favorite lines/quotes from books

[serutan]

Yet - O God, there were so many stars you could have used.

What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?

Arthur C. Clarke.

[tarascon]

“The lunatic is all idee fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.”

Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum.

[cemper93]

I just spent a lot of time entertaining myself by guessing the book from which the passages in my Kindle's vocabulary trainer, saved together with the words I looked up while reading, were taken. Maybe it's just that sentences, out of context, do always have a scent of mystery to them, but I noticed that even authors that I don't usually enjoy all that much can, just for a short bit, write well.

Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units.

But I don't actually keep any list or markings of favorite quotes, so I don't have anything more to share in this thread except for this excerpt which, curiously, I feel was enough to redeem that book for me.

[EvilDuckie]

From The Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy, 2 of my favourites:

"All eyes were on Ford Prefect, some of them were on stalks"

"Oh hello Slartibartfast, how are you?" (just because it was so unexpected)

[Kewangji]

From Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle.

Most people like me are dead.

And this is not from a book, but it is from this story, which a dear friend wrote me last year.

The mushrooms did not reply. They were mushrooms, and mushrooms are too good to speak to lowly animals like humans.

[kiniget]

I figure that having a new account grants me the right to post here again

anyway, the Lotus War trilogy by Jay Kristoff has some of the most beautiful prose I have ever read in my life (no seriously, go find Stormdancer and you'll see what I mean almost immediately), but seeing as I only have the third book on hand, I'll settle for just this one quote:

This was the pain before birth. The storm before spring
This was what they asked for.
This was what they wanted
This was war

[Quercus]

One of my favourite passages is actually from a fictional book - Frank Barr's Time's Body, within John Crowley's Aegypt. It's a long quote, but it also contains my favourite line from the book: "There is more than one history of the world"

We cannot help imposing our desires on the world - even though the world remains impervious to them, and keeps to laws that are not the laws our natures suppose it ought to have.

But history is made by man. Old Vico said that man can only fully understand what he has made, the corollary to that is, that what man has made he can understand: it will not, like the physical world, remain impervious to his desire to understand. So if we look at history and find in it huge stories, plots identical to the plots of myth and legend, populated by actual persons who however bear the symbols and even the names of gods and demons, we need be no more alarmed and suspicious than we would be on picking up a hammer and finding its grip fit for our hand, and its head balanced for our striking. We are understanding what we have made, and its shape is ours; we have made history…the laws that govern it are not the laws of nature, but they are the laws that govern us...The story remains; and if it changes, and it does, it is because our human nature is not fixed; there is more than one history of the world. But when we believe that we have proved that there is no story, that history is just one damned thing after another that can only be because we have ceased to recognize ourselves.