Happy Tuesday everyone! I hope your week is going great. Otherwise, I hope that it will start looking up in the coming days. It is my fervent hope that it will usher in positive energy, blessings, healing, and forgiveness for everyone. As it is Tuesday, it is also time for a Top 5 Tuesday update. Top 5 Tuesday was originally created by Shanah @ the Bionic Bookworm but is now currently being hosted by Meeghan @ Meeghan Reads.

This week’s topic: Top 5 Favourite Books Quotes

Whew. This week’s prompt is quite a challenging one, to be honest. In the books that I have read, several lines and quotes stood out for me, some of which I share in my Quotable Quotes updates. I also round up my favorite quotes for the year and share them in my annual wrap-up. Nevertheless, here are some of my favorite book quotes. Happy reading!

“You see to be under the impression that there is a special breed of bad humans. There is no such thing as a stereotypical bad man in this world. Under normal conditions, everybody is more or less good, or, at least, ordinary. But tempt them, and they may suddenly change. That is what is so frightening about men.”

~ Natsume Sōseki, Kokoro

“Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that’s the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing. Nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him if he gives too much.”

~ Alan Paton, Cry the Beloved Country

“It was only when looking at a horizon that one’s eyes could move past all the obstacles that limited one’s vision to the present situation, that one’s eyes could range without limit to other times and other places, and perhaps this was all that freedom was, nothing more than the ability of the ciliary muscles in each eye—the finely calibrated muscles that contracted when focusing on objects close by and relaxed when focusing on objects far away—nothing more than the ability of these muscles to loosen and relax at will, allowing the things that existed in the distance, far beyond the place one actually was, to seem somehow within reach.”

~ Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“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 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 will just have to… be enough. So we can live with our failures without drowning.”

~ Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“I am but paper. Brittle and thin. I am held up to the sun, and it shines right through me. I get written on, and I can never be used again. These scratches are a history. They’re a story. They tell things for others to read, but they only see the words, and not what the words are written upon. I am but paper, and though there are many like me, none are exactly the same. I am parched parchment. I have lines. I have holes. Get me wet, and I melt. Light me on fire, and I burn. Take me in hardened hands, and I crumple. I tear. I am but paper. Brittle and thin.”

~ TJ Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

“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

“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 arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.”

~ Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea
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