Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Top Ten Favorite Quotes From Books


10. "Grown-ups love figures. When you tell them that you have made a new friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you, 'What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies?' Instead, they demand: 'How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make?' Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him."   Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince


9. "...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."   Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet







8. "We used to all come outside when the streetlights came on and prowl the neighborhood in a pack, a herd of kids on banana-seat bikes and minibikes. The grown-ups looked so silly framed in their living-room and kitchen windows. They complained about their days and signed deep sighs of depression and loss. They talked about how spoiled and lucky children were these days. We will never be that way, we said, we will never say those things."   Jill McCorkle, Creatures of Habit









7. "Listen to your broccoli and it will tell you how to eat it."   Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird



                                                                                                                    







6. "Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things.""I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."   Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland






5. "Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"
Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day" from The Truro Bear and Other Adventures: Poems and Essays





4. "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for all of Paris is a moveable feast."   
3. "As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans."   Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast










2. "This inner peace of mind occurs on three levels of understanding. Physical quietness seems the easiest to achieve, although there are levels and levels of this too....Mental quietness, in which one has no wandering thoughts at all, seems more difficult, but can be achieved. But value quietness, in which one has no wandering desires at all but simply performs the acts of his life without desire, that seems the hardest."   Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance


1. "The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there."   Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
















Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish. This meme was created because we are particularly fond of lists at The Broke and the Bookish. We'd love to share our lists with other bookish folks and would LOVE to see your top ten lists!

Each week we will post a new Top Ten list complete with one of our bloggers answers. Everyone is welcome to join. All we ask is that you link back to The Broke and the Bookish on your own Top Ten Tuesday post AND sign Mister Linky at the bottom to share with us and all those who are participating. If you don't have a blog, just post your answers as a comment. Don't worry if you can't come up with ten every time..just post what you can!

22 comments:

  1. I love the book the Little prince
    My favorite quote from it is this one.

    “If you love a flower that lives on a star, it is sweet to look at the sky at night. All the stars are a-bloom with flowers...”

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    1. There is so much in the Little Prince about love and caring for things. This is just lovely. Thank you.

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  2. Love the "The Little Prince" quote. :)

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  3. To think of impossible things for 30 minutes a day...maybe more of the impossible could be overcome.
    Thanks for sharing.

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    1. Yes, let's start thinking of impossible things right now!

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  4. OMG the little prince <3 I love this book ! But it's so weird to read this quote in english... (i'm french :p)!

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    1. Of course you are right....The Little Prince quote should be in French! (I've actually "read" The Little Prince in English, Spanish, and French.)

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  5. I have never hear of the Truro Bear book but I love that quote!

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  6. What lovely quotes! Like everyone else, I love The Little Prince and so it's nice to see it here on your list. (One of my friends is actually planning to get a quote from TLP as a tattoo!) But I think my favorite quote is the one from Creatures of Habit, which I hadn't heard of before. The desperation of the parents contrasted with the innocence (and naivety) of the children is great.

    Thanks for sharing your list with us!

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  7. Moveable Feast and Bird by Bird are fabulous books! You picked some great quotes here :)

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  8. I love the quotes from "A Moveable Feast". Such a great book!

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  9. Great list! Love the quote from Creatures of Habit :)
    Angela @ AJ Arndt Books Blog

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  10. I love the Alice in Wonderland quote. Aren't you missing two quotes? 1 and 3?

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    1. Quote three is with four and quote one is with two. I had to squash them together so the post would look beautiful.

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  11. Lots of books here I've never read and some I hadn't heard of until today. But the quotes you selected from them makes me want to run out and read them! :)

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  12. Oh. Love the "Little Prince" and "Bird by Bird" quotes!

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  13. Haven't read the books but the quotes are great. Might check out some of these sometime.

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  14. I love Hemingway's quote about Paris being a moveable feast. Fantastic.

    Laura @ The Traveling Owl

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    1. I'm still eating from that feast, even two years later.

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  15. the broccoli quote made me laugh! :D

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  16. I adore The Little Prince. So many gems in that book that it's hard to find just one quote to choose. You picked a good one. ;)

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