Resonating Quotes

 

Someone asked me this week if there are particular passages or sections of books that stay with me. Though I like to think of reading a book as a river that brings me from my own world to another, I do tend to land on sections that stick in my mind and that I return to now and again, just because. 

I thought I'd share a few with you today to see if any resonate. 

"When the gods want to punish us, they answer our prayers." Though Oscar Wilde may have been one of the first people who said this, I heard it first watching Out of Africa and then again in The West Wing. I have a few things/situations I really want and have gotten a few of them, too. In one case, I did experience a punishing aftermath and in the other case, things went well and even gloriously. 

It's an interesting thing to think of, though, gods chittering away somewhere scheming to punish you. Of course, we sow the seeds of our own destruction--but like humans everywhere, need to blame it on someone else.

"Beware my lord of jealousy. It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on." Shakespeare's Othello play wouldn't pack the punch it has were it not for it's villain Iago, whose plot against his master is so carefully devised it's impossible to resist--so meets its target precisely. 

The green-eyed monster is a persistent disease and I've been stricken by it too many times not to know it preys on insecurity and must at all costs be avoided. Shakespeare, on the other hand, knew how tall an order that was--and frames it as beautifully as a bull's eye.

"The cake it Otello." This is not from a book, but instead is what a Russian friend said after eating cake with me at a wedding. He put his hands around his throat to show how the cake was choking him and I loved it so much, I put the moment into a play. 

Writers.

"Becoming drunk is a journey that generally elates him in the early stages—he's good company, expansive, mischievous and fun, the famous old poet, almost as happy listening as talking. But once the destination is met, once established up there on that unsunny plateau, a fully qualified drunk, the nastier muses, the goblins of aggression, paranoia, self-pity take control. The expectation now is that an evening with John will go bad somehow, unless everyone around is prepared to toil at humouring and flattering and hours of frozen-faced listening. No one will be.”

Ian McEwan's book Saturday is in my top-five list of favorite books and I hope this passage will encourage you to read more. His description of a relative instantly made me think of someone I knew, but more to the point, every word is a gem and that's true of the entire book and most everything else he writes. So-- there.

“I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung my out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy. 

That will do to explain my secret, as well as the other. I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, but because he's more myself than I am. What ever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire." 

I included part of this quote in another blog about my favorite quotes on God, but couldn't leave it out here. Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights has always been a kind of mirror for me, echoing so much of the way I feel about love, God and living that I can hardly stand it. Yet if I'm being honest, I need to say I haven't lived this way, but love the romantic heights and depths in which the characters travel so effortlessly. And the first few sentences are exactly, truly, deeply how I feel about death.

Do you have any favorite quotes that are still in your mind after months or years of putting down a book? Send your thoughts in the comment section or contact me via my website at jennazark.com.