Category: Quotes

2012 Challenges, Books, Quotes, The Classics Club

Book 105: Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell

Geoff W

Well I survived the slog. At points I honestly didn’t think I would get through the novel and really should have waited having just finished the five books of Martin’s epic saga, but I did and I didn’t. It took me nearly three weeks to read the novel (which, yes I know, isn’t a lot of time for some people – but it was never-ending for me), and they were three very long weeks.

Counting for the Back to the Classics Reading Challenge, the Tea and Books Reading Challenge and The Classics Club, I am definitely glad I read the novel (aside from the story of course) because it puts me that much closer to my yearly goals! Technically I’ve finished the Tea and Books reading challenge (my original goal was Earl Grey Aficionado, or six books) but I upgraded last month to the Sencha Connoisseur level which is eight books.

Click here to continue reading.

Quotes

Book Quote

Geoff W

Awesome Quote from the Tattered Cover Tumblr page.

The shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed, or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was in the hope that the right reader might discover it.

– Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

Quotes

Quotes from A Single Man – Christopher Isherwood

Geoff W

“With that body which sprawled stark naked, gaping wide in shameless demand, underneath Jim’s nude body? Gross in sucking vulva, sly truthless greedy flesh, in all the bloom and gloss and arrogant resilience of youth, demanding that George shall step aside, bow down and yield to the female prerogative, hide his unnatural head in shame. I am Doris. I am woman. I am Bitch. Mother. Nature. The Church and the Law and the State exist to support me. I claim my biological rights.” – 95-96

“He pictures the evening he might have spent, snugly at home, fixing the food he has bought, then lying down on the couch beside the bookcase and reading himself slowly sleepy. At first glance this is an absolutely convincing and charming scene of domestic contentment. Only after a few instants does George notice the omission that makes it meaningless. What is left out of the picture is Jim lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each others’ presence.” – 114-115

“Thinking what an absurd and universally accepted bit of nonsense it is that your best friends must necessarily be the ones who best understand you. As if there weren’t far too much understanding in the world already; above all, that understanding between lovers, celebrated in song and story, which is actually such torture that no two of them can bear it without frequent separations or fights.” – 122-123

“As for Geo, these waves are much too big for him. They seem truly tremendous, towering up, blackness unrolling itself out of blackness, mysteriously and awfully sparkling, then curing over in a thundering slap of foam which is sparked with phosphorus.” – 162

“I’m like a book you have to read. A book can’t read itself to you. It doesn’t even know what it’s about. I don’t know what I’m about.” – 176

Quotes

Quotes from You Shall Know Our Velocity – Dave Eggers

Geoff W

“They were dressed magnificently, one in the yellow of a rose, one in a rich and ancient orange, the third in a late-evening blue–three queens sitting on folding tables…” – 50

“He wants to make sure God wants him to live. So he spends a lot of time asking. He brings himself close to the edge and he feels God’s breath on his back. If God wants to take him, all he needs to do is blow.” – 72

“They were busy devoting their attention to traveling, to watching the progress of the boat–instrumental in traveling is the witnessing of passage. And I was traveling, too, I was serious about it.” – 160

“I grew up obsessed with dragons, knew everything, knew that scientists or people posing as scientists had calculated how dragons might have flown, that to fly and breathe fire they’d have to be full of hydrogen, at levels so dangerous and in such tremulous balance that– I wondered quickly if I’d give my life so that a dragon could live. If someone offered me that deal, your life for the existence of dragons. I thought maybe yes, maybe no.” – 180

“Her English was seamless. Everyone’s was. I had sixty words of Spanish and Hand had maybe twice that in French, and that was it. How had this happened? Everyone in the world knew more than us, about everything, and this I hated then found hugely comforting.” – 220

“We knew nothing; the gaps in our knowledge were random and annoying. They were potholes–they could be patched but they multiplied without pattern or remorse. And even if we knew something, had read something, were almost sure of something, we wouldn’t ever know the truth, or come anywhere close to it. The truth had to be seen. Anything else was a story, entertaining, but more embroidered fib than crude, shapeless fact.” – 238

“To travel is selfish–that money could be used for hungry stomachs and you’re using it for your hungry eyes, and the needs of the former must trump the latter, right? And are there individual needs? How much disbelief, collectively, must be suspended, to allow for tourism?” -253

“There is a corner of the sea that is deep but not so deep that it’s black. It’s the blue of a blueberry, violet in its heart, though this blue allows light through its million unseeable pores. The hue is evenly painted but electric, a klieg light pushing through a gel of cyan.” – 310

Quotes

Quotes from A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers

Geoff W

“This part concerns the unshakable feeling one gets, one thinks, after the unthinkable and unexplainable happens–the feeling that, if this person can die, and that person can die, and this can happen and that can happen…well, then, what exactly is preventing anything from happening to this person, he around whom everything else happened? If people are dying, why won’t he?” – xxxiii

“But see, my father had as much patience for religion as he did for solicitors ringing the bell.”

“His brain is my laboratory, my depository. Into it I can stuff the books I choose, the television shows, the movies, my opinions about elected officials, historical events, neighbors, passersby. He is my twenty-four-hour classroom, my captive audience, forced to ingest everything I deem worthwhile.” – 49

“I want to save everything and preserve all this but also want it all gone–can’t decide what’s more romantic, preservation or decay. Wouldn’t it be something just to burn it all? Throw it all in the street?” – 122

“We’re kissing each other but so much more, kissing like warriors saving the world, at the end of the movie, the last two, the only two who can save everything.” – 148

“It’ll be hundreds of us, all running together on the beach, a herd of bare and hopeful flesh, sprinting from left to right, of course symbolizing all the things that that would obviously symbolize.” – 177

“Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves. And it’s fleeting and incredibly mercurial. And subjective. So fuck it.” – 217

“I fear that even if it is beautiful in the abstract, that my doing it knowing that it’s beautiful and worse, knowing that I will very soon be documenting it, that in my pocket is a tape recorder but just for that purpose – that all this makes this act of potential beauty somehow gruesome.” 399-400