Eliza’s quotes:
“This reminds me,” he said, “of when I was a boy.”
I looked at this old man, my old man with his old white feet in this clear-running stream, these moments among the very last in his life, and I thought of him suddenly, and simply, as a boy, a child, a youth, with his whole life ahead of him, much as mine was ahead of me. I’d never done that before. And these images—the now and then of my father—converged, and at that moment he turned into a weird creature, wild, concurrently young and old, dying and newborn.
My father became a myth.
– Big Fish, by Daniel Wallace
“I’ll tell you what the problem was,” he says, lifting his hand from my knee and motioning for me to come closer. And I do. I want to hear. The next word could be his last.
“I wanted to be a great man,” he whispers.
“Really?” I say, as if this comes as some sort of surprise to me.
“Really,” he says. His words come slow and weak but steady and strong in feeling and thought. “Can you believe it? I thought it was my destiny. A big fish in a big pond—that’s what I wanted. That’s what I wanted from day one. I started small. For a long time I worked for other people. Then I started my own business. I got these molds and I made candles in the basement. That business failed. I sold baby’s breath to floral shops. That failed. Finally, though, I got into import/export and everything took off. I had dinner with a prime minister once, William. A prime minister! Can you imagine, this boy from Ashland having dinner in the same room with a—. There’s not a continent I haven’t set foot on. Not one. There are seven of them, right? I’m starting to forget which ones I… never mind. Now all that seems so unimportant, you know? I mean, I don’t even know what a great man is anymore—the, uh, prerequisites. Do you, William?”
“Do I what?”
“Know,” he says. “Know what makes a man great.”
I think about this for a long time, secretly hoping he forgets he ever asked the question. His mind has a way of wandering, but something in the way he looks at me says he’s not forgetting anything now, he’s holding on tight to that thought, and he’s waiting for my answer. I don’t know what makes a man great. I’ve never thought about it before. But at times like this “I don’t know” just won’t do. This is an occasion one rises to, and so I make myself as light as possible and wait for a lift.
“I think,” I say after a while, waiting for the right words to come, “that if a man could be said to be loved by his son, then I think that man could be considered great.”
For this is the only power I have, to bestow upon my father the mantle of greatness, a thing he sought in the wider world, but one that, in a surprise turn of events, was here at home all along.
“Ah,” he says. “those parameters,” he says, stumbling over the word, all of a sudden seeming slightly woozy. “Never thought about it in those terms, exactly. Now that we are, though, thinking about it like that, I mean, in this case,” he says. “In this very specific case, mine—”
“Yeah,” I say. “You are hereby and forever after my father, Edward Bloom, a Very Great Man. So help you Fred.”
And in lieu of a sword I touch him once, gently, on the shoulder.
– Edward and William Bloom, Big Fish, by Daniel Wallace
When he saw my father he began to laugh.
“What is it you want, little person?” he said with a terrible grin.
“You must stop coming into Ashland for your food,” my father said. “Our farmers are losing their crops, and the children miss their dogs.”
“What? And you intend to stop me?” he said, his voice booming through the valleys, no doubt all the way back to Ashland itself. “Why, I could snap you in my hands like a branch off a tree!”
And to demonstrate he grabbed the branch of a nearby pine and ground it to dust in his fingers.
“Why,” he went on, “I could eat you and be done with you in a moment! I could!”
“And that is why I have come,” my father said.
Karl’s face twitched then, either from confusion or from one of the bugs that had crawled from his beard and up his cheek.
“What do you mean, that’s why you’ve come?”
“For you to eat me,” he said. “I am the first sacrifice.”
“The first…sacrifice?”
“To you, O great Karl! We submit to your power. In order to save the many, we realize we must sacrifice a few. That makes me—what?—lunch?”
Karl seemed confounded by my father’s words. He shook his head to clear it, and a dozen creeping bugs flew from his beard and fell to the ground. His body began to shake, and for a moment he appeared about to fall, and had to right himself by leaning against the mountain wall.
It was as if he had been struck by a weapon of some kind. It was as if he had been wounded in battle.
“I…” he said quite softly, even sadly. “I don’t want to eat you.”
“You don’t?” my father said, greatly relieved.
“No,” Karl said. “I don’t want to eat anybody,” and a giant tear rolled down his beaten face. “I just get so hungry,” he said.
– Karl and Edward Bloom, Big Fish, by Daniel Wallace
She didn’t raise us to care about her,” Tsunami argued. “Kestrel was just keeping us alive, and if that’s what she wants, the best thing we can do is run away right now.”
– Clay and Tsunami, Wings of Fire, book one: The Dragonet Prophecy, by Tui T. Sutherland
“I’d like to be something more than alive,” Clay said fiercely. “I’d like to be the kind of dragon she doesn’t think I am — the kind they write prophecies about. That dragon would rescue her no matter how awful she is.
“These dragonets,” Scarlet said, waving a claw at Burn. “Constantly pushing and shoving to save each other. It’s just the weirdest thing.”
– Queen Scarlet, Wings of Fire, book one: The Dragonet Prophecy, by Tui T. Sutherland
Clarisse’s quotes:
“Nobody can say how he shall die,” he wrote. “But everybody must decide how and for what he shall live.”
― Indio Bravo: The Story of José Rizal by Asuncion Lopez-Rizal Bantug
“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn…”
― The Once and Future King by T.H. White
Lorace’s quotes:
“The presence of God is the finest of rewards.”
― Pi, Life of Pi by Yann Martel
“How true it is that necessity is the mother of invention, how very true.”
― Pi, Life of Pi by Yann Martel
“The blackness would stir and eventually go away, and God would remain, a shining point of light in my heart.”
― Pi, Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Ciel’s quotes:
“…Imagine! It is the real power of a book—not what is on the page, but what happens when a reader takes the pages in, makes it part of himself. That is the definition of literature.”
Mr. Fergins to Clover, The Last Bookaneer by Matthew Pearl
“Close your eyes, Mr. Clover, and if you wait long enough it will seem like we are moving at a fast pace, because your brain knows we are sitting on a train, even though we remain idly waiting on that broken train’s repair. To know, intellectually, there is no movement, should be sufficient, but a man’s brain is stubborn when what is happening in life is different than what is expected. Do you see what I mean?”
Mr. Fergins to Clover, The Last Bookaneer by Matthew Pearl
Angeli’s quotes:
“We are as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either.”
– Augustus Waters, The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
“I cannot talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this: There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.” – Hazel Grace Lancaster, The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
– Augustus Waters to Hazel Grace Lancaster, The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
“‘Okay,’ he said after forever. ‘Maybe okay will be our always.’”
Bookworms and Bluestockings 