Below you will find several book quotes. Some good. Some ridiculous. My mom (Carol) says she will critique five pages of a WIP written for kids (she’ll let you know the rules if you win) for the first person who gets all the quotes connected to the right books. Hint: a few of these are written for adults. And some are really easy. If you know any other terrific quotes from books, please post. (Answers to come.)
“The bond forged between us was not one that could be broken by absence, distance, or time. And no matter how much more special or beautiful or brilliant or perfect than me he might be, he was as irreversibly altered as I was. As I would always belong to him, so would he always be mine.”
“I hated sports. I hated sports, and I hated people who played them, and I hated people who watched them, and I hated people who didn’t hate people who watched or played them.”
“ ‘If only, if only,” the woodpecker sighs,
“The bark on the tree was as soft as the skies.
While the wolf waits below, hungry and lonely,
Crying to the moo-oo-oon,
If only, If only.’ ”
“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”
“A new sickness invaded Jerry, the sickness of knowing what he had become, another animal, another beast, another violent person in a violent world, inflicting damage, not disturbing the universe but damaging it.”
“I think that if I ever have kids, and they are upset, I won’t tell them that people are starving in China or anything like that because it wouldn’t change the fact that they were upset. And even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn’t really change the fact that you have what you have.”
“Grand. There’s a word I really hate. It’s a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.”
“I’ll find me a house
with a piano
and doctors to help
my mother
and no old man . . .”
“The knife had done almost everything it was brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet.”
“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…”
” ‘Get busy living or get busy dying.’ ”
“It cannot be seen, cannot be felt,
Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt.
It lies behind stars and under hills,
And empty holes it fills.
It comes first and follows after,
Ends life, kills laughter.”
“It almost rained Saturday.
The clouds hung low over the farm.
The air felt thick.
It smelled like rain.”
“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.”
“Remember, we’re madly in love, so it’s all right to kiss me anytime you feel like it.”
“You are not special. You’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We’re all part of the same compost heap. We’re all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”
Throwing Up Words 