the first lad to share what he’d asked the Prime Minister. The boy had asked Cameron about why he was closing libraries – or reducing their hours. ‘And what did the PM say?’ the anchorman asked. The lad reported that Cameron said that technology meant we no longer needed libraries. What he should perhaps have said was that technology means that his children and the children of his west London chums don’t need libraries.

There’d been no space for softness, for sentimentality, even for affection or laughter. - The After Wife by Cass Hunter.

‘start to notice how hard you are on yourself. This is the beginning. You need to start being more gentle.’ - Men, Money and Chocolate by Menna Van Praag

She watches on Facebook as people celebrate birthdays and go out and it seems like they really are having the time of their lives. From her phone screen they seem to sparkle. It’s as though all the life has been served up to other people and there are no scraps left for her. Or at least that’s how it feels. She doesn’t tell anyone that often she feels like a sad, matted teddy bear you might see forgotten under a bench on the underground. She just wants someone to pick her up and take her home. - The Lido by Libby Page

When she cries loudly like that she wonders whether part of her does want someone to hear: to knock on her door and scoop her up and tell her it will be OK. But no one ever does. Once she is empty of tears she lies in the dark with her eyes wide open, feeling completely numb. Eventually she falls asleep. - The Lido by Libby Page

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm
These quotes which I learnt as a 13year old explains a universal truth about politics and politicians

“Small said, "But what about when we are dead and gone, will you love me then, does love go on?"

…Large (replied) "Look at the stars, how they shine and glow, some of the stars died a long time ago. Still they shine in the evening skies, for you see…love like starlight never dies…”

― Debi Gliori, No Matter What

For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.

• C S Lewis, The Magician's Nephew

@Pursefirst beat me to it, but this sentence has always stuck with me.

"Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.”

Breaks me. Every. Single. Time.

Words in the heart cannot be taken - Pratchett - Feet of Clay, I think.

Me too longtompot .. sob...

Two of my favourites:
CS Lewis The Screwtape Letters from an older devil to the younger on how to get his human into hell. The human dies and at the moment of his death...

“He had no faintest conception till that very hour of how they would look, and even doubted their existence. But when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realized what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone, so that now he could say to them, one by one, not ‘Who are you?’ but ‘So it was you all the time.’ All that they were and said at this meeting woke memories. The dim consciousness of friends about him which had haunted his solitudes from infancy was now at last explained; that central music in every pure experience which had always just evaded memory was now at last recovered...He saw not only Them; he saw Him. This animal, this thing begotten in a bed, could look on Him. What is blinding, suffocating fire to you is now cool light to him, is clarity itself, and wears the form of a man.”

Gives me shivers every time and I'm not a Christian!

The other :
Tolkien Lord of the Rings:

It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so.

@LaurieMarlow

I first read The Member of the Wedding at school and that passage stopped me in my tracks. At that age (16?) I would have probably been trying so hard to fit in and find my place in the world but didn’t realise how fitting that passage was at the time. I spent ages trying to work out why it resonated so much!

I subsequently read more Carson McCullers ar uni and loved it all.

“Happiness [is] only real when shared”
From Into The Wild.

In this life there are those that apologise and those that do not. I am a person who says sorry if a passer-by stands on my foot."
Brother of the More Famous Jack

"There are things we know with our whole being without ever having to actively think them, at least with that verbal self-conscious prattle that chatters on the surface of our minds."
We need to talk about Kevin

"Life is like a patchwork quilt: God provides the material, but it is up to me what I make out of it."

No idea where that one comes from.

"Plan a picnic on the roof!"
I think that was advice to the bored, from Cosmopolitan magazine some time in the seventies. Called "the cheer up campaign" or something of the sort.

"Walking along with a cloud of free-floating anxiety round your head like midges."
Robert Robinson on Youth.

"Life is too short to stuff a mushroom."
Shirley Conran in Superwoman

"Anyone who has confidence in the government has the social awareness of a cockroach."
Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners

"I came away from the autopsy with a lot of material I felt I could use."
Clive Barker, but I can't remember where he wrote it.

"It is hard to knock on the door of a tent."
John Norman in one or other of the Gor books; it is probably the only thing in any of them worth remembering.

The next line....
Not all those who glitter are gold
JRR Tolkien - LotR

Sorry..., the exact words (no wish to despoil, and for all those pedants)

All that is gold does not glitter
JRR Tolkien
A different emphasis

The quote from The Poisonwood Bible on the the last baby also blew me away, literally got a spexk of dust in the corner of my eye, but then I read of Kathy's living through Heathcliffe's pain/love and I was done!

It brought me to these words:

Sleep in our eyes, her and me at the breakfast table. Barely awake, I let precious time go by. Then when she's gone there's that odd melancholy feeling and a sense of guilt I can't deny.
What happened to the wonderful adventures, the places I had planned for us to go (slipping through my fingers all the time). Well, some of that we did but most we didn't, and why I just don't know....

Taken from (slipping through my fingers - Abba).
..and now i'm broken...

Aw crap, Smother that's finished me off now

At the end of toddler group we have "chill out time" where the group leaders play a piece of music, the lights are turned down, and all the toddlers lie on the carpet while we grown ups gently waft a parachute over the top of them. Total wank, obviously, as the toddlers aren't the least bit fussed about chill out time but last week they chose "slipping through my fingers" as the chill out song. WHY WOULD THEY DO THAT!?

It's just not chill-out song...yes same, the toddlers all go to sleep/chill/relax , yeah right! Whilst DMs sit wafting and howling
How deeply relaxing

Or wafting and wailing I don't think it will catch on

Snape - 'Obviously'

The Circumlocution office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.... In short, all the business of the country went through the Circumlocution Office, except the business that never came out of it; and its name was Legion.

From Little Dorrit

AnnieAnt

Wouldn’t know where to begin with Wodehouse, almost every line eminently quotable. Underrated genius.

"Love is only as good as the lover."
The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison

And if you ever want to imagine the future, imagine a boot… no, imagine a trainer, laces trailing, kicking a pebble; imagine a stick, to poke at interesting things, and throw for a dog that may or may not decide to retrieve it; imagine a tuneless whistle, pounding some luckless popular song into insensibility; imagine a figure, half angel, half human…
Slouching hopefully towards Tadfield….
… forever. (Good Omens). Always chokes me up. Not sure why really!

Terry thought that was upbeat an upbeat ending.

Neil had read "It's a Good Life" by Jerome Bixby, and knew what he was doing.

From a teen book about the White Rose in Nazi Germany (uni students who were ultimately executed for their actions)-- can't remember book title or author

"Sophie, a little thing like this won't change the world." "I know, but it's a way of keeping the world from changing me."

I think of that every time someone begs for change in the street