Alexis' Top Ten Favorite Book Quotes

Hey there! This is Alexis and this is Top Ten Tuesday 2.0. This week, we're supposed to share our ten favorite book quotes. Since my co-blogger Claudia already shared her list, here's mine:

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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 — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning ——

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

2. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton 

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.

3. The Tempest by William Shakespeare

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked,I cried to dream again.

4. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams 

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.

5. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath 

Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.

6. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte 

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.

7. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.

8. Life of Pi by Yann Martel 

Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud...

9.  Angels in America by Tony Kushner 

Don't be afraid; people are so afraid; don't be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone...Learn at least this: What you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way.

10. The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination. 

Claudia's Top Ten Favorite Book Quotes

We thought it would be fun to participate in this Top Ten Tuesday event, hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. This week's topic: ten favorite book quotes. This is a hard one for me to do because a. I rarely write down quotes or highlight passages and b. I tend to remember fragments with pretty writing over fragments that state big ideas, and pretty writing can't always be taken out of context. But I did my best, so here's a selection of quotes I remember liking for their writing, their eloquence or just the mood they put me in at the time. In no particular order:

1. "Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen." --Lady Chatterley's Lover
2. "Me. And me now." --Ulysses
3. "His needled memory grows quiet, and until the next full moon no one will trouble the professor — neither the noseless killer of Gestas, nor the cruel fifth procurator of Judea, the equestrian Pontius Pilate." --The Master and Margarita
4.  "I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And what do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited." --The Bell Jar 
5.  "No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;/ Am an attendant lord, one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or two / Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,/ Deferential, glad to be of use,/ Politic, cautious, and meticulous;/ Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;/ At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—/Almost, at times, the Fool.'  --The Love Song of  J. Alfred Prufrock
6. "Quentin had grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad. His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence” --Absalom, Absalom
7.  "Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian. But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world." --Jude the Obscure
8.  "Something new, they had said. They had a perfect day for it. A day with the blue and gold good weather of anyone's primitive childhood expectations, when the new, brief memory tells itself that this is what is, and therefore was, and therefore will be. A good day to see a new place." --Possession 
9.  "Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined."  --Beloved
10. "Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was the secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance? Was the good or the evil genius dominant in those beams? Probably the evil; else why was the effect that of unrest rather than of undisturbed charm? Why was the wish to look again felt as coercion and not as a longing in which the whole being consents?" --Daniel Deronda