Favourite book quotes!

[bookbard]

I'll start . . .

"There's no butter in hell!" (Cold Comfort Farm).

I think of that whenever I burn myself. 

[MercyA]

"The library was a little old shabby place. Francie thought it was beautiful. The feeling she had about it was as good as the feeling she had about church. She pushed open the door and went in. She liked the combined smell of worn leather bindings, library paste and freshly inked stamping pads better than she liked the smell of burning incense at high mass."

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

[MercyA]

"I was beginning to learn about the farmers and what I found I liked. They had a toughness and a philosophical attitude which was new to me. Misfortunes which would make the city dweller want to bang his head against a wall were shrugged off with 'Aye, well, these things happen.'"

All Creatures Great and Small

[sweet2ndchance]

"A child's voice, however honest and true, is meaningless to those who've forgotten how to listen."

- Albus Dumbledore

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

[MercyA]

"In this quiet corner, the best wild flowers grow, and the first peepers are heard in the spring, even before the snow melts. Here, owls call from the treetops in the early morning, and the irreverent crows hold their noisy conventions. Here, the mother deer has her fawn, and the migrating geese come to rest. It is here that the fox is safe from the hunters.”

Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm

[MEmama]

"By January, it had always been winter"

--The Shipping News

[wathe]

“There is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats”

--Ratty

The Wind in the Willows

My canoes are named "Ratty" and "Mole"

[bookbard]

"How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks." Gaudy Night, Dorothy L Sayers.

[4kidlets4me]

"There are just some kind of men who—who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results."

To Kill A Mockingbird

 

“We'll be Friends Forever, won't we, Pooh?' asked Piglet.
Even longer,' Pooh answered.”

Winnie the Pooh

"There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

“And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on.”

The Grapes of Wrath

 

 

[Laura Corin]

'How was Anne to set all these matters to rights? She could do little more than listen patiently, soften every grievance, and excuse each to the other; give them all hints of the forbearance necessary between such near neighbours....'

Austen, Persuasion 

[Eos]

"Anything for a weird life" from the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

My family says this to each other when we find ourselves in odd circumstances. 

"...and don't let the neighbors catch you bringing in the piano" from the 6th Harry Potter book, also used by my family around odd projects or when moving large instruments.

Edited November 24, 2023 by Eos

[regentrude]

"We ourselves shall be loved for awhile and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses
of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

[marbel]

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." opening line of 100 Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez).

 

 

[wisdomandtreasures]

"It's good spelling, but it wobbles a little" from Winnie-the-Pooh. I use that one a lot for my son who has a hard time with spelling. 😉

"What fools these mortals be!"

"For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn." Quoted quite often and with some words replaced. My 14yo son recently vacuumed up a spider for me and walked away saying, "For what do we live but to kill spiders for our mothers?" 😄

[Jaybee]

Gonna ramp this up a bit with a quote from Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things that Go:

"Homer drove his tractor into the pond. That wasn't very smart, Homer!"

The last sentence of which can often be heard coming from my mouth while driving down the road trying to avoid people's recklessness.

[El...]

"What do they teach them at these schools?" CS Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe 

"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore? But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God - so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!" Melville, Moby Dick

[KatieJ]

“ Young man, I’ll give you one more chance.”

From 500 hats of Barthlomew Cubbins

Favorite book of all 13 grandkids, during Dr Suess  story time at my house, during which we all donned Dr Suess socks. 

[stephanier.1765]

"Listening to someone, truly listening, is the greatest way we can show our love."

-Jeff Wheeler from his book, The Hunted.

[Kassia]

“It's come at last," she thought, "the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache. When there wasn't enough food in the house you pretended that you weren't hungry so they could have more. In the cold of a winter's night you got up and put your blanket on their bed so they wouldn't be cold. You'd kill anyone who tried to harm them - I tried my best to kill that man in the hallway. Then one sunny day, they walk out in all innocence and they walk right into the grief that you'd give your life to spare them from.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

 

“Look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

 

“and yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had love and been loved back. she was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. a mother. a person of consequence at last.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

Edited November 25, 2023 by Kassia

[Kalmia]

"There was an elegant ingenuity displayed in the form of pies which delighted my heart." –– Sarah Orne Jewett

"... geese are friends with no one, they badmouth everybody and everything. But they are companionable once you get used to their ingratitude and false accusations." –– E. B. White

"It isn't often that Aunt Dahlia lets her angry passions rise, but when she does, strong men climb trees and pull them up after them." –– P. G. Wodehouse

[Miss Tick]

"I was rather literally in college ... and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the 'well-rounded man.'"

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby this was the refrain in my head as I helped my well-rounded Seniors apply to colleges that seemed to only be interested in pointy applicants.

[Carol in Cal.]

On 11/23/2023 at 5:34 PM, MEmama said:

"By January, it had always been winter"

--The Shipping News

OMG, this is so Vermont.

[Clarita]

"He looked more like a ball than a bird." - Round Robin

I've read this book a few too many times this week.

 

[Kassia]

38 minutes ago, Carol in Cal. said:

OMG, this is so Vermont.

And NE Ohio.  Winters are so long...and grey....and snowy.

Edited November 25, 2023 by Kassia

[MEmama]

33 minutes ago, Carol in Cal. said:

OMG, this is so Vermont.

Yep. Northern people will feel it.

The book is one of my favourite winter reads, in front of the stove as the snow piles up outside and the world outside has been reduced to black and white. It can't be read any other time of year for me; it's an immersive experience lol.  

[MEmama]

In full transparency I don't know where this is from or if it's a book quote at all, but if it is I love it so much I'm including here anyway 🙂 

 

[Dianthus]

Wouldn't it be dreadful if some day in our own world, at home, men start going wild inside, like the animals here, and still look like men, so that you'd never know which were which.

C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian 

[MrsMommy]

Most of mine come from The Phantom Tollbooth:

“You must never feel badly about making mistakes, as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons…but it’s not just learning things that’s important. It’s learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learns things at all that matters.” 

“That may be true, but you had the courage to try, and what you can do is often simply a matter of what you will do.”

“But it’s just as bad to live in a place where what you do see isn’t there as it is to live in one where what you don’t see is.”

"For instance, from here that looks like a bucket of water…But from an ant’s point of view it’s a vast ocean, from an elephant’s just a cool drink, and to a fish, of course, it’s home. So, you see, the way you see things depends a great deal on where you look at them from.”

“In this box are all the words I know…Most of them you will never need, some you will use constantly, but with them you may ask all the questions which have never been answered and answer all the questions which have never been asked. All the great books of the past and all the ones yet to come are made with these words. With them there is no obstacle you cannot overcome. All you must learn to do is use them well and in the right places.”

And a few from Anne of Green Gables:

“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn’t it?”

"That’s the worst of growing up, and I’m beginning to realize it. The things you wanted so much when you were a child don’t seem half so wonderful to you when you get them."

"It is ever so much easier to be good if your clothes are fashionable. At least, it is easier for me. I suppose it doesn’t make such a difference to naturally good people."

Finally, one from Little Women:

“Mothers have need of sharp eyes and discreet tongues when they have girls to manage.”