Luckily, my bookshelf doesn't leave me when all my friends go home for the holidays and I've had the chance to get lost in a few books over the last week or so.
I forgot how good it feels--to get completely sucked into a story line. To stay up way longer than you should to finish. To get so caught up in a line that you want to print it on every surface in your room.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby will forever be one of those books that I can [and will] read over and over again and always fall a little more in love with.
"And in the end, we're all just humans drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness."
"You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person that I have ever known--and even that is an understatement."
"I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self-respect. And it's these things I'd believe in even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all that she should be. I love her. And that is the beginning and end of everything."
[I mean, let's be real here. Who wouldn't want someone to say that about us?]
I took a class on Charles Dickens and his works this last semester, and as much as I despised his psychotic ways of writing and the way his characters messed with my mind, I couldn't help but relate to some of the things he said.
"I have been bent and broken, but hopefully into a better shape."
"Four our path in life is stony and rugged now, and it rests with us to smooth it. We must fight our way onward. We must be brave. There are obstacles to be met, and we must meet, and crush them."
"No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another."
My American Literature class helped me develop a healthy appreciation for American Literature (besides Fitzgerald, of course) and Kurt Vonnegut has words of advice that I think every person should listen to.
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be."
"Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. And don't put up with people who are reckless with yours."
"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'if this isn't nice, I don't know what is."
And some of my random favorites from my favorite novels...
"...Because as good as kissing feels, nothing feels as good as the anticipation of it." [John Green, An Abundance of Katherines]
"Who knows, maybe your love will make me forget all I wish not to remember." [Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo]
"It is to the credit of human nature that, except where it's selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates." [Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter]
"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good." [John Steinbeck, East of Eden]
"We cross our bridges as we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and the presumption that once our eyes watered."[Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead]
"We were just there together. And that was enough." [Stephen Chobsky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower]
We've all read things that rocked our worlds, haven't we? We've all fallen in love with a story and wished a thousand times over it wouldn't end. I saw something that said, "we fall in love the way we do because we learned it from literature." And it's true. I want a love worth writing novels about--and a life worth doing the same. That's why I read.
What are your favorite lines?
"My mother is a fish."
ReplyDeleteWilliam Faulkner - As I Lay Dying