Roof Beam Reader
Adam Burgess
Rewind! Top 10 Favorite Book Quotes
The Broke and the Bookish, hosts of this weekly meme, have decided to rewind and allow us to go back through the list of weekly topics to either redo one or complete one we might have missed.
The topic I chose is one which I don’t think I caught on the first go-round:
“Top 10 Favorite Book Quotes”
This is going to be tougher than I originally thought. How does one judge a “favorite” quote? Is it by the quotes relative impact on that moment in the story? Is it by its overall profundity? Do I measure it by humorousness? By truthfulness? How about I just go with the flow and see what comes up? No, too much freedom there. Here’s what I will do! I’ll go back through my own reviews and include my favorite quotes from those books, of the ones I wrote down.
1. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
2. “Don’t ever tell anybody anything, if you do, you start missing everybody.” – J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)
3. “We accept the love we think we deserve.” – Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)
4. “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” – J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)
5. “What good are the laws where Money is king, / where the poor are always wrong, / and even the mockers who scoff at the times / will sell the truth for a song? / The courts are an auction where justice is sold; / the judge who presides bangs a gavel of gold.” – Petronius (The Satyricon)
6. “I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.” – Robert Heinlein (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress)
7. “They tell you to do your thing but they don’t mean it. They don’t want you to do your thing, not unless it happens to be their thing, too.” – Robert Cormier (The Chocolate War)
8. “There is a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open, and yourself half conscious of everything that is passing around you, than you would in five nights with your eyes fast closed, and your senses wrapped in perfect unconsciousness. At such time, a mortal knows just enough of what his mind is doing, to form some glimmering conception of its mighty powers, its bounding from earth and spurning time and space, when freed from the restraint of its corporeal associate.” – Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist)
9. “Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark. In the hopeless swamps of the not quite, the not yet, and the not at all, do not let the hero in your soul perish and leave only frustration for the life you deserved, but never have been able to reach. The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.” – Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged) *hate to give props to this book/author, but the quote is excellent.
10. “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” – Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)
Roof Beam Reader 