Ten bits of language I’ve collected from books I’ve read (or, in the case of the first quote, a book I’m reading right now):
1. [we] were attached, like keenly mismatched Siamese twins cojoined at the back of the mind.
-Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver.
2. She’s a brass-bound bitch because she believes she knows best. I’m a brass-bound bitch because I don’t want anyone getting close enough to find out what a whiny little knot of naked nerve endings I really am.
-Sunshine, by Robin McKinley
3. But all the endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.
-The Five People You Meet in Heaven, by Mitch Albion
4. Why cannot the past leave us be in what peace we have made with it?
-The Fiery Cross, by Diana Gabaldon
5. …a well expressed opinion is usually better than a badly expressed fact.
-Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon
6. The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and violence.
and
7. I just think, like our teachers here, that if ministers are effective, they’re good at asking questions to get you to think. I don’t think they’re supposed to have the answers. Not necessarily.
-Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, by Gregory Maguire
8. A change in language can transform our appreciation of the cosmos.
-The Other Side of Silence, by Arden Neisser, quoting the linguist Benjamin Whorf
9. “Little scrap, little morsel,” the stars sing to me, “we are the same.”
-Ahab’s Wife, Or, the Star-gazer, by Sena Jeter Naslund
10. It is a holy duty to know the truth and tell it.
-Confessions of a Pagan Nun, by Kate Horsley
I always have to go back to The Master, the late, great J. R. R. Tolkien:
“Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?”
“They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow” - what a great line!
Falcon, I came THIS close to putting this one in:
“Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what it in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting evil in the fields that we know so that those who live after may have clear earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”
It gives me shivers just thinking about it.
Or what about:
“…who knows what she spoke to the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all her life seemed shrinking, and
the walls of her bower closing in about her, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in?”
As I said, he is The Master.
Ok, out of my head! I am reading ‘Animal Dreams’ right now too.
WeedWoman, didn’t you GIVE me Animal Dreams?!