Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish. It’s a fun way to share thoughts about books and get to know other bloggers. This week’s topic is favorite quotations from books. It was easier than I thought to come up with these.
The first two are fairly well-known as famous final lines (1) and first lines (2) from novels, maybe even a little cliché, but I like them so I included them:
1. “So we beat on, boats against the current borne back ceaselessly into the past.” From The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” From A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
I’m still amazed at how much mileage Hemingway could get out of this line:
3. “Brett was damned good looking.” From The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
On a personal note, I was going through somewhat of a “down” time in 2009 when I read this and thought “Someone actually knows how I feel!”:
4. “Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I have deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led – make of that what you will.” From Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry
One of the more powerful lines from one of the more powerful novels I read in 2011:
5. “I pray you will grow to be a strong man in a strong country.” From Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
You have to read the whole short story to fully appreciate this line – one of the funniest lines I’ve read in a long time:
6. “My days are peaceful now, and my nights sleep deep.” From “Moon-Face” by Jack London
Since I’ve never sat down and talked to Stephen King, I don’t know for sure, but it seems like this line from one of his more recent novels sums up his view on life:
7. “…where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.” From 11/22/63 by Stephen King
I loved this variation on Lao Tse’s proverb from this brilliant book of essays on philanthropy:
8. “Give a person a fish, and we feed him for a day. Teach a person to fish, and we feed him for a lifetime. Share with a person the joy of helping others learn to fish, and we enable him to participate in a goodness that transcends any particular lifetime.” From We Make A Life By What We Give by Richard B. Gunderman
A great quote I’ve been carrying around with me for years from one of my favorite authors:
9. “…it is as important to learn the important questions as it is the important answers. It is especially important to learn the questions to which there may not be good answers. We have to learn to live with questions…” From In The Beginning by Chaim Potok
And the last one is from The Bible:
10. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known. From New American Standard Verision, 1 Corinthians 13:12
HONORABLE MENTIONS
I read this novel in both high school and college and this line always stuck with me, as well as everyone else in the classes:
11. “Mother died today. Or, maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.” From The Stranger by Albert Camus
And since my wife and daughter are huge Jane Austen fans, I’ll include this one:
12. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. From Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen