Quotes you like from books

[Cimorene]

This is one of my favorites. It's why I picked the name Cimorene!

“The King and Queen did the best they could. They hired the most superior tutors and governesses to teach Cimorene all the things a princess ought to know— dancing, embroidery, drawing, and etiquette. There was a great deal of etiquette, from the proper way to curtsy before a visiting prince to how loudly it was permissible to scream when being carried off by a giant. (...)

Cimorene found it all very dull, but she pressed her lips together and learned it anyway. When she couldn’t stand it any longer, she would go down to the castle armory and bully the armsmaster into giving her a fencing lesson. As she got older, she found her regular lessons more and more boring. Consequently, the fencing lessons became more and more frequent.

When she was twelve, her father found out.

“Fencing is not proper behavior for a princess,” he told her in the gentle-but-firm tone recommended by the court philosopher.

Cimorene tilted her head to one side. “Why not?”

“It’s ... well, it’s simply not done.”

Cimorene considered. “Aren’t I a princess?”

“Yes, of course you are, my dear,” said her father with relief. He had been bracing himself for a storm of tears, which was the way his other daughters reacted to reprimands.

“Well, I fence,” Cimorene said with the air of one delivering an unshakable argument. “So it is too done by a princess.”

It's from Dealing With Dragons, Enchanted Forest Chronicles

 

[Ada Lovelace]

The quote about Cimorene's plucky spiritedness and defying of conventions reminds me in a way of this one, which is a favorite of mine from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre:

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.

These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is – I repeat it – a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them.

 

[Goodbook]

Jane Eyre..the quote I remember most from that book, aside from the opening line..

'Reader, I married him'

 

[Galatea]

Jane Eyre..the quote I remember most from that book, aside from the opening line..

'Reader, I married him'

I love that line, it's triumphant.

 

[Galatea]

One of the books that has touched me deeply is The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge. I love all her books, they are extremely sensitive.
"My dear," he said, "love, your God, is a trinity. There are three necessary prayers and they have three words each. They are these, 'Lord have mercy. Thee I adore. Into Thy hands.' Not difficult to remember. If in times of distress you hold to these you will do well."

 

[Cimorene]

“She had put despair and fear aside, as if they were garments she did not choose to wear.”
George RR Martin, Game of Thrones

 

[Galatea]

This is a poem, but I read it this summer, and it meant a lot.
"I Love You"
When April bends above me
And finds me fast asleep,
Dust need not keep the secret
A live heart died to keep.

When April tells the thrushes,
The meadow-larks will know,
And pipe the three words lightly
To all the winds that blow.

Above his roof the swallows,
In notes like far-blown rain,
Will tell the chirping sparrow
Beside his window-pane.

O sparrow, little sparrow,
When I am fast asleep,
Then tell my love the secret
That I have died to keep.
-Sara Teasdale
Not great poetry, but it means a lot.

 

[Journey.In.Grace]

"Moonlight drowns out all but the brightest stars." J.R.R Tolkien, Lord of the Rings.

 

[SweetPeach]

"That is happiness, to be dissolved into something complete and great." - My Antonia, Willa Cather

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart; I am, I am, I am.” - The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

“What are men to rocks and mountains?” - Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

“In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.” - The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank

"It’s impossible to resist the kindness of strangers. Someone who looks at you, who doesn’t know you, who tells you it’s OK, whatever you did, whatever you’ve done: you suffered, you hurt, you deserve forgiveness." - The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins

 

[Cimorene]

"The mind of man is capable of anything." Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad.

 

[Ada Lovelace]

I'm reading Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, and this quote stood out to me:
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”

 

[Galatea]

Just finished Rebel Yell: the Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson.

Complicated man, a mass of contradictions. He was a godly man who enjoyed war.

He was much loved and respected by Americans, Northern and Southern. After his death, John W. Forney, the editor of the Washington Chronicle wrote an article about Jackson "Stonewall Jackson was a great general, brave soldier, a noble Christian, and a pure man. May God throw these great virtues against the sins of a secessionist, the advocate of a great national crime." Lincoln wrote Forney immediately to compliment him on the "excellent and manly" article on Stonewall Jackson.

I think this quote demonstrates the irony that is Civil War, loving the enemies who wish to harm you. It is amazing that Northerners admired a man who was responsible for sending tens of thousands of their young men to their deaths.

Even the archabolitionist, Henry Ward Beecher wrote after Jackson's death that Jackson was "quiet, modest, brave, noble, honorable, and pure. He fought neither for reputation, nor for future personal advancement."

It is just sort of amazing.

 

[Ada Lovelace]

“I only wish the NRA and its jellyfish, well-paid supporters in legislatures both State and Federal would be careful to recite the whole of it, and then tell us how a heavily armed man, woman, or child, recruited by no official, led by no official, given no goals by any official, motivated or restrained only by his or her personality and perceptions of what is going on, can be considered a member of a well-regulated militia.”
- Kurt Vonnegut, Fates Worse Than Death

 

[Cimorene]

Lol I reading Divergent again & I like this quote
“And I'm the kind of person who does not let inconsequential things like boys and near death experiences stop her.”

 

[AudreyReid]

"I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”
-The Brothers Karamazov

“Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour ... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?”
-Jane Eyre

"Feeling . . . clamoured wildly. “Oh, comply!” it said. “. . . soothe him; save him; love him; tell him you love him and will be his. Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?” Still indomitable was the reply: “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad—as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation. . . . They have a worth—so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane—quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs.”
-Jane Eyre

". . at eighteen the true narrative of life is yet to be
commenced. Before that time we sit listening to a tale, a marvelous fiction, delightful sometimes, and sad sometimes, almost always unreal. Before that time our world is heroic, its inhabitants half-divine or semi-demon; its scenes are dreamscenes; darker woods and stranger hills, brighter skies, more dangerous waters, sweeter flowers, more tempting fruits, wider plains, drearier deserts, sunnier fields than are found in nature, overspread our enchanted globe. What a moon we gaze on before that time! How the trembling of our hearts at her aspect bears
witness to its unutterable beauty!”
-Shirley

“Graham’s thoughts of me were not entirely those of a frozen indifference, after all. I believe in that goodly mansion, his heart, he kept one little place under the skylights where Lucy might have entertainment, if she chose to call. It was not so handsome as the chambers where he lodged his male friends; it was not like the hall where he accommodated his philanthropy, or the library where he treasured his science, still less did it resemble the pavilion where his marriage feast was splendidly spread; yet, gradually, by long and equal kindness, he proved to me that he kept one little closet, over the door of which was written ‘Lucy’s Room.’ I kept a place for him too — a place of which I never took the measure, either by rule or compass: I think it was like the tent of Peri-Banou. All my life long I carried it folded in the hollow of my hand — yet, released from that hold and constriction, I knew not but its innate capacity for expanse might have magnified it into a tabernacle for a host.”
-Villette

"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
-Middlemarch

“She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.”
-The House of Mirth

"It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.”
-Of Human Bondage

 

[Cam Mach]

I know who I am, and who I may be if I choose.
- Don Quixote

 

[thehehe]

Basically every sentence from Faramir on the Lord of the Rings, but this one must rightly be his most famous : "I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend."

And as a gift, one by Gandalf too! "Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity."