148. LITTLE WOMEN

Louisa May Alcott 1868

Forgive me if the quotes I posted sound preachy. I am merely passing what seems to be the legacy of this book,  for I remember the same words of wisdom from my mother, uttered to me and my siblings when we were growing up.  In this can't-help-but-love novel, four sisters: Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy, with their own unique and different personalities, come of age with the utmost love and guidance of their beloved parents. At turns funny, sad and bittersweet, this wholesome story is one delightful read. 

'"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.'(opening line)

'Poor Meg seldom complained, but a sense of injustice made her feel bitter toward every one sometimes, for she had not yet learned to know how rich she was in the blessings which alone can make life happy.'(39)

"When you feel discontented, think over your blessings, and be grateful."(47)

"You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading them, for conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long; even if it is, the consciousness of possessing and using it well should satisfy one, and the great charm of all power is modesty."(73)

"My dear, don't let the sun go down upon your anger; forgive each other, help each other, and begin again to-morrow."(79)

"I've been trying to cure it for forty years, and have only succeeded in controlling it. I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo; but I have learned not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take another forty years to do so."(82)

"Well, I am happy, and I won't fret; but it does seem as if the more one gets the more one wants, doesn't it?"(87)

'"Money is a needful and precious thing, -- and, when well used, a noble thing, -- but I never want you to think it is the first or only prize to strive for. I'd rather see you poor men's wives, if you were happy, beloved, contented, than queens on thrones, without self-respect and peace."(101)

"Have regular hours for work and play; make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well. Then youth will be delightful, old age will bring few regrets, and life become a beautiful success, in spite of poverty."(121)

"If rank and money come with love and virtue, also, I should accept them gratefully, and enjoy your good fortune; but I know, by experience, how much genuine happiness can be had in a plain little house, where the daily bread is earned, and some privations give sweetness to the few pleasures."(207)

'With her eyes on her work, Jo answered soberly, "I want something new; I feel restless, and anxious to be seeing, doing, and learning more than I am. I brood too much over my own small affairs, and need stirring up, so, as I can be spared this winter, I'd like to hop a little way, and try my wings."(337-338)

'She thought she was prospering finely; but, unconsciously, she was beginning to desecrate some of the womanliest attributes of a woman's character. She was living in bad society; and, imaginary though it was, its influence affected her, for she was feeding her heart and fancy on dangerous and unsubstantial food, and was fast brushing the innocent bloom from her nature by a premature acquaintance with the darker side of life, which comes soon enough to all of us.'(358)

'She began to see that character is a better possession than money, rank, intellect, or beauty; and to feel that if greatness is what a wise man has defined it to be, "truth, reverence, and good will," then her friend Friedrich Bhaer was not only good, but great.'(362)

"... but girls are so queer you never know what they mean. They say No when they mean Yes, and drive a man out of its wits just for the fun of it," returned Laurie, entrenching himself behind an undeniable fact.'(371)

'They did feel it, yet neither spoke of it; for often between ourselves and those nearest and dearest to us there exists a reserve which it is very hard to overcome.'(380)

"I like peeps better than the gulls: they are not so wild and handsome, but they seem happy, confiding little things. I used to call them my birds, last summer; and mother said they reminded her of me, -- busy, quaker-colored creatures, always near the shore, and always chirping that contented little song of theirs. You are the gull, Jo, strong and wild, fond of the storm and the wind, flying far out to sea, and happy all alone. Meg is the turtledove, and Amy is like the lark she writes about, trying to get up among the clouds, but always dropping down into its nest again."(384)

"That is the secret of our home happiness: he does not let business wean him from the little cares and duties that affect us all, and I try not to let domestic worries destroy my interest in his pursuits. We each do our part alone in many things, but at home we work together, always."(400-401)

'Precious and helpful hours for Jo, for now her heart received the teaching that it needed; lessons in patience were so sweetly taught her that she could not fail to learn them; charity for all, the lovely spirit that can forgive and truly forget unkindness, the loyalty to duty that makes the hardest easy, and the sincere faith that fears nothing, but trusts undoubtingly.'(425)

'Amy's lecture did Laurie good; though, of course, he did not own till long afterward; men seldom do, for when women are the advisers, the lords of creation don't take the advice till they have persuaded themselves that it is just what they intended to do; then they act upon it, and, if it succeeds, they give the weaker vessel half the credit of it; if it fails, they generously give her the whole.'(429)

'But, you see, Jo wasn't a heroine; she was only a struggling human girl, like hundreds of others, and she just acted out her nature, being sad, cross, listless, or energetic, as the mood suggested. It's highly virtuous to say we'll be good, but we can't do it all at once, and it takes a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull all together, before some of us even get our feet set in the right way.'(444)

'Mr. Bhaer could read several languages, but he had not learned to read women yet.'(481)

'Four little chests all in a row,

Dim with dust, and worn by time,

All fashioned and filled, long ago,

By children now in their prime.'(487)

"Into each life some rain must fall..."(501)

Little, Brown and company, Uniform edition
502 pages
Book owned
Book qualifies for: the Victorian Literature Challenge 2011
                              100+ Reading Challenge

a YEAR already!!

a thousand Books with Quotes is ONE year old!!!!!

March 27, 2010 - It was a Saturday morning when I woke up with an idea for a blog to remember the best books I have read. I started with the book I just finished reading at that time - The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. Back then, I only quoted words of wisdom, and in subsequent books started quoting passages of my favorite scenes and characters. Hopefully, someday, I can reread those earlier books and update the quotes, and maybe, even completely change some of the books as my taste evolves. 

March 27, 2011 - As I look back on my blog that first day, 147 books with quotes posts ago, and look at it now, one incredible word comes to mind - WOW! Wow for all the wonderful book bloggers who posted great reviews and gave me ideas for my next reads. Wow for all the gracious readers and visitors who took the time to stop by. Wow for all the thoughtful and consistent commenters who kept in touch and never failed to encourage me to do yet another post. Thank you, I really appreciate all your support.  And even though I have read that one should 'blog even if nobody reads you', I feel so much better knowing there are a few who do.

147. MARY POPPINS

P.L. Travers 1934
illustrated by Mary Sheppard

Although I must admit, I read this children's book with the Disney version's music humming in my head, this book is so different, in a good way, from the movie. Mary Poppins is the stern and slightly self-centered magical nanny who brings adventures to Jane and Michael Bank's life as they meet a cast of many adorable characters, each imparting their own subtle messages: the Match-Man who brings his paintings to life, Andrew the pedigree dog who wishes to be common, Mr Wigg who couldn't stop laughing, the Red cow who couldn't stop dancing, the Bird Woman who couldn't stop singing, the wise King Hamadryad and the pleiadian Maia. 

'If you want to find Cherry-Tree Lane all you have to do is ask the Policeman at the cross-roads. He will push his helmet slightly to one side, scratch his head thoughtfully, and then he will point his huge white-gloved finger and say: "First to your right, second to your left, sharp right again, and you're there. Good morning."(opening lines)

'With her large bag in her hands she slid gracefully up the banisters, and arrived at the landing at the same time as Mrs. Banks. Such a thing, Jane and Michael knew, had never been done before. Down, of course, for they had often done it themselves. But up -- never! They gazed curiously at the strange new visitor.'(8-9)

'But Mary Poppins's eyes were fixed upon him, and Michael suddenly discovered that you could not look at Mary Poppins and disobey her. There was something strange and extraordinary about her -- something that was frightening and at the same time most exciting.'(11-12)

"Mary," he said, "I got an idea! A real idea. Why don't we go there -- right now -- this very day? Both together, into the picture. Eh, Mary? And still holding her hands he drew her right out of the street, away from the iron railings and the lamp-posts, into the very middle of the picture. Pff! There they were, right inside it!'(21)

'Mr Wigg went on calmly. "You see, it's this way. I'm a cheerful sort of man and very disposed to laughter. You wouldn't believe, either of you, the number of things that strike me as being funny. I can laugh at pretty nearly everything. I can."(32-33)

'The Red Cow, drawing in her breath, gave one huge tremendous jump and the earth fell away beneath her... She herself shot upwards through the sky, with the stars spinning around her like great golden plates, and presently, in blinding light, she felt the cold rays of the moon upon her. She shut her eyes as she went over it, and as the dazzling gleam passed behind her and she bent her head towards the earth again, she felt the star slip down her horn. With a great rush it fell off and went rolling down the sky. And it seemed to her that as it disappeared into the darkness great chords of music came from it and echoed though the air.'(77)

"Feed the Birds, Tuppence a Bag! Feed the Birds, Tuppence a Bag! Feed the Birds, Tuppence a bag, Tuppence a Bag!" Over the over again, the same thing, in a high chanting voice that made the words seem like a song.'(106)

"You'll forget because you can't help it.. There never was a human being that remembered after the age of one -- at the very latest -- except of course, Her." And he jerked his head over his shoulder at Mary Poppins.'(140)

"And after all," he went on, flicking his terrible little forked tongue in and out as he spoke, "it may be that to eat and be eaten are the same thing in the end. My wisdom tells me that this is probably so. We are all made of the same stuff, remember, we of the Jungle, you of the City. The same substance composes us -- the tree overhead, the stone beneath us, the bird, the beast, the star -- we are all one, all moving to the same end."(172-173)

"... the whole point of Christmas is that things should be given away, isn't it?"(188)

Scholastic Book Services edition
206 pages
Book owned
Post book cover picture from Goodreads
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge

146. the LOTUS EATERS

Tatjana Soli 2010

This is the first book I have read about the Vietnam war, a subject that is painful to talk about. This book certainly added to the intensity and poignancy of it. The novel starts and ends in April, 1975, the fall of Saigon, with a flashback in between. In the heart of the story is Helen, a photojournalist, who epitomizes the ambivalence attached to this war. She, too, is torn in so many ways: between the Saigon she has come to love and America, her homeland, between the married lover Darrow and the soft-spoken mysterious Linh, between her sympathy to the innocents, both Vietnamese and American, and all against the equally conflicting imagery, savagely torn but beautiful, green and lush Vietnam.

'The city teetered in a dream state. Helen walked down the deserted street. The quiet was eerie. Time running out. A long-handled barber's razor, cradled in the nest of its strop, lay on the ground, the blade's metal grabbing the sun,'(opening lines)

'She looked at the various poses of the Buddha in his enlightenment. Saigon in utter darkness this last night of the war. A gestating monster. Her letter to Linh had been simple: I love you more than life, but I had to see the end.'(41-42)

'Superstition held that if one traveled too far from one's birthplace, one's soul would fly out and return home, leaving one nothing more than a ghost, but if that were true the whole world would be filled with nothing more than wanderers, empty shades.'(42-43)

'For the first time since Linh had left his village, he felt something move within him, the anesthesia of grief briefly lifted. What he felt was fear for Darrow. To survive this war, one should not be brave.'(67-68)

'Why is it, you suppose, that the people who are supposed to love us the most are precisely the ones who try to stop us doing what we love? "(89)

"Sometimes you have to fulfill a promise in order to deserve the love you're given. Don't you think it's a calling to live in danger just to capture the face of those who are suffering? To show their invisible lives to the world?"(89)

'She did not think it was true that women fell in love all at once, but rather that they fell in love through repetition, just the way someone became brave.'(100)

'... the mystery came in its own language to each person, and you had to decipher it on your own.'(138-139)

'Their lives fell into a rhythm of sunrises and sunsets, of wind whispering through growing rice, of high white morning clouds dissolving to the metallic sheen of noontime heat. Their movements slowed to the speed of the thick, spreading rivers, the water buffalo's heavy footfalls... Their thoughts, too, slowed, filled with the sunlight through palm fronds, heat loosening muscles, tension unwinding from their bodies, until the war was something far outside both of them.'(172)

"We're making bigger and bigger mistakes because we can't admit we made the first one. We can't lose a war to a small Asian country."
The monk giggled and covered his mouth. "But you'll have to fight till every last Vietnam man is gone."(193)

'Still as clear as after they lifted off from that beach -- the photograph wasn't enough. Helped no one. Soldiers still died, civilians suffered, nothing alleviated in the smallest amount by the fact that a shutter had opened and shut, that light had stuck grains on emulsion, that patterns of light and dark would preserve their misery. No defense at all against the evil that had been perpetuated. Out on the beach that day, it had all been failure. Even the best picture would be forgotten, the page flipped.'(241)

""Sometimes one's past makes it harder to understand the present. I love Americans, but I don't know if they are good for the Vietnam people. I want them to stay and to leave at the same time." Linh took a deep breath, then shook his head. How could he make her see? His relationship with her, with all the American, genuine and false.'(309)

'This is what happened when one left one's home -- pieces of oneself scattered all over the world, no one place ever completely satisfied, always a nostalgia for the place left behind. Pieces of her in Vietnam, some in this place of bone... The smell of Vietnam: a mix of jungle and wetness and spices and rot. A smell she hadn't realized she missed.'(377)

'It is like a medic performing triage. You determine who will die anyway, and you move to those who you can save. You want to stand over the dead and cry, but that helps no one. That's a tourist's sensibility. Day after day I go out with photographer's who are tourists of the war."(328)

St. Martin's Press First Edition
386 pages
Book borrowed from the library
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge
______________________________

145. the LAST CHILD

John Hart 2009

Johnny Merrimon's twin sister Ashley suddenly vanished a year ago, when they were twelve years old. And even if everyone else seems to have given up hope on finding her, Johnny has not. In fact, he has secretly spent most of everyday looking for her, going on foot, on 'borrowed' cars and going house to house, waiting and searching patiently. When another girl, Tiffany,  disappears, the secret and mystery of Ashley's disappearance slowly unravels. Quite a satisfying whirlwind of a read. 

'Asphalt cut the country like a scar, a long, hot burn of razor-black. Heat had not twisted the air, but the driver knew it was coming, the scorching glare, the shimmer at the far place where blue hammered down.'(opening lines)

'Johnny learned early. If somebody asked him why he was so different, why he held himself so still and why his eyes seemed to swallow light, that's what he'd tell them. He learned early that there was no safe place, not the backyard or the playground, not the front porch or the quiet road that grazed the edge of town. No safe place, and no one to protect you. Childhood was illusion.'(7)

'He thought that the cop probably meant what he said. He was probably a good guy. But Johnny could never look at him without remembering Alyssa, and that kind of thinking required concentration. He had to picture her alive and smiling, not in a dirt-floored cellar or in the back of some car. She was twelve the last time he'd seen her. Twelve, with black hair, cut like a boy's.'(16)

'People were not right. The cop had that part straight. Johnny had peered over more fences and into more windows than he could count. He'd knocked on doors at all hours, and he's seen things that weren't right. Things that people did when they thought they were alone and no one was watching. He'd seen kids sniff drugs and old people eat food that fell on the floor. He once saw a preacher in his underwear, hot-faced and screaming at his wife as she cried. That was messed up. But Johnny was no idiot. He knew that crazy people could look like anybody else.'(39)

"Life is a comedy," Jack said, but there was no smile left. His mother was scary religious, born again and taking no prisoners. She was on Jack all the time with threats of hellfire and damnation. He played it off, but the cracks showed.'(43)

'Levi Freemantle carried a precious thing on his shoulder. It was a heavy box, wrapped twice in black plastic and closed up with silver tape. Few men could carry it as far as Levi had, but Levi was not like other men. He ignored the hurt of it, the sense of it. He kept his feet on the path and moved his lips when words rose up in his mind. He listened to God's voice in his head and followed the river like his momma taught him when he was a boy. The river was the river, never-changing, and Levi had walked the river trail a hundred times, maybe. Not that he counted that good.'(53)

'Hunt shook his head at the absurdity of the word. There was nothing mere about the boy Johnny had become. The evidence was everywhere: in his actions and his attitudes, in this bare-walled room and even in the books he kept. They were not a boy's books. Johnny had books on history and ancient religions, vision quests, and the hunting rituals on the Plain Indians.'(112)

'He drove out the fear and put his fingers on the key. His eyes, in the mirror, showed red lines and blackened lids. He was untouchable, he told himself, a warrior.... He was an Indian chief.(118)

"The world is what it is, unjust and tragic and full of crying shames. Don't hate me for it."(127)

'The kid knew things. Hunt was certain of it. He pictured again, as he had many times, the black eyes and wariness, the profound stillness of deep and careful thought. Johnny was messed up in so many fundamental ways, confused, twisted sideways; but the clarity with which he saw certain things... Loyalty. Fierceness. Determination.'(187-188)

'Darkness is a cancer of the human heart.'(338)

a Thomas Dunne Book for Minotaur Books
419 pages
Book owned
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge
___________________________

144. CHARLIE and the CHOCOLATE FACTORY

Roald Dahl 1964
Illustrated by Quentin Blake

A marvelous and endearing story that is a must read for all!! When good little Charlie and four other children: greedy Augustus Gloop, spoiled Veruca Salt, gum-chewing Violet Beauregarde and television addict Mike Teavee win the golden tickets to tour the mysterious chocolate factory, we share in the absolute delight and suspense of discovering the wonderful and delicious, mouth-watering world of Mr. Wonka and his music-loving Oompa-Loompas. 

'These two very old people are the father and mother of Mr. Bucket. Their names are Grandpa Joe and Grandma Josephine.(opening lines)

'Every one of these old people was over ninety. They were as shriveled as prunes, and bony as skeletons, and throughout the day, until Charlie made his appearance, they lay huddled in their one bed, two at either end, with nightcaps on to keep their heads warm, dozing the time away with nothing to do...  For they loved this little boy. He was the only bright thing in their lives, and his evening visits were something that they looked forward to all day long. Often, Charlie's mother and father would come in as well, and stand by the door, listening to the stories that the old people told; and thus, for perhaps half an hour every night, this room would become a happy place, and the whole family would forget that it was hungry and poor.'(8)

"Mr. Wonka can make marshmallows that taste of violets, and rich caramels that change every ten seconds as you suck them, and little feathery sweets that melt away deliciously the moment you put them between your lips. He can make chewing gum that never loses its taste, and candy balloons that you can blow up to enormous sizes before you pop them with a pin and gobble them up. And by a most secret method, he can make lovely birds' eggs with black spots on them, and when you put one of these in your mouth, it gradually gets smaller and smaller until suddenly there is nothing left except a tiny little pink sugary baby bird sitting on the tip of your tongue.'(11-12)

'To tell you the honest truth, I simply wouldn't feel comfortable if I didn't have a little wedge of gum to chew on every moment of the day, I really wouldn't. My mother says it's not ladylike and it looks ugly to see a girl's jaws going up and down like mine do all the time, but I don't agree. And who's she to criticize, anyway, because if you ask me, I'd say that her jaws are going up and down almost as much as mine are just from yelling at me every minute of the day."(31)

'There is something about very cold weather that gives one an enormous appetite. Most of us find ourselves beginning to crave rich steaming stews and hot apple pies and all kinds of delicious warming dishes; and because we are all a great deal luckier than we realize, we usually get what we want -- or near enough.'(37)

'He threw up his arms and yelled "Yippeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" And at the same time, his long bony body rose up out of the bed and his bowl of soup went flying into the face of Grandma Josephine, and in one fantastic leap, this old fellow of ninety-six and a half, who hadn't been out of bed these last twenty years, jumped on to the floor and started doing a dance of victory in his pajamas.'(48-49)

'There!" cried Mr. Wonka, dancing up and down and pointing his gold-topped cane at the great brown river. "It's all chocolate! Every drop of that river is hot melted chocolate of the finest quality. The very finest quality. There's enough chocolate in there to fill every bathtub in the entire country! And all the swimming pools as well! Isn't it terrific? And look at my pipes! They suck up the chocolate and carry it away to all the other rooms in the factory where it is needed. Thousands of gallons an hour, my dear children! Thousands and thousands of gallons!"'(64)

'A steamy mist was rising up now from the great warm chocolate river, and out of the mist there appeared suddenly a most fantastic pink boat. It was a large open rowboat with a tall front and a tall back (like a Viking boat of old), and it was of such a shining sparkling glistening pink color that the whole thing looked as though it were made of bright, pink glass. There were many oars on either side of it, and as the boat came closer, the watchers on the riverbank could see that the oars were being pulled by masses of Oompa-Loompas -- at least ten of them to each oar.'(81)

"They're completely new! I am inventing them for children who are given very little pocket money. You can put an Everlasting Gobstopper in your mouth and you can suck it and suck it and suck it and suck it and it will never get any smaller!"(89-90)

'For though she's spoiled, and dreadfully so,

A girl can't spoil herself, you know.

Who spoiled her, then? Ah, who indeed?

Who pandered to her every need?

Who turned her into such a brat? 

Who are the culprits? Who did that?'(117-118)

'So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,

Go throw your TV set away,

And in its place you can install

a lovely bookshelf on the wall.

Then fill the shelves with lots of books,

Ignoring all the dirty looks,

The screams and yells, the bites and kicks,

And children hitting you with sticks --

Fear not, because we promise you

That, in about a week or two

Of having nothing else to do,

They'll now begin to feel the need

Of having something good to read.'(141)

a Puffin Book

155 pages

Book owned

Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge
___________________________

143. the SURGEON

Tess Gerritsen 2001

A terrifying thriller guaranteed to keep you turning the pages. A serial murderer is on the hunt for women, torturing them with the precise cuttings of a 'Surgeon'. Added to the mystery is the eerie similarity of the crime to the previous rape and near death of Dr. Catherine Cordel, who survived the assault by killing his attacker two years before. Is the 'Surgeon' a copycat killer or is there a hideous connection? 

'Today they will find her body.'(opening line)

'There were two visible wounds. One was a deep slash across the throat, extending from beneath the left ear, transecting the left carotid artery, and laying open the laryngeal cartilage. The coup de grace. The second slash was low on the abdomen. This wound had not meant to kill; it had served an entirely different purpose.'(5)

'And when it was done, when her agonal struggles had ceased, you left us a calling card. You neatly folded the victim's nightshirt, and you left it on the dresser. Why? Is it some twisted sign of respect for the woman you've just slaughtered? Or is it your way of mocking us? Your way of telling us that you are in control?'(16)

'No matter how much you try to maintain order in your life, no matter how careful you are to guard against mistakes, against imperfections, there is always some smudge, some flaw, lurking out of sight. Waiting to surprise you.'(30)

'Evil doesn't die. It never dies. It just takes on a new face, a new name. Just because we've been touched by it once, it doesn't mean we're immune to ever being hurt again. Lightning can strike twice.'(51)

"This is the worst kind of unsub we can face. He went a whole year between attacks -- that's extremely rare. It means he can go months between hunts. We could run ourselves ragged looking for him, while he sits patiently waiting for the next kill. He is careful. He is organized. He will leave few, if any, clues behind.'(58)

'This isn't a souvenir. And it's not a mark of ownership." He set down the necklace, a tangled filigree of gold that had skimmed the flesh of two dead women.
A shudder went through Rizzouli. "It's a calling card," she said softly.
Moore nodded. "The Surgeon is talking to us."(87)

'Where we go depends on what we know, and what we know depends on where we go.'(137)

'No kiss, no embrace, could bring two people any closer than we are right now. The most intimate emotion two people can share is neither love nor desire but pain.'(156)

'Some men are worth trusting. Moore had told her.
Yes, but which ones? I never know.
You won't know until push comes to shove. He'll be the one still standing beside you.'(295)

"This is a boy who never stood out, never alarmed anyone. This is the most frightening killer of all, because there's no pathology, no psychiatric diagnosis. He's like Ted Bundy. Intelligent, organized, and, on the surface, quite functional. But he has one personality quirk: he enjoys torturing women. This is someone you might work with every day. And you'd never suspect that when he's looking at you, smiling at you, he's thinking about some new and creative way to rip out your guts.'(305)

'Twenty years of marriage, with all its countless memories. The whispers late at night, the private jokes, the history. Yes, the history. A marriage is made up of such little things as burned suppers and midnight swims, yet it's those little things that bind two lives into one.'(343)

a Ballantine Book
350 pages
Book borrowed from the library
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge

142. 1984

George Orwell 1949

A thought-provoking dystopian novel about an evil totalitarian regime where 'Big Brother' keeps tabs on every person's actions and thoughts. Among other things, there is perpetual war, thoughts are monitored constantly to make sure one 'doublethinks', truth and historical facts are revised and altered, the past flushed down the 'memory hole', language destroyed to the simpler 'Newspeak', and any person who tries to rebel is arrested and 'changed'. Which is why when Winston Smith, the protagonist tries to conjure ways of rebelling and continue to have one sliver of hope for change, the party tries to crush his soul. Such a disturbing and scary possibility!

'It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.'(opening lines)

'From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH'(7)

'They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. the Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment education, and the fine arts; the Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war; the Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for the economic affairs. Their names in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv and Miniplenty.'(8)

'He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:

April 4th, 1984

He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.'(10)

'The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing screaming lunatic.'(16)

'His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian on democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you just had performed. Even to understand the word "doublethink" involved the use of doublethink.'(32-33)

'If there is hope (wrote Winston) it lies in the proles.'(60)

"My grandfather. He used to say it to me when I was a little girl. He was vaporized when I was eight -- at any rate, he disappeared. I wonder what a lemon was," she added inconsequently."I've seen oranges. They're a kind of round yellow fruit with a thick skin."
"I can remember lemons," said Winston. "They were quite common in the Fifties. They were so sour that it set your teeth on edge even to smell them."(121-122)

'Both of them knew -- in a way, it was never out of their minds -- that what was now happening could not last long. There were times when the fact of impending death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on, and they would cling together with a sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned soul grasping at his last morsel of pleasure when the clock is within five minutes of striking.'(125)

'Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.'(128)

'In a way, the world-view of the party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.'(129)

'If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them... Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by inquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings; for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.'(138)

'The best books he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.'(165)

'The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison they never even become aware that they are oppressed.'(171)

'Sooner or later it would happen: strength would change into consciousness. The proles were immortal; you could not doubt it when you looked at that valiant figure in the yard. In the end their awakening would come. And until that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all the odds, like birds, passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill.'(182)

'The Party is not interested in the overt act; the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.'(209)

a Signet Classic edition
245 pages
Book owned
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge
___________________________

141. SCHINDLER'S LIST

Thomas Keneally 1982

An astonishing book about an astonishing man. The writer uses vivid and often horrifying personal accounts from many Schindler survivors to effectively present an authentic fictionalized memoir of  Oskar Schindler and his personal fight to save many Jews from the death camps during the Holocaust. Beneath the carefree gambling, drinking and womanizing facade was the heart of a just, sympathetic, righteous and fearless man who cunningly manipulated the ranks of evil Nazi officers for his remarkable cause. 

'In Poland's deepest autumn, a tall young man in an expensive overcoat, double-breasted dinner jacket beneath it and -- in the lapel of the dinner jacket -- a large ornamental gold-on-black-enamel Hakenkreuz (swastika) emerged from a fashionable apartment building in Straszewskiego Street, on the edge of the ancient center of Cracow, and saw his chauffeur waiting with fuming breath by the open door of an enormous and, even in this blackened world, lustrous Adler limousine.'(opening lines)

'So the story of Oskar Schindler is begun perilously, with Gothic Nazis, with SS hedonism, with a thin and brutalized girl, and with a figure of the imagination somehow as popular as the golden-hearted whore: the good German.'(29)

'Destiny, said Herr Schindler senior, was not a limitless rope. It was a piece of elastic. The harder you went forward, the more fiercely you were jerked back to your starting point.'(39)

'Near the end of their talk, Oskar did say something that had novelty. In times like these, he said, it must be hard for the churches to go on telling people that their Heavenly father cared about the death of even a single sparrow. He'd hate to be a priest, Herr Schindler said, in an era like this, when life did not have the value of a pack of cigarettes. Stern agreed but suggested, in the spirit of the discussion, that the Biblical reference Herr Schindler had made could be summed up by a Talmudic verse which said that he who saves the life of one man saves the entire world.'(48)

'Then without blinking, without any introduction, any qualifying lift of the shoulders, he told them, "You'll be safe working here. If you work here, then you'll live through the war."... The promise had dazed them all. It was a godlike promise. How could a mere man make a promise like that? But Edith Liebgold found herself believing it instantly. Not so  much because she wanted to; not because it was a sop, a reckless incentive. It was because in the second Herr Schindler uttered the promise it left no option but belief.'(91-92)

'Similar loops of reasoning would be traced this year and in years to come by all those to whom Oskar Schindler made his heady promises. Some would become aware of the unstated corollary. If the man was wrong, if he lightly used his powers of passing on conviction, then there was no God and no humanity, no bread, no succor. There were, of course, only odds, and odds weren't good.'(92)

'The chambers of Belzec, Schindler found out from his source had been completed by March of that year under the supervision of a Hamburg engineering firm and of SS engineers from Oranienburg. From Bachner's testimony, it seemed that 3,000 killings a day were not beyond their capacity. Crematoria were under construction, lest old-fashioned means of disposal of corpses put a brake on the new killing method.'(136)

'Now, even if he and Dr. B made their decision, H didn't know if he had the rigor to feed the cyanide to the ill, or to watch someone else do it and maintain a professional dispassion. It was absurdly like the argument, in one's youth, about whether you should approach a girl you were infatuated with. And when you'd decided, it still counted for nothing. The act still had to be faced.'(178)

'From late 1943, there is a story about Schindler which runs among the survivors with the electric excitement of a myth. For the thing about a myth is not whether it is true or not, nor whether it should be true, but that it is somehow truer that truth itself.... Oskar had become a minor god of deliverance, double faced -- in the Greek manner -- as any small god; endowed with all the human vices; many-handed; subtly powerful; capable of bringing gratuitous but secure salvation.'(232)

'But her father believed that Oskar would make a list of people and extricate them. Oskar's list, in the mind of some, was already more than a mere tabulation. It was a List. It was a sweet chariot which might swing low.'(277)

'At some point in any discussion of Schindler, the surviving friends of the Herr Direktor will blink and shake their heads and begin the almost mathematical business of finding the sum of his motives. For one of the commonest sentiments of Schindler Jews is still "I don't know why he did it." It can be said to begin with that Oskar was a gambler, was a sentimentalist who loved the transparency, the simplicity of doing good; that Oskar was by temperament an anarchist who loved to ridicule the system; and that beneath the hearty sensuality lay a capacity to be outraged by human savagery, to react to it and not to be overwhelmed. But none of this, jotted down, added up, explains the doggedness with which in the autumn of 1944, he prepared a final haven for the graduates of Emalia.'(281)

'He was mourned on every continent.'(closing line)

a Touchstone Book, Edition 1993
397 pages
Book owned
Book qualifies for:100+ Reading Challenge

140. GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Charles Dickens 1860-1861

I am proud to say that I intend to read all of Dickens' books! I absolutely love this outstanding novel which took me by surprise many times. I have been meaning to read this book, and have had my blinders on for quite a while, not wanting to know anything about the book before I read it. So when I first started the book and read about Pip, an orphan raised by his abusive sister, getting accosted by a convict while he was out visiting his parent's graves, I had no clue that multi-layer wonders were waiting for me, and that adorable, if not peculiar characters will soon be haunting my mind for days: Miss Havisham, a mysterious woman in white who is suspended in time, Estella, her adopted daughter who totally beguiles Pip, Mr. Jaggers, a successful lawyer who reveals Pip's great expectations, Joe, Pip's kind and simple brother-in-law, and Herbert, Pip's foe who becomes his true friend. Subtle life lessons and comical dialogues perfectly mix in with dark, dramatic and poignant heart-tugging scenes in a plot thick with twists and turns. And I actually like that both the original and revised endings are included in this book.   

'My father's family name being Pirrip, and  my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So I called myself Pip, and come to be called Pip.'(opening lines)

'In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong. I had no intercourse with the world at that time, and I imitated none of its many inhabitants who act in this manner.'(42)

'It was then that I began to understand that everything in the room had stopped, like the watch and the clock, a long time ago. I noticed that Miss Havisham put down the jewel exactly on the spot from which she had taken it up. As Estella dealt the cards, I glanced at the dressing-table again, and saw that the shoe upon it, once white, now yellow, had never been worn. I glanced down at the foot from which the shoe was absent, and saw that the silk stocking on it, once white, now yellow, had been trodden ragged. Without this arrest of everything, this standing still of all the pale decayed objects, not even the withered bridal dress on the collapsed form could have looked so like grave-clothes, or the long veil so like a shroud.'(61-62)

'My sister's bringing up had made me sensitive. In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter.  I had known, from the time when I could speak, that my sister, in her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me. I had cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me up by hand gave her no right to bring me up by jerks. Through all my punishments, disgraces, fasts and vigils, and other penitential performances, I had nursed this assurance; and to my communing so much with it, in a solitary and unprotected way, I in great part refer the fact that I was morally timid and very sensitive.'(64-65)

"There's one thing you may be sure of, Pip," said Joe, after some rumination, "namely that lies is lies. Howsoever they come, they didn't ought to come, and they come from the father of lies, and work round the same. Don't you tell no more of 'em, Pip. That ain't the way to get out of being common, old chap. And as to being common, I don't make it out at all clear. You are oncommon in some things. You're oncommon small. Likewise you're a oncommon scholar."(73)

'It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home. There may be a black ingratitude in the thing and the punishment may be retributive and well deserved, but that it is a miserable thing, I can testify.'(112)

"I am instructed to communicate to him," said Mr. Jaggers, throwing his finger at me sideways, "that he will come into a handsome property. Further, that it is the desire of the present possessor of that property that he be immediately removed from his present sphere of life and from this place, and be brought up as a gentleman -- in a word, as a young fellow of great expectations."(146)

'Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried than before -- more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle. '(169)

"No; the office is one thing, and private life is another. When I go into the office, I leave the castle behind me, and when I come home into the castle, I leave the office behind me.'(219)

'According to my experience, the conventional notion of a lover cannot always be true. The unqualified truth is that, when I loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I loved her none the less because I knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection.'(245-246)

"I'll tell you," said she, in the same hurried passionate whisper, "what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the sinister -- as I did!"(254)

'As I had grown accustomed to my expectations, I had insensibly begun to notice their effect upon myself and those around me. Their influence on my own character I disguised from my recognition as much as possible, but I knew very well that it was not all good. I lived in a state of chronic uneasiness...'(289)

'"Choose your bridge, Mr. Pip," returned Wemmick, "and take a walk upon your bridge, and pitch your money into the Thames over the centre arch of your bridge, and you know the end of it. Serve a friend with it, and you may know the end of it too -- but it's a less pleasant and profitable end."(309)

'And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a mastermania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?'(423)

a Bantam Book Classic edition June 2003
518 pages
Book owned
Book qualifies for: Victorian Challenge
                              100+ Reading Challenge

139. SPEAK

Laurie Halse Anderson 1999

Melinda Sordino is a 9th grader with a horrible secret she can't speak of,  a secret that weighs in so heavily on her mind and heart, that it starts manifesting itself as a cascade of both somatic, psychological and behavior problems.  Sadly, this is happening to our children more often than we can imagine, often unrecognized even by the health professionals, teachers, friends and family around them.  This book spotlights such complex issues and is told in a simple, cohesive and absorbing way, and for that, it's on my list. 

'It is my first morning of high school. I have seven new notebooks, a skirt I hate, and a stomachache.'(3)

'Older students are allowed to roam until the bell, but ninth-graders are herded into the auditorium. We fall into clans: Jocks, Country Clubbers, Idiot Savants, Cheerleaders, Human Waste, Eurotrash, Future Fascists of America, Big Hair Chix, the Marthas, Suffering Artists, Thespians, Goths, Shredders. I am clanless.... I am an Outcast.'(4)

"You will each pick a piece of paper out of the globe." He walks around the room so we can pull red scraps from the center of the earth. "On the paper you will find one word, the name of an object. I hope you like it. You will spend the rest of the year learning how to turn that object into a piece of art. You will sculpt it. You will sketch it, paper-mache it, carve it. If the computer teacher is talking to me this year, you can use the lab for computer-aided designs. But there's a catch -- by the end of the year, you must figure out how to make your object say something, express an emotion, speak to every person who looks at it.'(12)

"Why is it so hard to make friends here? Is there something in the water? In my old school I could have gone out for the musical and worked on the newspaper and chaired the car wash. Here people don't even know I exist. I get squished in the hall and I don't belong anywhere and nobody cares. And you're no help. You are so negative and you never try anything, you just mope around like you don't care that people talk about you behind your back."(34)

'The doctor stares into the back of my eyes with a bright light. Can she read the thoughts hidden there? If she can, what will she do? Call the cops? Send me to the nuthouse? Do I want her to? I just want to sleep. The whole point of not talking about it, of silencing the memory, is to make it go away. It won't. I'll need brain surgery to cut it out of my head.'(81-82)

'I open up a paper clip and scratch the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If suicide is a cry for help, then what is this? A whimper, a peep? I draw little windowcracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting. It looks like I arm-wrestled a rosebush.'(87)

'I should probably tell someone, just tell someone. Get it over with. Let it out, blurt it out.'(99)

'Mr Freeman: "Art without emotion is like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag." He sticks his finger down his throat. "The next time you work on your trees, don't think about trees. Think about love, or hate, or joy, or rage -- whatever makes you feel something, makes your palms sweat or your toes curl. Focus on that feeling. When people don't express themselves, they die one piece at a time. You'd be shocked at how many adults are really dead inside -- walking through their days with no idea who they are, just waiting for a heart attack or cancer or a Mack truck to come along and finish the job. It's the saddest thing I know."'(122)

"Make it bend -- trees are flexible, so they don't snap. Scar it, give it a twisted branch -- perfect trees don't exist. Nothing is perfect. Flaws are interesting. Be the tree."(153)

"But don't expect to make a difference unless you speak up for yourself."(159)

Farrar Straus Giroux First Edition 1999
198 pages
Book borrowed from the library
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge
______________________________

Reading from My Shelves Project Giveaway Winner:

After assigning the valid entries (comments with e-mail addresses) with the numbers 1-18,  Random.org generated the winner:

    # 4 - Scoot (I have e-mailed you with this news)

Congratulations to Scoot and thanks to everyone who entered the giveaway.