This TTT is hosted by Jen at The Broke and The Bookish. I’m really excited about this one because I’m the type of person who writes in their books, underlining their favorite passages. I’m not even sure if these are my true top ten for there are so many passages that it’s near impossible to rank them. So here is A top ten.
1. “But ‘Thou Mayest’ Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.” – John Steinbeck East of Eden
2.”The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful.” -James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
3. “My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.” – John Green The Fault in Our Stars
4. “Trying to write about love is ultimately like trying to have a dictionary represent life. No matter how many words there are, there will never be enough.” -David Levithan The Lover’s Dictionary
5. “There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up; holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind-wrapped tight like skin. Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.
Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t know her name? Although she has claim, she is not claimed. In the place where long grass opens, the girl who waited to be loved and cry shame erupts into her separate parts, to make it easy for the chewing laughter to swallow her all away.” -Toni Morrison Beloved
6. “The contemplation of eternity within the very movement of life.” -Muriel Barbery The Elegance of the Hedgehog
7. “After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart’s impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble.” -Richard Russo Empire Falls
8.”It’s life that matters, nothing but life–the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.” –Fyodor Dostoevsky The Idiot
9.”If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love” -George Orwell 1984
10. “I have finally concluded maybe that’s what life is about: there’s a lot of despair, but also the odd moments of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It’s as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that has come to us, an always within a never.” -Muriel Barbery The Elegance of the Hedgehog
