Book Quotables

[The Scribbling Man]

I read a lot and often note down passages I like but it saddens me that they remain locked away in a digital notepad. I thought I'd open this thread for the sole purpose of quoting these and others, be it for admiring prose, provoking discussion, or humour, etc.. Others are welcome to join in.


Rules:

1. Post quotes only. Providing a bit of context is fine. But if you want to comment on someone else's or discuss something off the back of a quote, reply to it in the Discussion Thread.
2. Quote must be from a book
3. Said quote must be accompanied by the author and book name.
4. Non-fiction is allowed but, for obvious reasons, please don't quote from any political or religious texts.

(example post to follow)

 

[The Scribbling Man]

There was a click as the door shut behind him. There should have been a slam, but some doors never quite understand the situation.

- Terry Pratchett, Snuff

 

[Moe_Syzlak]

We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give ourselves away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms, blandly filled with excrement and heat? To what purpose?

- Infinite Jest; David Foster Wallace

 

[The Scribbling Man]

In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that last enormous, unanswerable question.

― Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan

 

[Adabisi]

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.

- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

If there's a better sentence in the English language, I haven't read it.