Top Ten Tuesdays: Favorite Book Quotes

Oh no... this week's Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by The Broke and the Bookish) is just impossible! I'm a quote hoarder and a obsessive compulsive marginalia jotter-- how could I ever choose just 10 (to quote Drew Barrymore in Ever After, "I could no sooner pick a favorite star in the heavens").

1. “I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.” Salman Rushdie The Satanic Verses

2. “Ah, good conversation - there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.”Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence

3. “The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget about being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.”  Philip Roth American Pastoral

4. “Isn't it great when you're a kid and the world is full of anonymous things? Everything is bright and mysterious until you know what it is called and then all the light goes out of it...Once we knew the name of it, how could we ever come to love it?...For things had true natures, and they hid behind false names, beneath the skin we gave them.” Colson Whitehead Apex Hides the Hurt

5. “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.” Barbara Kingsolver The Lacuna

6. “When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too - leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back. Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.” Margaret Atwood The Blind Assassin

7.   “Perhaps it's true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house---the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture---must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstitutred. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.” Arundhati Roy The God of Small Things

8. “Strangers’ faces hold no secrets because imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.” James Baldwin Another Country

9.  “Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.” J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye

10. “I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.” Herman Melville Moby Dick