OT: Best Quotes From Your Favorite Books

[NUance]

Every one of the coaches at Briarcrest can recall the moment they realized that Big Mike was not any ordinary giant. For Huge Freeze the moment was a football practice at which this new boy, who had just been admitted on academic probation, had no business. He just wandered onto the field, picked up a huge tackling dummy—the thing weighed maybe fifty pounds—and took off with it, at high speed. “Did you see that!!!? Did you see the way that kid moved?” Hugh asked another coach. “He ran with that dummy like it weighed nothing.” Hugh’s next thought was that he had misjudged the boy’s mass. No human being who moved that quickly could possibly weigh as much as 300 pounds. “That’s when I had them weigh him,” said Hugh. “One of the coaches took him into the gym and put him on the scale, but he overloaded the scale.” The team doctor drove him away, and put him on a cattle scale: 344 pounds it read.

The Blind Side, by Michael Lewis

True story. Michael Oher, left OT, Baltimore Ravens. Drafted in the first round, 2009. Pretty good movie too. But the book is better.

.

 

[Comeds]

John Kennedy Toole - The Confederacy of Dunces.
don't know why, but this passage just makes me chuckle....

This, I should have known, was too much for his literal and sausage-like mind. … We lunged about in the garage like tow swashbucklers in an especially inept historical film for several moments, fork and cutlass clicking against each other madly. Realizing that my plastic weapon was hardly a match for a long fork wielded by a maddened Methuselah

This letter from that book had me laughing out loud:

Mr. I. Abelman, Mongoloid, Esq.:
We have received via post your absurd comments about our trousers, the comments revealing, as they did, your total lack of contact with reality. Were you more aware, you would know or realize by now that the offending trousers were dispatched to you with our full knowledge that they were inadequate so far as length was concerned. "Why? Why?" you are in your incomprehensible babble, unable to assimilate stimulating concepts of commerce into your retarded and blighted worldview.

The trousers were sent to you (1) as a means of testing your initiative (A clever, wide-awake business concern should be able to make three-quarter length trousers a by-word of masculine fashion. Your advertising and merchandising programs are obviously faulty.) and (2) as a means of testing your ability to meet the standards requisite in a distributor of our quality product. (Our loyal and dependable outlets can vend any trouser bearing the Levy label no matter how abominable their design and construction. You are apparently a faithless people.)

We do not wish to be bothered in the future by such tedious complaints. Please confine your correspondence to orders only. We are busy and dynamic organization whose mission needless effrontery and harassment can only hinder.

If you ****** us again, sir, you may feel the sting of the lash across your pitiful shoulders.

Yours in anger,

Gus Levy, Pres.

 

[herky]

Mine isn't so much a quote as it is a poem.

I sit beside the fire and think...

by J. R. R. Tolkien

I sit beside the fire and think
of all that I have seen,
of meadow-flowers and butterflies
In summers that have been;

Of yellow leaves and gossamer
in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun
and wind upon my hair.

I sit beside the fire and think
of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring
that I shall ever see.

For still there are so many things
that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring
there is a different green.

I sit beside the fire and think
of people long ago,
and people who will see a world
that I shall never know.

But all the while I sit and think
of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door.

 

[beantownmaniac]

I guess Penthouse Forum doesn't count, huh?

 

[Comeds]

I find I am excited, so excited I can hardly hold the pencil in my trembling hand. I think it is the excitement that only a free man can feel, a free man starting a long journey whose conclusion in uncertain.

I hope Andy is down there.

I hope I can make it across the border.

I hope to see my friend and shake his hand.

I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams.

I hope.

 

[KillerVee]

"Good Omens" by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman has a million good quotes.

Good Omens - Wikiquote

 

[GagneFire12]

You're a wizard, Harry.

 

[puckhead]

I find I am excited, so excited I can hardly hold the pencil in my trembling hand. I think it is the excitement that only a free man can feel, a free man starting a long journey whose conclusion in uncertain.

I hope Andy is down there.

I hope I can make it across the border.

I hope to see my friend and shake his hand.

I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams.

I hope.

I dig that open ending, rather than what the movie did. (still very good movie of course)

 

[sbb122]

I find I am excited, so excited I can hardly hold the pencil in my trembling hand. I think it is the excitement that only a free man can feel, a free man starting a long journey whose conclusion in uncertain.

I hope Andy is down there.

I hope I can make it across the border.

I hope to see my friend and shake his hand.

I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams.

I hope.

Between that novella and Boys Life i can't decide which one was the best thing i have ever read.

 

[IPostedWhat]

"He came back to my mouth and I kissed him, tasting myself, which he tasted too. I pushed him back and kissed his bare

and all the way down to the top of his jeans. He moaned and stared down at me, wanting me to take his

in my mouth. He thrust his hips out a little until I unzipped his jeans and held his

in my hands. I marveled at the size of it for a moment, wondering if it would hurt when he

put it in because it was so big. I bent down and gave him a little of what he'd given me. He held onto my head for a while but then suddenly

grabbed me up under the arms and pulled me away from it. It was as if what I was doing was too much to handle."

 

[Ho_Brah]

I like where this is going!!!

 

[KillerVee]

Whoa.

 

[Ho_Brah]

 

[sabresfaninthesouth]

A favorite of mine:

Society invents a spurious convoluted logic tae absorb and change people whae's behaviour is outside its mainstream. Suppose that ah ken aw the pros and cons, know that ah'm gaunnae huv a short life, am ay sound mind etcetera, etcetera, but still want tae use smack? They won't let ye dae it. They won't let ye dae it, beacuse its seen as a sign ay thir ain failure. The fact that ye jist simply choose tae reject whit they huv to offer. Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mouth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life.

Note that that's from the novel Trainspotting, not the modified version that appeared in the movie.

 

[Darkstone42]

Carl Sagan's speech "The Pale Blue Dot" also appeared in his book, Pale Blue Dot, essentially verbatim. The only difference is that in the book it's broken up a little bit in a few places. Anyway, here's Sagan delivering that speech.


I just thought this needed some more science nerve influence.

 

[loki604]

Thanks for the input everyone...some more than others...haha.

I've read The Confederacy of Dunces, Fear and Loathing, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Good Omens already, but some of these others look good...keep 'em coming if you have more, except IPW.

 

[jstewismybastardson]

nothing deep here ... a book I havent read but will very soon

from "Scorecasting" ... NFL referee Mike Carey on refereeing errors of omission versus refereeing errors of commission

"You might have a longer career as an official if you back off, but you won’t have a more accurate career.”

 

[Comeds]

I cannot remember whether I read Good Omens or not, I think I did. I know I read American Gods and liked it.

 

[IPostedWhat]

keep 'em coming if you have more, except IPW.

<giggety> considering the issue of which you are talking about.

 

[Comeds]

"He came back to my mouth and I kissed him, tasting myself, which he tasted too. I pushed him back and kissed his bare

and all the way down to the top of his jeans. He moaned and stared down at me, wanting me to take his

in my mouth. He thrust his hips out a little until I unzipped his jeans and held his

in my hands. I marveled at the size of it for a moment, wondering if it would hurt when he

put it in because it was so big. I bent down and gave him a little of what he'd given me. He held onto my head for a while but then suddenly

grabbed me up under the arms and pulled me away from it. It was as if what I was doing was too much to handle."

I read that one, it really ends with a bang!