Just for you-know-what’s and giggles, I feel like sharing some of my favorite quotes and passages from books. Check ‘em out; feel free to click on the links to see exactly where the quotes are from. What are some of your favorite sayings or passages?

“Science, you say, will save us. Science, I say, has destroyed us… The promises of science have not been kept. Promises of efficiency and simplicity have bred nothing but pollution and chaos. We are a fractured and frantic species moving down a path of destruction… The language of science comes with no signposts about good and bad…. We ask not why you will not govern yourselves, but how can you? Your world moves so fast that if you stop even for an instant to consider the implications of your actions, someone more efficient will whip past you in a blur.” (Dan Brown)

“… Have you thought of the fellow on the other side of [the fire]? The finicky, critical husband looking through his art books on mythical Greece. What worship has HE ever known? Real worship! Without worship you shrink, it’s as brutal as that… I shrank my own life. No one can do it for you. I settled for being pallid and provincial, out of my own eternal timidity. The old story of bluster, and do bugger-all… While I sit there… a freaky boy tries to conjure the reality!… Then in the morning, I put away my books on the cultural shelf, close up the kodachrome snaps of Mount Olympus, touch my reproductive statue of Dionysus for luck–and go off to hospital to treat him for insanity!” (Peter Shaffer, Equus)

“On her kitchen table she set out the joint, a pack of matches, and a saucer. She positioned a chair in front of them and turned off all but one light. She had a cassette marked DANCE that had been broken for five years. Training her desk light on it, she opened it up and spliced out the mangled stretch with Scotch Magic tape and nail scissors.  The dope tasted like April in college; like the music on the tape. She danced… her arms and legs mixing the last faint banks of smoke into a haze. She thought she was crying when “Beast of Burden” played, but when she opened her eyes there were no tears and it seemed that she’d only imagined it.  Outside the kitchen window she lay down on the wet, sloping shingles. They were made of real slate.” (Jonathan Franzen)

“‘What’s life for?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I don’t either. But I don’t think it’s about winning.’” (Jonathan Franzen)

“Oh, Oscar! When will you learn that there is no such thing as free shrimp!?” (Arrested Development)

“Then when you wake up one day about forty years old and you say, ‘My God, I’ve arrived! I’m there.’ And you don’t feel very different from what you’ve always felt. And there’s a slight letdown because you feel there’s a hoax. It was a hoax! A dreadful hoax! They made you miss everything.  We thought life by analogy was a journey, was a pilgrimage which had a serious purpose at the end and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is or maybe heaven, after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and there was supposed to be singing and dancing while the music was being played. (Alan Watts)