Top Five Quotes
(from kriskabelle )
Wow, this was a really difficult one because... Well, I wasn't sure if we were going for things like literary quotes or actual social mores and Aesop's Fables kind of sayings. But I decided to go for the former. Anyway, even so, it was really difficult to narrow down the top five things I wanted to include-- so many good quotes out there from so many of my favorite novels and people! In the end, I just tried to go with self-sustaining, self-contained pieces... though I don't know that I quite succeeded. Perhaps I should have thrown in a little of Tolstoy's "all happy families are happy in the same way" or Thackeray's "revenge may be wicked, but it's natural" or some other things a bit shorter though perhaps not sweeter. In the end, however, I've a weakness for expansive things, and so, I present to you, my top five favorite quotes. Not really in a particular order, because that's too much for my feeble abilities.
"The smell of hospitals in winter, and the feeling that it's all a lot of oysters and no pearls... It's been a long December and there's reason to believe maybe this year will be better than the last." --Counting Crows, A Long December
"Before such people can act together, a kind of telepathic feeling has to flow through them and ripen to the point when they all know that they are ready to begin. Anyone who has seen the martins and swallows in September... has seen at work the current that flows (among creatures who think of themselves primarily as part of a group and only secondarily, if at all, as individuals) to fuse them together and impel them into action without conscious thought or will: has seen at work the angel which drove the First Crusade into Antioch and drives the lemmings into the sea." --Richard Adams, Watership Down
"It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together." --Jeffery Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
"He had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth." -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
"You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself." --Paul Varjack (character), Truman Capote (writer), Breakfast at Tiffany's
Wow, this was a really difficult one because... Well, I wasn't sure if we were going for things like literary quotes or actual social mores and Aesop's Fables kind of sayings. But I decided to go for the former. Anyway, even so, it was really difficult to narrow down the top five things I wanted to include-- so many good quotes out there from so many of my favorite novels and people! In the end, I just tried to go with self-sustaining, self-contained pieces... though I don't know that I quite succeeded. Perhaps I should have thrown in a little of Tolstoy's "all happy families are happy in the same way" or Thackeray's "revenge may be wicked, but it's natural" or some other things a bit shorter though perhaps not sweeter. In the end, however, I've a weakness for expansive things, and so, I present to you, my top five favorite quotes. Not really in a particular order, because that's too much for my feeble abilities.
"The smell of hospitals in winter, and the feeling that it's all a lot of oysters and no pearls... It's been a long December and there's reason to believe maybe this year will be better than the last." --Counting Crows, A Long December
"Before such people can act together, a kind of telepathic feeling has to flow through them and ripen to the point when they all know that they are ready to begin. Anyone who has seen the martins and swallows in September... has seen at work the current that flows (among creatures who think of themselves primarily as part of a group and only secondarily, if at all, as individuals) to fuse them together and impel them into action without conscious thought or will: has seen at work the angel which drove the First Crusade into Antioch and drives the lemmings into the sea." --Richard Adams, Watership Down
"It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together." --Jeffery Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
"He had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth." -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
"You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself." --Paul Varjack (character), Truman Capote (writer), Breakfast at Tiffany's