Weekly Geeks: 2011-19 Quotables

This week's weekly geeks is all about our favorite quotes. I thought I would try to have a bookish quiz. Before you get too excited, there are no prizes to be won. But. I thought you might enjoy the challenge anyway! These twenty-two quotes come from twelve different authors. All of these quotes come from books I've read--and reviewed--this year. (January through June) How many authors or books can you guess correctly? Can you identify any of the characters speaking?

If you don't want the challenge of guessing the answers, I'd still love to hear from you. Which of these quotes do you like? I'd love to hear your thoughts about them!!!

1) "Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?"
"So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober. Which accounts for my talking so much."

2)  "As I've told you, I've got a very suspicious mind. My nephew Raymond tells me, in fun, of course--that I have a mind like a sink. He says that most Victorians have. All I can say is that the Victorians knew a good deal about human nature."

3) "If you learn how to tackle one subject--any subject--you've learnt how to tackle all subjects."

4) "The spoken word and the written--there is an astonishing gulf between them. there is a way of turning sentences that completely reverses the original meaning."

5) "I'm afraid that, observing human nature for as long as I have done, one gets not to expect very much from it. I daresay idle tittle-tattle is very wrong and unkind, but it is so often true, isn't it?"

6)"'The exact truth! Very few people do speak the exact truth. I have given up hoping for it.'"

7) "If the ears be too delicate to hear the truth, the mind will be too perverse to profit by it."

8) "Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages."

9) "Words, mademoiselle, are only the outer clothing of ideas."

10)"I learned (what I suppose I really knew already) that one can never go back, that one should not ever try to go back--that the essence of life is going forward. Life is really a one way street, isn't it?"

11) "I remember a saying of my Great Aunt Fanny's. I was sixteen at the time and thought it particularly foolish."
"Yes?" I inquired.
"She used to say, "The young people think the old people are fools--but the old people know the young people are fools!"

12) "But death does not stand at the end of life, it is all through it. It is the fear of losing, the knowledge of losing that makes love tender."

13) "A sermon is not to tell you what you are, but what you ought to be, and a novel should tell you not what you are to get, but what you'd like to get."

14) "One demands a little originality in these days, even from murderers," said Lady Swaffham. "Like dramatists, you know--so much easier in Shakespeare's time, wasn't it? Always the same girl dressed up as a man, and even that borrowed from Boccaccio or Dante or somebody. I'm sure if I'd been a Shakespeare hero, the very minute I saw a slim-legged young page-boy I'd have said: "Odsbodikins! There's that girl again!" 

15) "But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with him by instinct. No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays, without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately."

16) "My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn't have any excuse to be stupid. Close to everything a human being needed to know was somewhere in the library. There was plenty I needed to know."

17) "Every minute you spend with someone gives them a part of your life and takes part of theirs."

18) "No man was ever taken to hell by a woman unless he already had a ticket in his pocket, or at least had been fooling around with timetables."

19)  "But he had long ago determined that he would work where he was most needed, in the midst of turmoil, even in war. He would not allow his mind to be delicate nor his heart remote."

20) "Nursery rhyme riddles had been as much a part of my younger years as they had anyone else's. I suppose it was these little rhymes, learned at an early age, that taught me to be good at puzzles. I've recently come to the conclusion that the nursery rhyme riddle is the most basic form of the detective story. It's mystery stripped of all but the essential facts."

21) "Think about the happiness of those around you, and your own will come without thinking."

22) "I am careful with my opinions, sir; they are my bread and butter and the main source of my self-esteem."

© 2011 Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews