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Greetings Book Barn Goons! Sometimes a sentence pops. The words line up in just the right way that it lodges in your brain, stirs something inside, or makes you stop and think. This is the thread for those golden nuggets that you underline, highlight, or write down. The quote can be from fiction or non-fiction. It can be lyrical, funny, poignant, deep, silly, etc. This thread is for quotes that hold some kind of meaning. With that being said, let's try to keep away from an ironic perspective, or "I like it because it's so bad." This is The Book Barn, so discussion is encouraged. To help discussion, please list the author, and if you can, the book that the quote is from. This will (hopefully) keep the "Where is that quote from" posts to a minimum. You can always ask questions about the book if you like a quote and/or want a recommendation. Example of bad post: quote:"Call me Ishmael." It may be a famous quote, but not everyone has read the Harvard Classics. No book, no author. Also, it's such a well known quote, some people may find the post facetious. Example of good post: quote:"Call me Ishmael." We don't need a huge commentary for each quote, but it's always nice to know why it stood out to you. Reading is a personal journey, but you can still share that with others. Also, quotes don't have to be put in quote boxes, use them how you see fit. Let's try to keep the hate to a minimum. I didn't like Life of Pi, but I'm not going to shame someone else for quoting it or liking it. You shouldn't either. To get started: "Sometimes, just when we need them, life wraps metaphors up in little bows for us. When you think all is lost, the things you need the most return unexpectedly." -Brain On Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan Though I haven't gone through nearly the ordeal of Susannah Cahalan's mental breakdown, I've certainly felt that, when you're going through the worst, life provides little winks at you to remind you that there's still good, even with the bad. “But I knew the way the people in the town thought about things. They always had some time left over from their life to bother about other people and what they did. They thought they had to get together to help other people out, like the time they got together about the woman who let a colored man borrow her car and told her the best place for her was up north with all the other friend of the family lovers, and the time they got the veterans with overseas wives out. If you were different from anybody in town, you had to get out. That's why everybody was so much alike. The way they talked, what they did, what they liked, what they hated. If somebody got to hate something and he was the right person, everybody had to hate it too, or people began to hate the ones who didn't hate it. They used to tell us in school to think for yourself, but you couldn't do that in the town. You had to think what your father thought all his life, and that was what everybody thought.” - The Neon Bible by John Kennedy Toole JKT was mostly known for his comedy A Confederacy of Dunces, but he wrote his first novel when he was still a teenager, about growing up in a small town in the south. This quote succinctly captures the struggles of hate and hypocrisy of small town people. Happy Reading, Happy Posting.
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Jul 10, 2015 15:46
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"Social scientists have written papers analyzing Eshelman's every move in there, including the strange detail that the more brutally he behaved, the more American South his accent sounded. I saw at least one analysis of the experiment where the author seemed to find it perfectly plausible that if a person was overcome by a violent madness he'd involuntarily start to sound like someone from Louisiana." On Philip Zimbardo's famous Stanford Prison Experiment -Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed
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Aug 11, 2015 14:01
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Another great quote about wilderness: "But it seemed that I had seen the ancient afternoon of that trail, from meadow rocks and lupine posies, to sudden revisits with the roaring stream with its splashed snag bridges and undersea greennesses, there was something inexpressibly broken in my heart as though I’d lived before and walked with a fellow bodhisattva, but maybe on a more important journey. I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. Ecstasy, even, I felt, with flashes of sudden remembrance, and feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and dreaming in the grass." -Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums I like Kerouac, I appreciate his contribution to American Lit. The Dharma Bums shows that just because you're on a path to enlightenment doesn't mean you're automatically a good person, and Kerouac was honest about his flawed characters (even if it were unintentional). However, the best parts of the book are the moments where Ray and Japhy wander the wilderness. This is from the first section where they climb the mountain for the first time. Moments like this quote really hit home, because it's happened to me. You wander the woods and this weird moment grows where you feel the weight of everything around you and you just want to soak it in. I wish I could quote the entirety of Chapter 29 of this book, as it is full of these moments.
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Aug 14, 2015 14:30
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“First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring — this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth. Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else — but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself. It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.” -Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe "It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.” -Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe Such a sad, bizarre, dark story of romance. If you haven't read it, you're doing yourself a disservice.
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Aug 19, 2015 18:58
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Book and Author?
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Aug 23, 2015 21:00
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Wow, now that you say that, I can see it in the style. I never knew McCarthy to have a sense of humor.
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Aug 27, 2015 20:35
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"That is, it occurs to me now in force that in college things were never, not ever, at no single point, simply all right. Things were never just OK. I was never just getting by. Never. I can remember I was always horribly afraid. Or, if not horribly afraid, horribly angry. I was always desperately tense. Or, if not tense, then in an odd hot euphoria that made me walk with the water-jointed jaunt of the person who truly does not give a poo poo one way or the other. I was always either so unreasonably and pointlessly happy that no one place could seem to contain me, or so melancholy, so sick and silly with sadness that there was no place I could stomach the thought of entering. I hated it here. And I have never been as happy as when I was here. And these two things together confront me with the beak and claws of the True." The Broom of the System David Foster Wallace
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Jan 7, 2016 01:01
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I'm reading through Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, and took a laughing break at this description. "His suit fit like Cary Grant's, he appeared to have shaved sometime in the last hour, and he was wearing a pink tropical blossom in his lapel. He still smelled, however, like the far end of a men's toiletries section in a drugstore, and his haircut had been performed by someone who must have been trying to give up smoking." Pynchon has a fantastic skill at throwing in humanizing details for his characters, and Vineland, which has to be the most sentimental Pynchon I've read since Inherent Vice, is full of them.
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Feb 6, 2016 18:30
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...A fine grit sifted down between the railroad ties and the trestles and settled upon Owen and me; even the concrete abutments shook, and--shielding our yes from the loosened sand--we looked up to see the giant, dark underbelly of the train, speeding above us. Through the gaps between the passing cars, flashes of the leaden, winter sky blinked down on us. "IT'S THE FLYING YANKEE!" Owen managed to scream above the clamor. All trains wee special to Owen Meany, who had never ridden on a train; but The Flying Yankee--it's terrifying speed and its refusal to stop in Gravesend--represented to Owen the zenith of travel. Owen (who had never been anywhere) was a considerable romantic on the subject of travel. "What a coincidence!" I said, when The Flying Yankee had gone; I meant that it was a farfetched piece of luck that had landed us under that trestle bridge precisely at noon, but Owen smiled at me with his especially irritating combination of mild pity and mild contempt. Of course, I know now that Owen didn't believe in coincidences. Owen Meany believed that "coincidence" was a stupid, shallow refuge sought by stupid, shallow people who were unable to accept the fact that their liv were shaped by a terrifying and awesome design--more powerful and unstoppable than The Flying Yankee. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving In three short paragraphs, Irving has tied together many of the themes of a book spanning several decades over 600 pages: small-town life in 1950's New England, history, the wonderful and terrifying insights from childhood, friendship, faith, and fate. Owen Meany believes he is God's instrument. The book is full of these "coincidences" surrounding Owen, revealed at the end to all weave into an intricate tapestry of storytelling. In this section alone, we know who Owen is and how he views life, we know John the narrator and his views on life and his respect towards his friend Owen, we are giving a symbolism of determinism in the train barreling forward (described with horror imagery), the train itself is taken from the actual history of the area, it captures the narrative flow, and (unseen to the first-time reader) it contains a subtle foreshadow of the ending of the book. All this while still managing a compassionate, but darkly comic tone. Because, despite the heavy subject matter of the book, it is, at its heart, a comedy.
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Mar 11, 2016 19:30
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That whole movie has a fantastic soundtrack.
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Mar 16, 2016 16:49
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