Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme for the list lovers among book bloggers, created and hosted at The Broke and the Bookish. Today the theme is “Top Ten Top Ten Favorite Quotes from Books”. Oh, how to choose? There are so many… Let’s see:
One in keeping with the theme of this blog:
How do you lose a word? Does it vanish into your memory, like an old toy in a cupboard, and lie hidden in the cobwebs and dust, waiting to be cleaned out or rediscovered?
― Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide
One for my “other” theme:
The original is unfaithful to the translation.
― Jorge Luis Borges
One more by Borges, to complete the description of this blog in 3 quotes:
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
― Jorge Luis Borges
One because it fits our recent discussion on fairy tales:
Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
― G.K. Chesterton
One for my eyes:
All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it.
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
One for books:
Every book, every volume [...] has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Which in turn results in this:
Isn’t it odd how much fatter a book gets when you’ve read it several times? [...] As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells…and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower…both strange and familiar.
― Cornelia Funke, Inkspell
One to represent the perfect opening lines of a story:
When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
― John R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Or maybe the perfect opening is this:
It was a nice day.
All the days had been nice. There had been rather more than seven of them so far, and rain hadn’t been invented yet. But clouds massing east of Eden suggested that the first thunderstorm was on its way, and it was going to be a big one.
― Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
And the perfect ending?
I think we ought to live happily ever after.
― Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle
