It’s the end of the year: a time of thinking over what’s gone by, and of all there is to come.
As 2014 comes to a close, we’ve been revisiting the words we loved this year. Here’s a simple gathering of quotations (whether funny, thoughtful, beautiful, wry, or otherwise) that were enjoyed by a few of our staff members. We hope you’re reading (or listening, audiobook fans!) and loving words too, and that your new year will be as full of wonderful new words and ideas.
Fiction
“At the outset, Verna had not intended to kill anyone.”
Book: Stone Mattress
Author: Margaret Atwood
-Patti
“I call for help in silence; I make signals with the two arms of my soul, which are softer than algae, not, of course, to some friend firmly planted on the ground, but to a kind of crystallization of the tenderness whose seeming hardness makes me believe in its eternity.”
Book: Our Lady of the Flowers
Author: Jean Genet (trans. Bernard Frechtman)
-Hazel
“My father’s wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us.”
Book: Lucky Us
Author: Amy Bloom
-Carrie
“And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky–so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.”
Book: The Goldfinch
Author: Donna Tartt
-Gail
“I want to thank you for coming out of the closet. Again and again, over and over, for the rest of your life. At school, at work, at your kid’s daycare, at your brother’s wedding, at the doctor’s office. Thank you for sideswiping their stereotypes. I never get the chance to come out of the closet because my closet was always made of glass.”
Book: Missed Her
Author: Ivan E. Coyote
-Emily R
“It is simply this: do not tire, never lose interest, never grow indifferent—lose your invaluable curiosity and you let yourself die. It’s as simple as that.”
Book: Fair Play
Author: Tove Jansson
-Brandie
“Are you really a witch?”
“No,” said the demon. “A witch is just a girl who knows her mind.”
Book: The Bread We Eat in Dreams
Author: Catherynne M. Valente
-Harper
“For if Jack Buggit could escape from the pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat’s blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, and that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.”
Book: The Shipping News
Author: E. Annie Proulx
-Jim
“If you don’t understand, ask questions.
If you’re uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It’s easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place.
Then listen some more.”
Book: Americanah
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
-Elizabeth
“We read a lot of books. Children’s books mostly, because they’re always much more truthful than adult books. And much more entertaining,” said Mrs. Bunny.”
Book: Mr. and Mrs. Bunny–Detectives Extraordinaire!
Author: Polly Horvath
-Laura
Non-Fiction
“We are not predestined to reach any goal, nor are we answerable to any power but our own. Only wisdom based on self-understanding, not piety, will save us.”
Author: E.O. Wilson
-Steve P.
At the age of 19, Patrick Leigh Fermor walked across Europe in 1933-34. Here he has just entered a barn in Germany where he will spend a snowy winter’s night:
“The composite smell of snow, wood, dust, cobwebs, mangolds, beetroots, fodder, cattlecake and cows’ breath was laced with an ammoniac tang from the plip-plop and the splash that sometimes broke the rhythm of the munching and the click of horns.”
Book: A Time of Gifts
Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor
-George
“I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.”
Book: Bad Feminist
Author: Roxanne Gay
-Samantha
“That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.”
Book: Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking
Author: Franz Kafka, quoted by Susan Cain
-Cher
Oh what a pleasant world ‘twould be,
How easy we’d step thro’ it,
If all the fools who meant no harm,
Could manage not to do it!
Author: Francis Ledwidge (1887-1917), Irish soldier/poet
-Tom W
“But now the snowplough’s thunder signals itself, and I watch the revolving yellow light reflect upward into white prodigious air, and hear the great bruising barge roar and rumble past the house as a steel plow swooshes high waves of whiteness up and over the gutter almost to the front of the house, and buries the mailbox.”
Book: Seasons at Eagle Pond
Author: Donald Hall
-Cathy
“This is how a revolution begins. It begins when someone grows tired of standing idly by, waiting for history’s arc to bend toward justice, and instead decides to give it a swift shove.”
Book: Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality
Author: Jo Becker
-Sage
City of Readers
posted: , by Elizabeth
