Pick your absolute FAVOURITE book quote, and post it here

[Clintonista2]

I'll go first. This quote is from the book "The Egyptian", set in Ancient Egypt, the main character Sinuhe has been seduced by a woman who he gives everything too, including his parent's possessions (The ancient egyptians believed that if you die without any possessions, you cannot enter the afterlife). After finding his parents committed suicide, here is the letter his father left him: (It's a LONG one!)

"I Senmut, whose name is inscribed in the book of life, and his wife Kipa send this greeting to our son Sinuhe, who in Pharoah's house was given the name He Who Is Alone. The gods sent you to us, throughout your life you have brought us only joy, and great has been our pride in you. We are grieved for your sake because you have met with reverses, and we have not been able to help you as we should have wished. And we believe that in all you did you were justified and could not help yourself. Do not grieve for us though you must sell our tomb, for assuredly you would not have done this without good reason. But the servants of the law are in haste, and we have no leisure to await our death. Death is as welcome to us now as sleep to the weary- as home to the fugitive. Our life has been long, and our joys many, but the greatest joy of all we had of you, Sinuhe.

Therefore, we bless you. Do not grieve because we have no tomb, for all existance is but vanity, and it is perhaps best that we should vanish into nothingness, without seeking to encounter further perils and hardships on that difficult journey to the western land. Remember always that our death was easy and that we blessed you before we went. May all the Gods of Egypt protect you from danger, may your heart be shielded from sorrow, and may you find as much joy in your children as we have found in you. Such is the desire of your father senmut and your mother Kipa"

[HuskerDU]

1. Here's mine.

'It has always seemed strange to me,' said Doc. 'The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding, and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits which we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.'

John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

[lost-in-nj]

2. And Sorrow floats

The Hotel New Hampshire...



lost

[Pale Blue Dot]

3. Penquins!

From A Prayer For Owen Meany. :cry:

[flvegan]

4. Peter Singer, "Animal Liberation"

"All the arguments to prove man's superiority can not shatter this hard fact: In suffering, the animals are our equals."

That's it, that's all.

[Reciprocity]

5. The Hobbit.

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
Thorin Oakenshield

[Danger Mouse]

6. Check my sigline...

:rofl:

[Tyler Durden]

7. From "HANNIBAL"

"The world shall not be this way within the reach of my arm."

I use it in my sig line.

[RevolutionaryActs]

8. How the *bleep* do you pick just one!?

:wow:

[rug]

9. Bartleby the Scrivener.

As Nippers, looking very sour and sulky, was departing, Turkey blandly and deferentially approached.

“With submission, sir,” said he, “yesterday I was thinking about Bartleby here, and I think that if he would but prefer to take a quart of good ale every day, it would do much towards mending him, and enabling him to assist in examining his papers.”

“So you have got the word too,” said I, slightly excited.

“With submission, what word, sir,” asked Turkey, respectfully crowding himself into the contracted space behind the screen, and by so doing, making me jostle the scrivener. “What word, sir?”

“I would prefer to be left alone here,” said Bartleby, as if offended at being mobbed in his privacy.

“That’s the word, Turkey,” said I—“that’s it.”

“Oh, prefer? oh yes—queer word. I never use it myself. But, sir, as I was saying, if he would but prefer—”

“Turkey,” interrupted I, “you will please withdraw.”

“Oh, certainly, sir, if you prefer that I should.”

[Swede]

10. "He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead..."

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester.

[ghostsofgiants]

11. Does it have to be fiction?

"All they will ever know about the Ramones is that Sid Vicious murdered his girlfriend and then himself."

From "Rock and The pop Narcotic" by Joe Carducci.

[The Straight Story]

12. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you

Saw it in some book once, Can't recall the title :)

[FloridaJudy]

13. From Sheri S. Tepper's "The Family Tree"

"ignorance may be bliss, but it's damned poor life insurance"

[idgiehkt]

14. From Rubyfruit Jungle, by Rita Mae Brown

The first time I ever read this quote it gave me chills...I identified so much with the Molly character and I knew at that moment what her father was telling her was the truth, and time has only reinforced that.

Carl: "I dunno. Me, I don't like fights, right or wrong, I smile and say 'Yes'... I slide by."
Molly: "I can't do that, Dad."
Carl: "I know. You'll pay for it honey. Tears and bitterness, 'cause you'll be out there fighting all by yourself. Most people are cowards, like me. And if you try to get them to fight they'll turn on you, bad as the people you originally fightin' with. You'll be all alone."

[Clintonista2]

15. WOW

I love that one!

[eridani]

16. Tom Robbins: another Roadside Attraction

Jesus: Hey Dad?
God: Yes, Son?
Jesus: Western civilization followed me home. Can I keep it?
God: Certainly not! And put it down this minute--you don't know where it'e been!

[EFerrari]

17. "Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents." n/t

[SteppingRazor]

18. Hmmmm... I don't think this is really my favorite, but...

the first thing that popped into my head was the last lines of The Sun Also Rises:

“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”

Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.

“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

[Oeditpus Rex]

19. Perhaps this one:

"The normal rectal temperature of a hummingbird is 104.6.

"The normal rectal temperature of a bumblebee is calculated to be 110.8, although so far no one has succeeded in taking the rectal temperature of a bumblebee. That doesn't mean it can't or won't be done. Scientific research marches on: perhaps at this moment, bee proctologists at DuPont...

"As for the oyster, its rectal temperature has never even been estimated, although we must suspect that the tissue heat of the sedentary bivalve is as far below good old 98.6 as that of the busy bee is above. Nonetheless, the oyster, could it fancy, should fancy its excremental equipment a hot item, for what other among Creation's crapping creatures can convert its bodily wastes into treasure?

"There is a metaphor here, however strained."


—Tom Robbins, "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues"

[BlooInBloo]

20. "The worst thing you can do to a man is give him back something broken."

[SKKY]

21. Here's a gem from George Orwell...

...it's my personal favorite.

"All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting."

[ForrestGump]

22. There're a few I can think of, but this is a true classic:

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further... And one fine morning -

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

[displacedtexan]

23. The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

Favorite quote: "It just doesn't matter."

[Fox Mulder]

24. Not my favorites, but two I like.

There are too many other inexplicable things around us--horrors, threats, mysteries that draw you in and then inevitably disenchant you. Back to the predictable and humdrum. The prince is never going to come, everybody knows that; and maybe Sleeping Beauty's dead.
--Lestat de Lioncourt, Queen of the Damned

I realized aloud in the midst of saying it that even when we die we probably don't find out the question as to why we were ever alive. Even the avowed atheist probably thinks that in death he'll get some answer. I mean God will be there, or there won't be anything at all.
--Lestat de Lioncourt, The Vampire Lestat

[hyphenate]

25. I can only narrow it down to three:

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

— Henry Beston, The Outermost House, 1928


"We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed, for our safety, to its security and peace. Preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and the love we give our fragile craft."

--Adlai Stevenson


No man is an island, entire of itself
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
it tolls for thee.


-- John Donne

[RetroLounge]

26. So many...

"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."

Love in the TIme of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

[kay1864]

27. From William Goldman's "Marathon Man"

(about a spy who was legendary for his punctuality)

If you were in Beirut and he was in Paris, and he called you and said, "Meet me next Tuesday, 2:30, Mt. Everest, north face, halfway up", well you had better have one hell of an excuse if you showed up at quarter of three.

(not a particularly profound quote, I'll admit. I just like the flow of the words)