Ten Memorable Book Quotes

Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by Jana over at That Artsy Reader Girl. Every Tuesday, you pick ten books on that week’s topic. This week, we have a freebie and I am going with some memorable book quotes. Hope these stay with you the way these have stayed with me.

Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman

(King) Brutus was expelled from Italy for shooting his father with an arrow, thinking him an animal, although it seems to me a reasonable mistake. After many adventures this Brutus came to the island of Albion, inhabited only by giants, and he and his followers built homes and settled down to stay, changing the name of the island to Britain, after Brutus. I asked Odd William why in that case it was not Brutain.

 Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge

‘Life isn’t that simple. People aren’t that simple. You can’t cut them into slices like a cake, then throw away the bits you don’t like. The Triss who was kind about the frog and the Triss who spoilt your birthday – they’re the same person.’

One Dark Window by Rachel Gilling

“There once was a girl,” he murmured, “clever and good, who tarried in shadow in the depths of the wood. There also was a King—a shepherd by his crook, who reigned over magic and wrote the old book. The two were together, so the two were the same: “The girl, the King… and the monster they became.”

The Alleluia Files by Sharon Shinn

“You are missing the point”, she said to him calmly. “If there is no god, what is left but science? What is left to endow us with any grace? You can tell me the chemical makeup of my skin and my brain, but how can you explain away my soul? And if there is no god to watch over me, chastise me, grieve for me, rejoice with me, make me fear, and make me wonder, what am I but a collection of metals and liquids with nothing to celebrate about my daily living?”

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

… I came to them out of mists and rain; I came to them in dreams at midnight;
I came to them in a flock of ravens that filled a northern sky at dawn;
When they thought themselves safe, I came to them in a cry that broke the silence of a winter wood …

The Blue Cross, in The Complete Father Brown Stories by G.K. Chesterton

“The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen. A few clouds in heaven do come together into the staring shape of one human eye. A tree does stand up in the landscape of a doubtful journey in the exact and elaborate shape of a note of interrogation. … Nelson does die in the instant of victory; and a man named Williams does quite accidentally murder a man named Williamson ….
In short, there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. … [W]isdom should reckon on the unforeseen.”

Patricia A. McKillip, The Tower at Stony Wood

“[She] saw the third tower at night. It stood in a ring of trees, a squat dark flattened beehive of stone. Three great worn lichen-covered slabs formed the doorposts and the lintel. There was no door, only that yawn into blackness. The waning moon hung above it, low and cold. In the milky light, the shadows of trees melted into the elongated, impenetrable shadow of the tower. Only the doorposts, sagging heavily into the ground, and the crooked lintel they bore, all made of paler stone, caught the light in tiny flecks of silver.”

T. S. Eliot, “The Cocktail Party”

Half the harm that is done in this world
Is due to people who want to feel important
They don’t mean to do harm
But the harm does not interest them.
Or they do not see it, or they justify it
Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle
To think well of themselves.

Gustav Ichheiser, in Appearances and Realities

If people who do not understand each other at least understand that they do not understand each other, then they understand each other better than when, not understanding each other, they do not understand that they do not understand each other.

The Problem of the Green Capsule by John Dickson Carr

“All witnesses, metaphorically, wear black spectacles. They can neither see clearly, nor interpret what they see in the proper colours. They do not know what goes on on the stage, still less what goes on in the audience. Show them a black-and-white record of it afterwards, and they will believe you; but even then they will be unable to interpret what they see.”

Any of these memorable book quotes catch your eye? What have you been thinking about for this week’s Top Ten Tuesday?