Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Quotes

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme run byThe Broke and the Bookish designed help the blogging community share its very favorite titles/characters/scenes/etc. Each week we get a new "topic" and the instructions to list our Top Ten-- I love this feature both because it forces/allows me to think back over my years of reading to locate the books/personalities that have meant the most to me, and also because it gives me the chance to read and interact with blogs I never would have come across in my regular voyages. Sometimes, while reading another person's blog, I'll come across a title I haven't read in AGES and I'll wax nostalgic. Sometimes I'll even go hunt the book down in my stacks and have a grand old time getting reacquainted with an old friend. Occasionally, I'm convinced to pick up a new title and start a new relationship with a stranger-book. 

This week's topic is Top Ten Favorite Book Quotes. I'm going to have to say right off the bat that my post is going to be more like "Ten (of my) Top Favorite Quotes" because there's no way I could limit myself to having 10 favorites and I KNOW I'm going to leave some out that I absolutely adore... C'est la vie!

1. "Only strangers have no secrets. Before you begin to know them they are faces, open and pure, only when you delve deeper do they grow personalities, grow mysteries, grow caves of experience to plunge and explore." 

Black Girl in Paris by Shay Youngblood

2. "What a great difference there is... between dreaming of something and dealing with it." 

Another Country by James Baldwin

3. "Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone cold dead." Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

4. "Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him." 

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

5. "Meaning is a shaky edifice  we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death. " "Imaginary Homelands" by Salman Rushdie

6. "I do not know how I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilest the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." 

Diaries of Isaac Newton

7. "You force people to stop asking questions, and before you know it they have auctioned off the question mark, or sold it for scrap. No boldness. No good ideas for fixing what's broken in the land. Because if you happen to mention it's broken, you are automatically disqualified."

 Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

8. "Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever."

 Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

9. "To espresso or to latte, that is the question," he muttered, his free will evaporating. I had asked Hamlet for something he couldn't easily supply: a decision. "Whether 'tis tastier on the palate to choose white mocha over plain," he continued in a rapid garble, "or to take a cup to go. Or a mug to stay, or extra cream, or have nothing, and by opposing the endless choice, end one's heartache--... To froth, to sprinkle, perchance to drink..."

 Something Rotten (from the Thursday Next series) by Jasper Fforde

10. "You will never be alone, with a poet in your pocket!" 

Letter from John Adams to John Quincy Adams

And a bonus quote-- "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." Maya Angelou