(Notable Quotables is a meme brought to you by the Bewitched Bookworms. Every Monday you’re invited to share a favorite quote or two from the books you’ve been reading. Wanna join the fun? Clicking the image takes you to this week’s post.)
I recently attended the funeral of Best Friend’s paternal grandfather. I never met Grandpa B., but after hearing all the wonderful things he said and did, I really wish I had. Alzheimers is a terrible disease, and I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to lose a parent before they even pass away.
I never met Grandpa B., but his spirit and intelligence lives on, especially in the things he said:
“Sometimes silence isn’t golden; sometimes it’s just plain yellow.”
How can I miss someone I never even knew?
This next quote is the opening paragraphs from Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, a novel I read my Sophomore year of high school. I love that the first line is a metaphor for the entire story; I also love the imagery and the way the words feel in my mouth as I read them aloud.
“Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.
First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. This forest eats itself and lives forever.”
And although I haven’t yet found an Ursula K. LeGuin book that I love to pieces, I appreciate her love of story, and of the written word and its readers.
“The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.”
A bit of a mish-mash of quotes today. It was a long weekend, so hopefully my thoughts will collect themselves over the next few days.
What are you reading this week? Share your favorite snippets in the comments!
