"If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”- Thorin Oakenshield

The first sentence of Elmer Gantry: Elmer Gantry was drunk. Hard to beat it.

East of Eden:

> Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or a less degree. As a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience. A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them. Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have wings, but there is no reason to suppose it is the same feeling birds have. No, to a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish.

> You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.

The God of Small Things: > It didn’t matter that the story had begun, because Kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.

> That is their mystery and their magic.

“There was no more meaningless phrase in all of language than ‘Cheer up!’ The only way to get someone to cheer up was to help them forget, and saying ‘cheer up’ had quite the opposite effect, only reminding the person why he or she was depressed in the first place.” - from Spiral by Koji Suzuki.

It was a quote in the book called Life of Pi, "I suppose in the end, the whole of life becomes an act of letting go, but what always hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye." It was written by Yann Martel

“My parents got smushed to death in a boating accident when I was nine. Don’t worry - I’m not that sad about it.”

Opening line to Monsters by Emerald Fennell

El-ahrairah, your people cannot rule the world for I will not have it so. All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a thousand enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.,

Watership Down

“Since you always wonder, May you wander Wonderfully.”

from “May We All Get Booked” vMixiMv

“No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don’t you think? The young are eternally desperate,” he said frankly. “And books, they offer one hope —- that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that new universe, one is saved. “

• Anne Rice, Blackwood Farm

I've read too many books to have an all-time favorite, but here is my favorite from this month:

"Physicists claimed that time moved slower the farther you traveled toward the edge of the universe and that time also bent back upon itself, suggesting all that has ever been will repeat, perhaps endlessly. If so, there must also be a place along the continuum, at the end of one cycle and the start of the next, where the mouth and tail of time meet, where all that has been exists in a perfect timeless condition, where a husband and wife embrace in an endless kiss, where a father holds his child forever in his loving arms, where death has no dominion." - Dean Koontz, The Night Window

“A day will come when men will discover an alphabet in the eyes of chalcedonies, in the markings of the moth, and will learn in astonishment that every spotted snail has always been a poem.“

-Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps

"We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes - something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch..."

​

That's the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your vision of what is real. - The Adventures of Augie March (Bellow).

This quote sums up my love of literature (and de Botton):

“I explained — with the excessive exposition of a man spending a
lonely week at the airport — that I was looking for the sort of books in
which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt
but never before really understood; those that convey the secret,
everyday things that society at large prefers to leave unsaid; those
that make one feel somehow less alone and strange.” - Alain de Botton, A Week at the Airport

“As Helen, Edward and Louise grew up they had come to recognise their mother's outlook for what it was. They realised with discomfort that she was not so much egotistical as fettered –trapped within a perpetual adolescence. She moved forever within a landscape whose only point of reference was herself."

from "Passing On" by Penelope Lively

"Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Mary Oliver: The Summer Day

but I first read it in Cheryl Strayed's Wild

'Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive. There is a very old saying which goes: “Do what you must, come what may.” That amounts to saying in a different way that the result is not external to the good will which fulfills itself in aiming at it. If it came to be that each man did what he must, existence would be saved in each one without there being any need of dreaming of a paradise where all would be reconciled in death.'

-- Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir