Favorite quotes from books

It's been awhile since I participated in Top Ten Tuesday hosted by The Broke and The Bookish and I just couldn't pass this topic up. Below are my top ten favorite quotes from books.

"I believe that theres is one story in the world, and only one... Humans are caught - in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too - in a net of good and evil... there is no other story." - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.” -Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

"sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living." - Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

"and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in." -Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

"No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.” –George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur of think at some point, 'if this isn't nice, i don't know what is.'" – Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

"Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing." -Sylvia Plath

"No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and connive and you plan, you're not superior to sex. It's a very risky game. A man wouldn't have two-thirds of the problems he has if he didn't venture off to get fucked. It's sex that disorders our normally ordered lives." - Philip Roth, The Dying Animal

"I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live." - Johnathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

"She wanted a book to take her places that she couldn't get to herself." -Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot


photo via nose in a book

Most Quoted Books of 2011

Infographic via Media Bistro.

I read because...

Reading has always brought me pure joy. I read to encounter new worlds and new ways of looking at the world. I read to enlarge my horizons, to gain wisdom, to experience beauty, to understand myself better, and for the pure wonderment of it all. I read and marvel over how writers use language in ways I never thought of. I read for company, and for escape. Because I am incurably interested in the lives of other people, both friends and strangers, I read to meet myriad folks and enter their lives- for me, a way of vanquishing the “otherness” we all experience.

 -Nancy Pearl, Book Lust

Top Ten Favorite Book Quotes

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. This week is a rewind, a chance to go back through the archives and pick a Top Ten topic you missed. I'm not sure how I missed favorite book quotes, but here they are. It was hard for me to narrow them down to ten, but I did my best:

1. "We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say 'Oh Nothing!'" - George Eliot, Middlemarch

2. "Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love?" - Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

3. "I believe that theres is one story in the world, and only one... Humans are caught - in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too - in a net of good and evil... there is no other story." - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

4. "No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and connive and you plan, you're not superior to sex. It's a very risky game. A man wouldn't have two-thirds of the problems he has if he didn't venture off to get fucked. It's sex that disorders our normally ordered lives." - Philip Roth, The Dying Animal

5. "and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in." -Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

6. "sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living." - Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

7. "I am, to be blunt and concise, in love only with myself, my puny being with its small inadequate breasts and meager, thin talents. I am capable of affection for those who reflect my own world." - Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath

8. "Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering." - Nichole Krauss, The History of Love

9. "Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made." - Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

10. "Some of us look for the way in opium and some in God, some of us in whisky and some of us in love. It is all the same way and it leads nowhither." - W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil

Kurt Vonnegut in The Paris Review

As I finish up Slaughterhouse-Five and prepare to review it, I read a fantastic interview with Kurt Vonnegut via The Paris Review. The interview is from the 70's and details, among other things, Vonnegut's experience in WWII and what prompted him to write about it with the viewpoint that he did, an experience that he relates at the start of Slaughterhouse-Five:

I would try to write my war story, whether it was interesting or not, and try to make something out of it. I describe that process a little in the beginning ofSlaughterhouse Five; I saw it as starring John Wayne and Frank Sinatra. Finally, a girl called Mary O’Hare, the wife of a friend of mine who’d been there with me, said, “You were just children then. It’s not fair to pretend that you were men like Wayne and Sinatra, and it’s not fair to future generations, because you’re going to make war look good.” That was a very important clue to me. She freed me to write about what infants we really were: seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. We were baby-faced, and as a prisoner of war I don’t think I had to shave very often. I don’t recall that that was a problem.

Vonnegut also recalls the importance of diversity among authors, namely a diversity of background - that not every author should hold an English literature graduate degree:

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

If you get a chance I suggest you read the interview in its entirety. He explains what he believes to be the theory of writing a good story and what exactly makes a good writer. Vonnegut is truly captivating in a nonchalant, pessimistic kind of way.

April 11th marks the 4 year anniversary of Kurt Vonnegut's death. So it goes.

You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket.

"I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can’t really put a book on the Internet. Three companies have offered to put books by me on the net, and I said, ‘If you can make something that has a nice jacket, nice paper with that nice smell, then we’ll talk.’ All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don’t want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket."

-Ray Bradbury

Photo via LA Times

It is language alone...

"Bear in mind, language is man's way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone that separates him from the lower animals."

-Maya Angelou, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

What I Meant Was...

I laughed and said, "Life is easy." What I meant was, life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again. - Miranda July

Fragmentary Girl

“I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?”
-Sylvia Plath

A mind is like a parachute...

image via thingssheloves

A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it's not open. 
-Frank Zappa

They're in my head, but who knows where!

Margaret Atwood interview with The Paris Review, 1990

INTERVIEWER
Yet you write as if you’ve lived through violence.

ATWOOD
But I write as if I’ve lived a lot of things I haven’t lived. I’ve never lived with cancer. I’ve never been fat. I have different sensibilities. In my critical work I’m an eighteenth-century rationalist of some kind. In my poetry I’m not at all. There’s no way of knowing in advance what will get into your work. One collects all the shiny objects that catch the fancy—a great array of them. Some of them you think are utterly useless. I have a large collection of curios of that kind, and every once in a while I need one of them. They’re in my head, but who knows where! It’s such a jumble in there. It’s hard to find anything.

Read the entire interview at The Art of Fiction no. 121.

Is Stephen King Any Good?

"People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy... and I keep it in a jar on my desk."
-Stephen King

I read this quote on my Half Price Books calendar and it intrigued me. I haven't read any King and, given the time of the year, I am starting to wonder if I am missing out. So, my question to you, lovely readers, is if I were to pick a book, which should I start with? 

photo via the New York Times

Plodding Along with Books

Now, 75 years later, in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.

-Harper Lee

The Book That Lived

“Is the ‘book’ an object made out of paper, or is it rather a set of functions? If it’s the latter, the book isn’t dead—it’s just using various digital forms to serve the same function.”

-Leah Price, Professor of English, via Books and Bytes, The Harvard Crimson

Ebooks: The New Homewreakers

"By the end of this year, 10.3 million people are expected to own e-readers in the United States, buying about 100 million e-books, the market research company Forrester predicts. This is up from 3.7 million e-readers and 30 million e-books sold last year. The trend is wreaking havoc inside the publishing industry, but inside homes, the plot takes a personal twist as couples find themselves torn over the “right way” to read. At bedtime, a couple might sit side-by-side, one turning pages by lamplight and the other reading Caecilia font in E Ink on a Kindle or backlighted by the illuminated LCD screen of an iPad, each quietly judgmental."

-Via The New York Times "Of Two Minds About Books"

The Chicken or the Egg?

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, former editor of the New York Times Book Review, responds to the assertion that only while male authors are getting their books reviewed:

I think it reflects what's being published. Does the book review - I don't know what's being published by smaller presses that might be publishing Latino writers, for example, African-American writers. But the major houses are simply doing less diverse books in every respect because they are aiming for the bestseller list.

Listen to his entire NPR interview here.

Books Still Matter

"Is Franzen the literary world's ideal representative? Maybe not. Maybe yes. I don't think it matters. What matters is that on the cover of one of the most widely read magazines in the country, a writer is looking directly back at us, and we are being told that His. Craft. Matters. We should have no tolerance for the snipers, the agitators, the petty grievers who lament that Franzen was given this honor rather than someone else who may have been a better fit. When the day comes that writers are commonly granted the accolades and recognition they deserve, we can argue over who deserves what and why. But for now, Franzen is being lifted up for all of us. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When our culture tells us that the ignorant are to be admired, that vacuousness is the new entertainment, the battle over ebooks feels like a battle over who has to sweep the deck on the titanic. When reading and intelligence is presented as overrated or unimportant, these small quibbles seem laughable. Too few know the importance of the written word, how important letters are, how important thinkers are, how important books are.

And so here it is, in big bold letters: Great American Novelist. Whether he is comfortable with it or not, Franzen is the representative for the entirety of publishing. His cover is telling millions of people, shouting from newsstands, that writers are still the soul of our culture. That books still matter. That books still matter. And this, beyond anything, is reason to celebrate. And this, beyond anything, is a reason to be hopeful."

- Jason Pinter, "Why Should We Celebrate Johnathan Franzen? Because Books Still Matter"


If you're sick of hearing about Franzen, check out The Dork's post "The Hype Machine: Love It or Loath It"

I'm Excited About Books Because...

“Because books are still the most valuable commodities we have. Because books can transport you to a different world, or change your own perception of the one you live in. Because the notion of ‘getting lost in a good book’ transcends time, generation, and even the page itself.”

-Jason Pinter, author and literary agent, via Guy LeCharles Gonzalez "Why Books? 9 Reasons To Be Optimistic"

Friends with Death

"You've got to make friends with death. And you have to let things go. Because if you don't, then your life really is shit"

-Bret Easton Ellis via Herald.ie

Need to Read

"I don't think people read 'for' pleasure, exactly. Of course there is pleasure in reading. But mainly we do it out of need. Because we're lonely, or confused, or need to laugh, or want some kind of protection or quiet — or disturbance, or truth, or whatever."

-Lorin Stein, editor of the Paris Review, via "The Fine Art of Recommending Books" by Laura Miller