"The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it."
Chapter 5,
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
"The bed is brass, covered with a patchwork quilt, and "nice and firm," Michael
says, "in case you're interested."
Judy Blume, Forever
"There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing."
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
"Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live."
"Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health."
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
"I feel wicked sleeping in a warm bed, while my dearest friends have been knocked down or have fallen into a gutter somewhere out in the cold night. I get frightened when I think of close friends who have now been delivered into the hands of the cruelest brutes that walk the earth. And all because they are Jews!"
Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank
"Music is a good thing; and after all that soul-butter and hogwash I never see it freshen up things so, and sound so honest and bully."
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
"Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three."
Joseph Heller, Catch 22
"Now is the seedtime of continental union, faith and honor. The least fracture now, will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound would enlarge with the tree, and posterity read in it full grown characters."
"The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind."
Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,..."
Allen Ginsberg, Howl
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that."
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
"It is a curious thing, Harry, but perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it. Those who, like you, have leadership thrust upon them, and take up the mantle because they must, and find to their own surprise that they wear it well.
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
"Just because you've got the emotional range of a teaspoon doesn't mean we all have."
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
"I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to scratch himself to death."
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
"People always think something's all true."
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
"We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent there will be no need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."
George Orwell, 1984
And it seems to me that these books are worth keeping around, regardless of what the say. They are chalked full of humor, sex, irreverence, inappropriateness, and utter truth. And they create the need for analytical thought. They stir emotion. They boil the blood. These words on a page are more than that. They are thoughts and expressions that are worth sharing because they might forebode a fate so awful the human race should listen up, or they may shed light into the wonderful world of our human nature.
Cheers to my most favorite books, although not many of you have been banned.
Neil Gaiman, for shedding light into the stars, Stardust.
J.K. Rowling, for writing about the greatest love possible, Harry Potter.
Gregory Maguire, to know she's not really wicked, Wicked.
John Irving, because someone has to have faith, A Prayer for Owen Meany.
J.M. Barrie, because one boy will never grow up and one girl will always long to be a mother, Peter Pan.
Tom Robbins, in the hopes that we can make love stay, Still Life With Woodpecker.
And last, but never least,
L.M. Montgomery, for two namesakes and more scope for imagination, Anne of Green Gables.
"And so, goodnight."
L.M. Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside
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