Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature/meme brought to you by the folks over at The Broke and the Bookish (the button also belongs to them). This week’s theme is your Top Ten Favorite Quotations* From Books.
I’m terrible at remembering book quotations, but here are a few culled from my memory and verified by Goodreads…
1. “History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ‘history’ it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.” –Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson
2. “Happiness is the most natural thing in the world when you have it, and the slowest, strangest, most impossible thing when you don’t.” —Partials by Dan Wells
3. “In a world where Marilyn Manson can’t shock anyone anymore, Marcus knows that wearing the Backstreet Boys T-shirt is one of the most subversive things that he– being “Krispy Kreme,” after all– can do. He thinks it’s funny. It is.” —Sloppy Firsts by Megan McCafferty
4. “To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.” —Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
5. “In a perfect world everything would be either black or white, right or wrong, and everyone would know the difference. But this isn’t a perfect world. The problem is people who think it is.” —Unwind by Neal Shusterman
6. “On Saturday mornings during deliveries, I’d practice picking out new words in Jane Eyre, sounding out the ones that needed sounding out—and I’m not lying, there were plenty. “‘A new servitude! There is something in that,’ I soliloquized.” I mean, who talks like that? Do you know how long it takes to sound out a word like soliloquized? And even after you do, you have no idea what the stupid word means except that it probably just means “said,” which is what stupid Charlotte Brontë should have said in the first place. When I delivered Mrs. Mason’s groceries, she saw that I had Jane Eyre stuck under my arm. “Oh,” she said, “that was my favorite novel in school.” “It was?” I soliloquized.” —Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt
7. “Reader, I married him.” —Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
8. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’–that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” —“Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats
Got any good quotations to share with me?
*My 10th grade English teacher had a pet peeve about using the word “quote” as a noun when that is actually the verb and “quotation” is the noun. Hence my use of the word “quotation.”