Random Book QUotes

sweetpotato

Sometimes, as I'm reading a book- usually a novel- a certain sentence or passage will strike such a chord, or make me snort with laughter, and I wish I could share it with someone right there and then. Of course, it often doesn't do the quote justice, taken out of context. But I don't care. I think it would be fun to see what some of us find especially intriguing/hilarious/heartbreaking about a particular book we're reading. It could inspire others to read the book as well. So I'll start.

I have read every book by Haven Kimmel, beginning with A Girl Named Zippy, a memoir, a few years back and I just recently finished The Used World, a novel. This scene is outside a backwoods meth lab where two women are preparing to go in and rescue a neglected infant from the heathens living within:

"’Hazel, are you carrying a gun?’

‘Of course I am. I always carry it when I visit Edie, wherever she's living.’

Claudia pressed her thumbs against her temples.

‘Do you have a permit? A license to carry? A license to conceal it?’

'Well, yes, Claudia, I do. But if I didn't that wouldn't stop me.’

. . .’What kind of gun is it?’

Hazel unsnapped the holster. ‘It's a Derringer.’

The gun was no bigger than a deck of cards. Claudia reached out and took it, admired the mother-of-pearl handle.

‘Forgive me, Hazel, but if we find ourselves in danger, are you going to ask one of those fat, tattooed psychopaths to lift his shirt and point to his kidneys? Are you going to say, “This barrel might feel a little cold, Porky, but I need you to stand still?"’

Hazel took the gun back, narrowed her eyes at Claudia. ‘You're right. Good thing I have the nine-millimeter in my coat pocket.’”

sweetpotato

Not long ago my sister Melinda shocked me by saying she had always assumed that the book on (our hometown) Mooreland had yet to be written because no one sane would be interested in reading it. "No, no, wait," she said. "I know who might read such a book. A person lying in a hospital bed with no television and no roommate. Just lying there. Maybe waiting for a physical therapist. And then there comes a candy striper with a squeaky library cart and on that cart there is only one book--- or maybe two books: yours, and Cooking With Pork. I can see how a person would be grateful for Mooreland then."

~ Haven Kimmel (again)
A Girl Named Zippy

failedpersephone

"It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second."
- John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

intodeep

failedpersephone wrote:

"It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second."
- John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

I liked the first two

I really liked the Steinbeck one too.

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."

Billy Pilgram writing a letter to a newspaper describing the Tralfamadorians
Kurt Vonnegut Jr Slaughterhouse V

failedpersephone

AHHH Slaughterhouse Five!

so it goes...is one of my favorite phrases!

sweetpotato

He says my daughter, and all the love he has is wrapped up in the tone of his voice when he says those two words, he says my daughter you must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many things you could miss if you are not careful. He says there are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are.

He says if nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?

He looks at her and he knows she doesn't understand, he doesn't think she'll even remember it to understand when she is older. But he tells her these things all the same, it is good to say them aloud, they are things people do not think of and he wants to place them in the air.



~jon mcgregor, if nobody speaks of remarkable things