So,
Darby bought me a Kindle for my birthday last year.
It sat on my desk unused for a few months, partially because I was too busy in school to do much reading, and partly because I wasn't sure if I would like reading off a screen. But eventually I starting figuring out how to buy books, and pretty soon my Kindle and I were inseparable.
This summer I started consuming a ridiculous number of books–the entire Game of Thrones series, virtually every Kurt Vonnegut book, as well as non-fiction books like Guns, Germs and Steel and In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. I read some Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and lately I've been working my way through a pair of Hitchens books.
One of the best I've read lately? Cloud Atlas.
Anyways, a few months ago I figured out how to highlight and compile quotes from these books. I used to ruin all my books, going through with highlighters or marking in the margins. The digital equivalent is a lot tider, and more efficient.
Now I have a decent collection, and I thought I'd start sharing them on this blog. Check them out after the jump:
#1. Kurt Vonnegut
"Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God." - Cat's Cradle
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." - Mother Night
"So it goes." -Slaughterhouse-Five
"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile." -Mother Night
"I doubt if there has ever been a society that has been without strong and young people eager to experiment with homicide, provided no very awful penalties are attached to it." -Mother Night
#2. David Mitchell
"No wonder the poor are all socialists." -Cloud Atlas
"A half-read book is a half-finished love affair." -Cloud Atlas
"Whoever opining `money can't buy you happiness' obviously had far too much of the stuff." - Cloud Atlas
"How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner." -Cloud Atlas
"Oh, aging is ruddy unbearable! There I's we were yearn to breathe the world's air again, but can they ever break out from these calcified cocoons? Oh, can they hell." -Cloud Atlas
"`In the morning.' Fate is fond of booby-trapping these three little words." - Cloud Atlas
"Behold your future, Cavendish the Younger. You will not apply for membership, but the tribe of the elderly will claim you." -Cloud Atlas
"Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Somni the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds." -Cloud Atlas
"Anticipating the end of the world is humanity's oldest pastime." -Cloud Atlas
"Writing is such a damn lonely sickness." - Cloud Atlas
"People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it'll no longer function." -Cloud Atlas
"The weak are meat the strong do eat." -Cloud Atlas
"The color of monotony is blue." -Cloud Atlas
#3. Christopher Hitchens
"The working assumption is that we should have no moral compass if we were not somehow in thrall to an unalterable and unchallengeable celestial dictatorship. What a repulsive idea!" - The Portable Atheist
"It has taken us a long time to shrug off this heavy coat of ignorance and fear, and every time we do there are self-interested forces who want compel us to put it back on again." -The Portable Atheist
"The fans of the tooth fairy do not bang on your door and try to convert you." -The Portable Atheist
"I myself have tried to formulate a position I call `anti-theist'. There are, after all, atheists who say they wish the fable were true but are unable to suspend the requisite disbelief, or have relinquished belief only with regret. To this I reply: who wishes that there was a permanent, unalterable celestial despotism that subjected us to continual surveillance and could convict us of thought-crime, and who regarded us as its private property even after we died? How happy we ought to be, at the reflection that there exists not a shred of respectable evidence to support such a horrible hypothesis." -The Portable Atheist
"The clergy are practically the most irresponsible of all talkers." -The Portable Atheist
"An evangelical preacher is not obliged to be well-read." -The Portable Atheist
"I am very aware that it makes a great difference to have had, in early life, a passionate lady in one own's corner." Hitch-22 (Talking about his mother)
"I will alway take it for granted that sexual moralizing by public figures is a sign of hypocrisy or worse, and most usually a desire to perform the very act that is most condemned." -Hitch-22
"The first real kick he gets from a cop is often a huge moment of truth to a young member of the middle class." -Hitch-22
"If you can give a decent speech in public or cut any kind of figure on a podium, then you need never dine or sleep alone." -Hitch-22
"The stages by which one mutates or pupates from one identity to another are not always evident while they are being undergone." -Hitch-22
"I had slowly realized that when male neighbours on airplanes or bar stools struck up conversation by asking about the `play offs', I didn't actually have to know or care anything about sports; it was merely an initial Y-chromosome attempt at an opening and one could get straight to sex or politics (or silence if desired) by acknowledging this an cutting out the middle-man subject." -Hitch-22
#4. Daniel Keyes
"A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger." -Flowers for Algernon
"Now I understand one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you've believed in all your life aren't true, and that nothing is what it appears to be." -Flowers for Algernon
"Spelling is not suppose to make sence." -Flowers for Algernon
"If your smart you can have lots of friends to talk to and you never get lonley by yourself all the time." -Flowers for Algernon
"A child says nothing matters, but it takes an adult to say it doesn't matter when nothing matters." -Flowers for Algernon
...
Well, that's it for the first installment. Hope you enjoyed the quotes.
Will!!
