Reading Out Loud

Every so often the reader comes across a quotation that makes him or her stop and reread it several times with that pleasurable feeling of having stumbled across a beautifully phrased sentence or a profound piece of punditry.  Sadly it doesn’t happen nearly as often as one would wish but when that bolt bursts from the blue, it makes the act – and the art – of reading even more rewarding than usual.  Here’s some of the ones I enjoy returning to every so often:

• It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love – Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez

• And aren’t the most beautiful follies the ones linked to love? – Fire in the Blood, Irene Nemirovsky

• The whole modern world has been shaped by lopsided outcomes. – Guns. Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond

• We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom. – War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

http://www.pixabay.com

• She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket. – Farewell, my Lovely, Raymond Chandler

• Give a man a fire and he’s warm for a day, but set fire to him and he’s warm for the rest of his life. – Jingo, Terry Pratchett

• Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means… – The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco

• And we danced, on the brink of an unknown future, to an echo from a vanished past – The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham

• You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language? – The Library of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges

• We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright. – A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

• I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul. – A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

• One reads alone, even in another’s presence. – If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino

• Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you. – Letters to a Young Contrarian, Christopher Hitchens

http://www.pixabay.com

• A life without investigation is not worth living – Phaedo, Plato

• It is the unrepentant worship of statistics that forms the true orthodoxy of any modern police department. – Homicide, A Year on the Killing Streets, David Simon

• If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then? – 1984, George Orwell

• How terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living. – The Solitaire Mystery, Jostein Gaarder