Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite 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’s topic is “Favorite Book Quotes“. So, without further ado, here’s the list.

1. From F. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866). A perfect ending to a perfect book on the reformative justice system:

He did not know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering.
But that is the beginning of a new story—the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.

2. From the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) — what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger:

‘Come to the edge,’ He said.
They said, ‘We are afraid.’
‘Come to the edge,’ He said.
They came. He pushed them…
And they flew.

3. This long but beautiful quote from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, about how we are all heroes in our daily, ordinary lives:

Certainly those determining acts of [Dorothea’s] life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it …
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.

4. From Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, which rings as much true for life as it is for writing:

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.

5. An extremely painful moment in E.R. Braithwaite’s iconic auto-biography (1959), To Sir, With Love.

I have yet to meet a single English person who has actually admitted to anti-negro prejudice. It is even generally believe that no such thing exists here. A negro is free to board any bus or train and sit anywhere, provided he has paid the appropriate fare. The fact that many people might pointedly avoid sitting near to him is casually overlooked. He is free to seek accommodation in any licensed hotel or boarding house – the courteous refusal which frequently follows is never ascribed to prejudice. The betrayal I now felt was greater because it had been perpetuated with the greatest of charm and courtesy.

6. Here is a reminder to not take others’ “sacrifices” for granted. From Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957):

“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders – What would you tell him?”
I…don’t know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?”
“To shrug.”

7. A powerful question for this new age of misinformation, but also for people who think changing their mind is a sign of weakness. From ilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall:

What’s wrong with you? Or what’s wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too.

9. And here is the secret to all our relationship problems: the desire to feel “important” in others’ eyes: T. S. Eliot in 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.

10. And ending this list with the most powerful twist in Chekhov’s short story, The Bet:

And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.
You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth.

Previous Top Ten Tuesday posts can be found HERE.