I was never an English major. I can’t discuss Sylvia Path or Kafka at length. Pride and Prejudice is my favorite Jane Austen book and I’ve been told (by lit snobs majors) that this makes me basic. *Kanye shrug* I love books!! I have fictional crushes on literary characters. I have a Kindle, but I love and use my library card like I’m trying to earn frequent flyer miles. I refuse to see a movie unless I’ve read the novel it’s based on first Basically this is me:
Back in undergrad, I started writing down some of my favorite quotes or passages from literature. I now have a few notebooks of these fantastic book quotes and I wanted to share a few with you all (with some of my commentary 🙂 ).
Memorable Book Quotes
Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. “Pooh?” he whispered. “Yes, Piglet?”
“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s hand. “I just wanted to be sure of you.” — A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh
“’Why did you do all this for me?’ he asked. ‘I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.’ ‘You have been my friend,’ replied Charlotte. ‘That in itself is a tremendous thing.’” —E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
I couldn’t pick just one quote from Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.
Sorry, not sorry.
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
“Life is going to give you just what you put in it. Put your whole heart in everything you do, and pray, then you can wait.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
I love John Green. Sue me.
“You can love someone so much… But you can never love someone as much as you miss them.”— John Green, An Abundance of Katherines
“She was beautiful, but not like those girls in the magazines.
She was beautiful, for the way she thought.
She was beautiful, for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved.
She was beautiful, for her ability to make other people smile, even if she was sad.
No, she wasn’t beautiful for something as temporary as her looks.
She was beautiful, deep down to her soul. She is beautiful.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
I’m always looking for new reads. What are some of your favorite passages or quotes from books? Leave a comment below.
I never think to log quotes when I read them in books, but my favorite song lyric is from Train: You save me and I will save the day. =)
I love Train. I saw someone who does it bullet journal style so there’s a Table of Contents and everything. I’m not that organized, but it’s cool to be able to flip through them and get some inspiration. 🙂 Thanks for reading!
-Donni
love that F Scott Fitzgerald quote! I’m always looking for inspirational quotes when I read 🙂
I used to see it (or pieces of it) all the time and then I finally read the book and figured out where it was from. Thanks for reading!!
-Donni
I’m the same way – I find them quite often but never think to write them down. Really should make it a habit.
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It’s cool to have something to flip through for inspiration, but everyone has their one process. Maybe writing them down will work for you, as well. 🙂
Donni
Love these, especially the ones from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Here’s one of my favs from Eckhart Tolle: “All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.”
I love that!! Thanks for sharing.
-Donni
I LOVE quotes! Normally I pull mine from Pinterest or make them myself – so I have no books 🙁 But I loved the ones you shared!
As long as you’re being inspired by them, I think you’re fine 🙂 Thanks for stopping by and I’m glad you liked the quotes I shared.
-Donni
I need to read more books and be sure I am getting something from them!! I need to start writing them down too.
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When I need inspiration, it’s nice to have them written down and easy to flip through, but everyone is different. 🙂 Sometimes it’s just fun to read. I definitely have guilty pleasure books, that I never write quotes down from.
-Donni
I’m such a sucker for both books and quotes! I love a good quote-they just grab you by the heart. It’s like someone else’s words said what your heart wanted to say but couldn’t find the words.
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Oh, me too! It’s so great when what you read just completely captures your feelings or experiences.
-Donni
Nice quotes. I should really pay more attention when I read.
I find that writing the quotes really makes me pay attention more :), but everyone has their own process.
-Donni
Pinning this! Reading always produces the best quotes- these are all beautiful in their own ways.
Thanks! Yes, I totally agree. Thanks for stopping by!
-Donni
One of my favorite passages from the book Mountains beyond Mountains by Tracey Kidder:
The rest of the way back was mostly a descent, but there were still some slopes to climb. I straggled up out of another ravine and as usual found Farmer waiting for me. He stood at the edge of a cliff, gazing out. I walked over to him. The view from where he stood was immense. Scrims of rain and clouds and swaths of sunlight swept across the yellow mountains in front of us and the yellow mountains beyond those mountains and over the Lac de Peligre. The scene, I realized, would have looked picturesque to me before today. So maybe I’d learned something. Not enough to suit Farmer, I suspected. Education wasn’t what he wanted to perform on the world, me included. He was after transformation.
I offered him a slightly moist candy, a Life Saver from my pocket. He took it, said, “Pineapple! Which, as you know, is my favorite,” and then went back to gazing.
He was staring out at the impounded waters of the Artibonite. They stretched off to the east and west and out of sight among the mountains. From here the amount of land the dam had drowned seemed vast. Still gazing, Farmer said, “To understand Russia, to understand Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Boston, identity politics, Sri Lanka, and Life Savers, you have to be on top of this hill.”
The list was clearly jocular. So was his tone of voice. But I had the feeling he had said something important. I thought I got it, generally. This view of drowned farmland, the result of a dam that had made his patients some of the poorest of the poor, was a lens on the world. His lens. Look through it and you’d begin to see all the world’s impoverished in their billions and the many linked causes of their misery. In any case, he seemed to think I knew exactly what he meant, and I realized, with some irritation, that I didn’t dare say anything just then, for fear of disappointing him.