It’s already the last Tuesday of the ninth month of the year! With everything that has been happening lately, one forgets to notice how time has been flying so fast. Oh well, Tuesday also means one thing, a Top Ten Tuesday update!

toptentuesday

Top Ten Tuesday is an original blog meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and is currently being hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s given topic: Top Ten Favorite Bookish Quotations.

I have a lot of favorite quotes. I often take note lyrical inspirational lines that I love. In fact, for some of the books I have read, I created a separate Quotable Quotes Post. Moreover, I round out my favorite quotes for the year and create a separate post. Honestly, it was a challenge picking up ten favorites but I will be posting some of my top picks. Happy reading!

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“As I walked in the dark through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness. I couldn’t help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in s a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousand more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by words and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.”

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
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“And I thought about how many people have loved those songs. And how many people got through a lot of bad times because of those songs. And how many people enjoyed good times with those songs. And how much those songs really mean. I think it would be great to have written one of those songs. I bet if I wrote one of them, I would be very proud. I hope the people who wrote those songs are happy. I hope they feel it’s enough. I really do because they’ve made me happy. And I’m only one person.”

~ Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
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“A person is nothing but his image. Philosophers can tell us that it doesn’t matter what the world thinks of us, that nothing matters but what we really are. But philosophers don’t understand anything. As long as we live with other people, we are only what other people consider us to be. Thinking about how others see us and trying to make our image as attractive as possible is considered a kind of dissembling or cheating. But does there exist another kind of direct contact between my self and their selves except through the mediation of the eyes? Can we possibly imagine love without anxiously following our image in the mind of the beloved? When we are no longer interested in how we are seen by the person we love, it means we no longer love.”

~ Milan Kundera, Immortality
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“If we are lucky the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast.”

~ Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
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“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
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“Then 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
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“Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also, but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own.”

~ Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
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“Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul. Power’s comings, and goings, from host to host, via war, marriage, ballot box, diktat, and accident of birth, are the plot of history. The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.”

~ David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks
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“You see, in life, sometimes nice things happen to good people. You don’t need to worry – they don’t need to worry – they don’t happen as often as they should. But when they do, it is up to the good people to just say thank you, and move on, and maybe consider that the person doing the nice things gets a bang out of it as well, and really isn’t in the mood to hear all the reasons that the person for whom he’s done the nice thing doesn’t think he deserves or isn’t worthy of it.”

~ Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
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“Its so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That’s above and beyond everything else, and it’s not a mental complaint-it’s a physical thing, like it’s physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. They don’t come out smooth and in conjunction with your brain the way normal people’s words do; they come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.”

~ Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story

I have a lot more but I am allowed Ten, at least for this post. Here’s one of my favorite lines from my more recent reads:

“We can’t change the world, and a lot of time we can’t even change people. No more than one bit at a time. So we can do what we can to help whenever we get the chance, sweetheart. We save those we can. We do our best. Then we try to find a way to convince ourselves that that will just have to… be enough. So wen can live with our failures without drowning.”

~ Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

How about you fellow reader? What are your favorite book quotations? I hope you can share in the comment box! Have a great day ahead! Have a good week ahead! Happy Tuesday everyone!