Classic Books 101

Below are excerpts that I've underlined, outlined, and circled from my favorite novels. Enjoy!

[classicbooks101]

The more I wonder the more I love.

The Color Purple, Alice Walker

[classicbooks101]

Anyhow, he say, you know how it is. You ast yourself one question, it lead to fifteen. I start to wonder why us need love. Why us suffer. Why us black. Why us men and women. Where do children really come from. It didn't take long to realize I didn't hardly know nothing. And that if you ast yourself why you black or a man or a women or a bush it don't mean nothing if you don't ast why you here, period.

The Color Purple, Alice Walker

[classicbooks101]

If you know your heart sorry that mean it not quite as spoilt as you think.

The Color Purple, Alice Walker

[classicbooks101]

There is so much we don't understand. And so much unhappiness comes because of that.

The Color Purple, Alice Walker

[classicbooks101]

Oh, Celie, unbelief is a terrible thing. And so is the hurt we cause others unknowingly.

The Color Purple, Alice Walker

[classicbooks101]

This life soon be over, I say. Heaven last all ways.

The Color Purple, Alice Walker

[classicbooks101]

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.

A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean

[classicbooks101]

The cast is so soft and slow that it can be followed like an ash settling from a fireplace chimney. One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful, even if it is only a floating ash.

A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean

[classicbooks101]

Many of us probably would be better fisherman if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for the world to become perfect.

A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean

[classicbooks101]

The hardest thing usually to leave behind, as was the case now, can loosely be called the conscience.

A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean

[classicbooks101]

It is a strange and wonderful and somewhat embarrassing feeling to hold someone in your arms who is trying to detach you from the earth and you aren't good enough to follow her.

A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean

[classicbooks101]

We consume ourselves in the idea we believe, we burn in the landscape we are moved by.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera

[classicbooks101]

Kristyna was so shy, so delicate, that love's functions lost their names in her presence. He dared use only the language of breathing and touching. Weren't they beyond the heaviness of words? Wasn't he burning within her?

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera

[classicbooks101]

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.

The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien

[classicbooks101]

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth. Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.

The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien

[classicbooks101]

Sometimes the bravest thing on earth was to sit through the night and feel the cold in your bones.

The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien

[classicbooks101]

Proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life.

The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien