Five Favorite: Quotes

“Five Favorite” is a feature on thewasofshall where I lay out my five favorite “x”. Sometimes they’re relevant to a season or holiday, mostly they’re not. It’s an all-around fun excuse to give my 100% amazingly awesome opinion. To see previous topics, click here.

Quotes are tricky. What makes a reader dog-ear a page to come back to? Underline a string of words? Write them down? Memorize them? Half of the things I think I want to savor, I end up re-reading and then deciding they aren’t worth the effort it would take to save. But the five below, those are some of my favorite.

I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation.  It is too long ago.  I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

I watched her for a long time, memorizing her shoulders, her long-legged gait.  This was how girls left.  They packed up their suitcases and walked away in high heels.  They pretended they weren’t crying, that it wasn’t the worst day of their lives.  That they didn’t want their mothers to come running after them, begging their forgiveness, that they wouldn’t have gone down on their knees and thanked God if they could stay.

White Oleander by Janet Fitch

Sara waited a respectful time, knowing there was nothing she could do to ease the woman’s pain. Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone. It was like a room without doors, and what happened in that room, all the anger and the pain you felt, was meant to stay there, nobody’s business but yours.

The Passage by Justin Cronin

“Tell me, then,” she said, unbuckling her seat belt and putting her arm around his waist. “Tell me now, won’t you ever wonder what it would have been like to be with someone else?”
“It would be less,” he said.
“Less?”
He looked over at her, just for a second, sitting sideways in her bucket seat, and squeezed the steering wheel. “It would have to be. I already love you so much. I already feel like something in my chest is going to pop when I see you. I couldn’t love anyone more than I do you, it would kill me. And I couldn’t love anyone less because it would always feel like less. Even if I loved some other girl, that’s all I would ever think about, the difference between loving her and loving you.”

Attachments by Rainbow Rowell

When they turned, Pelletier and Espinoza saw an older woman in a white blouse and black skirt, a woman with a figure like Marlene Dietrich, as Pelletier would say much later, a woman who despite her years was still as strong willed as ever, a woman who didn’t cling to the edge of the abyss but plunged into it with curiosity and elegance.  A woman who plunged into the abyss sitting down.

2666 by Roberto Bolaño

Have your own five favorite quotes? Let me know!