September
13
Poll: Favorite Book Quotes
I’ve always had a fondness for collecting quotes. I had notebook upon notebook full of quotes from the time I was young, probably more an attempt to keep the magic of the books I’d read with me long after I’d returned their well-worn pages to the library.
These days I see bookish quotes everywhere – in my Facebook and Twitter feeds, in pretty form on Pinterest and Instagram, on my students’ notebooks and t-shirts.
Today I happened to see one of my favorites posted on Instagram:
“So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.”
― Roald Dahl, Matilda
Couldn’t be more true words.
But it made me curious…what are Nerdy Nation’s favorite bookish quotes? Leave them in the comments below.
Nerdy Book Club 
‘Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remember to turn on the light’ -Professor Dumbledore
Not very ‘bookish’ but it’s my most favorite for so many reasons ❤️
Albus Dumbledore feels similar to Gandalf 😛
“Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. ” Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux
“You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” AAMilne On our classroom door this year http://mnosal.edublogs.org/2015/09/12/settling-into-the-new-school-year/
My god, that is amazing :O. Where is that written?
“Littmus W. Block figured the world was a sorry affair and that it had enough ugly things in it and what he was going to do was concentrate on putting something sweet in it.”
Kate DiCamillo Because of Winn-Dixie
Definitely one of my favorites: ‘A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.’ from George R.R. Martin.
I am not sure it was from GRRM 😀
Huh? The quote above most certainly is from George R.R. Martin, from “A Dance with Dragons”. It’s a play on words from a quote by Shakespeare, but the quote that I referenced (and the character Jojen, who said it) is from GRRM…?
I knew it….it’s a derived form of some other quote …..writers should pen some quotes themselves
Really hard to pick just one, but I just thumbed through my commonplace book and stopped on this from The Lorax, “Unless someone like you cares a whole lot, nothing is going to get better, it’s not.” I love this post!
“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
“We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
« On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur ; l’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. » – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Le petit prince)
JK Rowling and her inspirations -_-
While this isn’t a quote from a book, it is from Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail, quite possibly my favorite movie of all time, as it features Meg Ryan running a children’s bookstore filled with titles such as Ballet Shoes and the Betsy-Tacy books. At one point she says: “I started helping my mother after school here when I was six years old. And I used to watch her. And it wasn’t that she was just selling books, it was that she was helping people become whoever it was (that) they were going to turn out to be. Because when you read a book as a child it becomes part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your whole life does…”
I am making a PowerPoint using favorite book quotes to be shown between sessions at the Iowa Reading Conference in June 2016 in Ames
Please share it when you are done!
“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more so than our abilities”. ~Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
This one is my favorite!!
“Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs.” The first line of the first book in the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. These books are my comfort food, beautifully written, sweet, soulful and satisfying every time.
ABSOLUTELY! I a40, been reading these since I was 7, and I still take them out when I just want to feel comforted. 🙂
“If I were to command a general to turn into a seagull, and if the general did not obey, that would not be the general’s fault. It would be mine.” From The Little Prince of course
“Boundaries between noise and sound are conventions, I see now. All boundaries are conventions, national ones too. One may transcend any convention, if only one can first conceive of doing so.” ~ Robert Frobisher, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
“Some days are like that. Even in Australia.” I still say this to my teenagers when they are having a bad day. Many thanks to Judith Viorst. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.
Our version that I grew up with here in Australia said, “Some days are like that. Even in Timbuktu”…
“People live, and then they die, and as long as they do both things properly, there is nothing to regret.” Jack Reacher – Tripwire
“Read like a wolf eats.” Gary Paulsen. Posted in my classroom every year!
“First of all,” he said, “if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view [..] until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” (3.85-87) Atticus in To Kill A Mockingbird
I love this quote because it teaches us about compassion and empathy. It is an something I wish everyone strived for.
my favourite too))
Roald Dahl
“I was glad my father was an eye-smiler. It meant he never gave me a fake smile because it’s impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren’t feeling twinkly yourself. A mouth-smile is different. You can fake a mouth-smile any time you want, simply by moving your lips. I’ve also learned that a real mouth-smile always has an eye-smile to go with it. So watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you but his eyes stay the same. It’s sure to be a phony.” I love this quote. It reminds me to be an eye smiler with kids and staff at all times.
So far, aah, it is nearly impossible to choose:
“She gave him a wan smile. “And then you came, Eragon. You and Saphira. After hope had deserted me and I was about to be taken to Galbatorix in Uru’baen, a Rider appeared to rescue me. A rider and a dragon!”
“And Morzan’s son,” he said. “Both of Morzan’s sons.”
“Describe it how you will, it was such an improbable rescue, I occasionally think that I did go mad and that I’ve imagined everything since.”
― Christopher Paolini
So hard to pick just one…
“Like a shoe that has lost its mate is never worn again, I had lost my matching part and didn’t know how to run barefoot.”- Josie Jo Jensen in Running Barefoot by Amy Harmon
“A lawyer’s either a social engineer or he’s a a parasite on society.” -Charles Hamilton Houston in Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights by Genna Rae McNeil
“Humans haunt me.” Death the Narrator in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief.
“Vase-ISH?” Ramon looked closer. Then he studied all the drawings on Marisol’s walls and began to see them in a whole new way. “They do look….ish,” he said. from Ish by Peter H. Reynolds
“People are complicated. There is so much more to everybody than you realize.” (from ‘Code Name Verity’ by Elizabeth Wein)
From Sarah J. Maas’s Throne of Glass –
“Grinning, she whirled and moved through the main floor, running a hand across the dusty books. ‘I didn’t know assassins liked to read,’ Chaol called. If she were to die now, it would be in complete bliss.”
And – “‘Guards are of no use in a library.’ Oh, how wrong he was! Libraries were full of ideas – perhaps some of the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons.”
“What is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures and conversations?” ~Lewis Carroll from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
“If you had behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner…” Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austin
“Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect. -And that isn’t flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn’t have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.” Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
“And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.” Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
“I’m the Whether Man, not the Weather Man, for after all it’s more important to know whether there will be weather than what the weather will be.” ~The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
I have adored this quote since my fifth grade teacher, Mr. Coleman, introduced me to this book. I love the word play with homonyms, and it’s fun to say out loud!
Welcome, welcome, welcome, to the Land of Expectations! I love every single word in this book.
All time favorite: “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go!” I Can Read With My Eyes Shut by Dr. Seuss
And of course: “…and third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.” Twilight by Stephanie Meyer page 195
“In ways we never expect, books do transform us.” The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry…have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere — be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.
— Francie Nolan from A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN
“To do brave things, you don’t have to be hugely brave. You only have to be a little bit braver than you are scared.” from A Handful of Stars by Cynthia Lord. I always think this applies to so many of us trying to make changes in the education world just as much as it applies to our students.
“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“From my observation, the older you get, the more you like the word cozy.
That’s why most of the elderly wear pants with elastic waistbands. If they wear pants at all. This may explain why grandparents are in love with buying grand kids pajamas and bathrobes.”
― Holly Goldberg Sloan, Counting by 7s
“People always fear what they don’t understand, Evangeline. History proves that.”
― Libba Bray, The Diviners
“There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all.” ~~ Jacqueline Kennedy
It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.
–E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
Another favorite of mine (from part 2 of Fahrenheit 451): “‘We cannot tell the precise moment when a friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.'”
“It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.”
-Lev Grossman, The Magician’s Land
“…yes, books are like flypaper–memories cling to the printed page better than anything else.”
“…books have to be heavy because the whole world’s inside them…”
“Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn’t ask for anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly. ”
There are too many to list from Inkheart by Cornelia Funke.
“If you have good thoughts, they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.” -Roald Dahl, The Twits
“If every single person in this room made it a rule that wherever you are, whenever you can, you will try to act a little kinder than is necessary– the world really would be a better place. And if you do this, if you act just a little kinder than is necessary, someone else, somewhere, someday, may recognize in you, in every single one of you, the face of God.” -Mr. Tushman Wonder by R.J. Palacio
“If you are a dreamer come in
If you are a dreamer a wisher a liar
A hoper a pray-er a magic-bean-buyer
If youre a pretender come sit by my fire
For we have some flax golden tales to spin
Come in!
Come in!”
Shel Silverstein in Where the Sidewalk Ends. I know it’s poetry so may not “count,” but reading this was the first time I remember loving the printed word.
My favorite book quote is from Harry Potter – J.K. Rowling:
Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end. If not always in the way we expect it.
– Luna Lovegood