My 2018 18 Most Memorable Book Quotes (Part II)

Readers,

2018 is about to draw to a close, hence, it is now time to look back to the year that was, at least in terms of reading. After having had a slow year in 2017, I picked up the momentum in 2018. In total, I was able to read 63 books in twelve months. This is in stark comparison to the measly 43 books I had in 2017. Nonetheless, I had a great time in 2017 but even better one in 2018 as I have had many great reads.

This book wrap up is a part of a mini-series which will feature the following:

1. My 2018 Top 10 Most Notable Books
2. My 2018 Eight Not-So Favorite Reads
3. My 2018 18 Most Memorable Book Quotes (Part I)
4. My 2018 18 Most Memorable Book Quotes (Part II)
5. My 2019 10 Books I Look Forward To

Through 63 books, I was able to cull numerous memorable quotes and lines from a wide range of themes and subjects such as death, love, finding one’s self, dealing with grief, and ultimately, life. From these hundreds of memorable lines and quotes, I have rounded up some of the most thought-provoking and memorable quotations. Since there are too many memorable lines from the year, I am sharing 36 lines in total in two installments of 18 each. This is the second installment; for the first part, you can click on the link provided above.

Happy Reading!

---

“His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. he ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough.” ~ J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature; leave life to it unhindered, let life defend itself in it; it will do more than if you paralyse it, encumbering it with remedies. Our body is a perfect watch, meant to go for a certain time the watchmaker has not the power of opening it, he can only handle it in fumbling fashion, blindfolded.” ~ Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.” ~ Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Love? What is love? Love hinders death. Love is life. All, all that I understand, I understand only because I love. All is, all exists only because I love. All is bound u pin love alone. Love is God and dying means for me a particle of love, to go back to the universal and eternal source of love.” ~ Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“There is nothing, nothing more certain but the nothingness of all that is comprehensible to us and the grandeur of something incomprehensible, but more important.” ~ Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place, and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating on anything is very hard work.” ~ David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“When people call it that I always get pissed off because I always think depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the window sighing or just lying around. A state of not caring about anything. A kind of blue kind of peaceful state.” ~ David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

 

“But in the end, back she comes. There’s no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out; enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly.” ~ Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“But thoughtless ingratitude is the armor of the young; without it, how would they ever get through life? The old wish the young well, but they wish them ill also: they would like to eat them up, and absorb their vitality and remain immortal themselves. Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past – the past of others, loaded on their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.” ~ Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“The past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, n more than that.” ~ John Banville, The Sea

“Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed quietus.” ~ John Banville, The Sea

“Although it was autumn and not summer, the dark-gold sunlight and the inky shadows, long and slender in the shape of felled cypresses, were the same, and there was the same sense of everything drenched and jewelled and the same ultramarine glitter on the sea. I felt inexplicably lightened; it was as if the evening, in all the drench and drip of its fallacious pathos, had temporarily taken over from the the burden of grieving.” ~ John Banville, The Sea

“Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretenses are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage.” ~ Iris Murdoch, The Sea, Thea Sea

“The I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangement are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whtever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.” ~ Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea

“Her last conscious thought was disgust at life; her senses had lied to her. The world was not made of energy and delight but of foulness, betrayal, and lassitude. Living was hateful, and death was no better, and from end to end of the universe this was the first and last and only truth.” ~ Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife

“We feel cold, but we don’t mind it, because we will not come to harm. And if we wrapped up against the cold, we wouldn’t feel other things, like the bright tingle of the stars, or the music of the aurora, or best of all the silky feeling of moonlight on our skin. It’s worth being cold for that.” ~ Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

“Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.” ~ Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife

“Even if it means oblivion, friends, I’ll welcome it, because it won’t be nothing. We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.” ~ Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass