What is your favourite quote / para from a book you have read?
This is for all the book lovers here. What is your favourite line/quote/paragraph from any book you have read. Can be fiction/non-fiction.
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"My Harvard Twenty-fifth Reunion is next month and I am scared to death.
Scared to face all my successful classmates, walking back on paths of glory, while I have nothing to show for my life except a few gray hairs.
Today a heavy, red-bound book arrived that chronicles all the achievements of The Class of ’58. It really brought home my own sense of failure.
I stayed up half the night just staring at the faces of the guys who once were undergraduates with me, and now are senators and governors, world-famous scientists and pioneering doctors.
Who knows which of them will end up on a podium in Stockholm?
Or the White House lawn?
And what’s amazing is that some are still married to their first wives.
A few of the most glittering successes were close friends of mine.
The roommate I once thought of as a fruitcake is the candidate likeliest to be our next Secretary of State. The future President of Harvard is a guy I used to lend my clothes to.
Another, whom we barely noticed, has become the musical sensation of our age. The bravest of them all laid down his life for something he believed in.
His heroism humbles me.
And I return, resplendent in my disappointment. I am the last Eliot of a great line to enter Harvard. My ancestors were all distinguished men.
In war, in peace, in church, in science, and in education. As recently as 1948, my cousin Tom received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
But the brilliance of the family tradition has grown dim with me. I don’t even hold a candle to Jared Eliot (Class of 1703), the man who introduced rhubarb to America. Yet I do have one tenuous connection with my noble forebears.
They were diarists.
My namesake, Reverend Andrew Eliot, ’37, while bravely tending his parishioners, kept a daily record –still extant –describing what the Revolutionary War was like during the siege of Boston in 1776.
The moment the city was liberated, he hurried to a meeting of the Harvard Board of Overseers to move that General George Washington be given an honorary doctorate.
His son inherited his pulpit and his pen, leaving a vivid account of America’s first days as a republic.
Naturally, there’s no comparison, but I’ve been keeping notebooks all my life as well.
Maybe that’s the single remnant of my heritage.
I’ve observed history around me, even if I didn’t make any of it.
Meanwhile, I’m still scared as hell."
I read this in ESPNCricinfo's biography of Rahul Dravid: Timeless Steel. It is something that has stayed with me.
"Dravid's second century of the tour had begun with a bruising hour of play on Friday evening. He was hit on his wrist, jammed in the fingers, worked over. He kept batting through two more sessions, sometimes hobbling, sometimes cramping but always pushing forward. He was hit on the wrist again this morning, and after the initial spasm, his hand lost sensation for a few overs. What Dravid never lost was the purpose of what he had to do: bat one ball at a time."
''My dad gave me advice on how to negotiate my way through life. 'Never make a decision until you have to.’
He'd also warn me that even if I was in a position of strength, whether at work or in relationships, I had to play fair.
'Just because you're in the driver's seat, doesn't mean you have to run people over,' he'd say."
I have been sharing this poem with an evangelical zeal ever since I came across it. It always makes me feel better about life and the world.
It's long (sorry!), but makes me wish it were longer.
Say Yes, by Andrea Gibson
When two violins are placed in a room if a chord on one violin is struck
the other violin will sound the note
If this is your definition of hope
This is for you
The ones who know how powerful we are
Who know we can sound the music in the people around us
simply by playing our own strings
for the ones who sing life into broken wings
open their chests and offer their breath
as wind on a still day when nothing seems to be moving
Spare those intent on proving god is dead
For you when your fingers are red
from clutching your heart
so it will beat faster
For the time you mastered the art of giving yourself for the sake of someone else
For the ones who have felt what it is to crush the lies
and lift truth so high the steeples bow to the sky
This is for you
This is also for the people who wake early to watch flowers bloom
Who notice the moon at noon on a day when the world
has slapped them in the face with its lack of light
For the mothers who feed their children first
and thirst for nothing when they’re full
This is for women
And for the men who taught me only women bleed with the moon
but there are men who cry when women bleed
men who bleed from women’s wounds
and this is for that moon
on the nights she seems hung by a noose
For the people who cut her loose
and for the people still waiting for the rope to burn
about to learn they have scissors in their hands
This is for the man who showed me
the hardest thing about having nothing
is having nothing to give
Who said the only reason to live is to give ourselves away
So this is for the day we’ll quit or jobs and work for something real
We’ll feel for sunshine in the shadows
look for sunrays in the shade
This is for the people who rattle the cage that slave wage built
and for the ones who didn’t know the filth until tonight
But right now are beginning songs that sound something like
people turning their porch lights on and calling the homeless back home
This is for all the shit we own
and for the day we’ll learn how much we have
when we learn to give that shit away
This is for doubt becoming faith
For falling from grace and climbing back up
For trading our silver platters for something that matters
like the gold that shines from our hands when we hold each other
This is for the grandmother who walked a thousand miles on broken glass
to find that single patch of grass to plant a family tree
where the fruit would grow to laugh
For the ones who know the math of war
has always been subtraction
so they live like an action of addition
For you when you give like every star is wishing on you
and for the people still wishing on stars
this is for you too
This is for the times you went through hell so someone else wouldn’t have to
For the time you taught a 14 year old girl she was powerful
This is for the time you taught a 14 year old boy he was beautiful
For the radical anarchist asking a republican to dance
cause what’s the chance of everyone moving from right to left
if the only moves they see are NBC and CBS
This is for the no becoming yes
For scars becoming breath
For saying I love you to people who will never say it to us
For scraping away the rust and remembering how to shine
For the dime you gave away when you didn’t have a penny
For the many beautiful things we do
For every song we’ve ever sung
For refusing to believe in miracles
because miracles are the impossible coming true
and everything is possible
This is for the possibility that guides us
and for the possibilities still waiting to sing
and spread their wings inside us
‘Cause tonight saturn is on his knees
proposing with all of his ten thousand rings
that whatever song we’ve been singing we sing even more
The world needs us right now more than it ever has before
Pull all your strings
Play every chord
If you’re writing letters to the prisoners
start tearing down the bars
If you’re handing our flashlights in the dark
start handing our stars
Never go a second hushing the percussion of your heart
Play loud
Play like you know the clouds have left too many people cold and broken
and you’re their last chance for sun
Play like there’s no time for hoping brighter days will come
Play like the apocalypse is only 4…3…2
but you have a drum in your chest that could save us
You have a song like a breath that could raise us
like the sunrise into a dark sky that cries to be blue
Play like you know we won’t survive if you don’t
but we will if you do
Play like saturn is on his knees
proposing with all of his ten thousand rings
that we give every single breath
this is for saying–yes
This is for saying yes
"Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth." –Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
This is my second shameless plug for my favourite fiction book. :)
I have like hundreds of favourite quotes. Here’s one:
“It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn't make everything all right. It didn't make ANYTHING all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight. But I'll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting.”
"To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation".
- Yann Martel, 'life of Pi'
"You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better. We see that in sports all the time, don’t we? The tennis challenger starts strong but soon loses confidence in his playing. The champion racks up the games. But in the final set, when the challenger has nothing left to lose, he becomes relaxed again, insouciant, daring. Suddenly he’s playing like the devil and the champion must work hard to get those last points. So it was with me. To cope with a hyena seemed remotely possible, but I was so obviously outmatched by Richard Parker that it wasn’t even worth worrying about. With a tiger aboard, my life was over.
- Yann Martel, 'life of Pi'
“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Kafka on the Shore"Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth." –Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
This is my second shameless plug for my favourite fiction book. :)
I'm sorry, but I'm back with some other favourites of mine.
"...she sat staring at her reflection as if it were a face she might not see again and ought to memorise; then she could leave it behind, in the Fontaines de Médicis, and go in search of a new one."
-Journey to Ithaca, Anita Desai
"The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you already know"
-1984, George Orwell
"....it was easier for him to bear other people's pain than his own"
-Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Màrquez
"It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life it purloined"
-The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
I will stop now; thank you for reminding of all the books I need to revisit. :)
Some of my favorite quotes from the bookBindra, Abhinav; Rohit Brijnath.A Shot At History : My Obsessive Journey to Olympic Gold
- Unlike many sports, here perfection is not elusive, it is, in fact, a requirement.
- I have to make my life difficult, break it down into minute detail and master each part.
- Only sport can do this to you, strip you naked in an instant in public, step on your dreams, make four years of practice incidental.
- In our world, even hitting the bullseye isn’t enough. We have to hit a particular part of the bullseye, we have to exist on the very edge of perfection.
- You have to stretch yourself to the limit and leave very little to chance. Only then does reward arrive.
- Let me explain. My trigger is sensitive, it takes just 30 grams of pressure to set it off. Almost to the point where, if a platoon of arguing bees sat on it, it will fire. But I have enough control in my finger to pull it back 20 grams and then hold it, hold it, hold it, and then exert a little more to fire, as gently as a butterfly’s breath. It’s cool.
“We
are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going
to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could
have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day
outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include
greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because
the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of
actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our
ordinariness, that are here.”
Originally written by Richard Dawkins. But I came across this para in the 'Sense of Style' by Steven Pinker.
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