Some Favorite Quotes from Books

This week's Long & Short Reviews question asks for reviewers' personal favorite quotes from book. This differs from the topics of book quote posts we did earlier in the year. Favorite quotes may make us laugh or think or remember reading the book. 

As before, the quotes I remember most clearly tend to be the ones I learned fairly early in life, so no apologies for quotes from children's books. They also tend to be the ones I share with family and close friends, so they've acquired layers of connotation over the years. I've shared a few memories that don't violate anyone else's privacy. "Favorites" is defined loosely enough to include anything I've quoted more than one time in a recent year. 

1. "All truth is safe and nothing else is safe; and he who {suppresses the truth]...is either a coward or a criminal or both."--John A. Stormer 

Stormer saw more danger in more things than living right-wingnuts seem to do. However, he was consistently pro-Christian and anti-violence. Today's "alt-right" could stand to rediscover his books. 

2, "Her face was so face-like in its expression as to be absolutely facial."--Stephen Leacock 

A person with astigmatism can see faces, but finds it easier to recognize voices. By the time the details of a face are clear to me I've probably been staring at the face too long. I don't have the kind of neurological problem with the mobility of faces that autistic people say they have. I just don't see faces as all that interesting. They look the way Leacock described them.

3. "Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice."--Robert Frost 

4. "A is for Apples: Our farm has many." The whole family have said "Our farm has many" about so many things, for so long...! 

5. "It wants fire." 

"Do you mean that I should put more fire into my poetry?" 

"No--I mean that you should put more of your 'poetry' into the fire."--Quoted by many people, including Louis Untermeyer 

6, "We be of one blood, ye and I."--Rudyard Kipling 

7. "Stout hearts and true, hold fast what is ours!"--Girl Scout Manual 

8. "All those who loved the true and good, Whose promises were kept, With humble mind, whose acts were kind, Whose honor never slept, These were the free; and we must be Prepared like them to live."--Girl Scout Manual 

9. "Dare to be like Daniel! Dare to stand alone! Dare to have a purpose firm, and dare to make it known."--some Sunday School songbook (it used to be in several) 

10. "Hie dygel lond, Frecne fen-gelad, naessa genippu..." "They dwell in a darksome land, Wolf-cliffs wild and windy wildernesses..."--Beowulf

In Beowulf's time the sea-cliffs and beaches weren't pretty tourist attractions to stroll through on pleasant afternoons. They were where desperate people had to live because they were cheap--free shelter in caves, free fish if you could catch one. Where Grendel and his mother lived. In the poem exaggerations of their size and greed make them mythic figures of Evil; in whatever reality the story was based on I imagine they were desperate people, the mother originally outcast as much because she was ugly as because she was a single mother, the mother and son sharing genetic physical abnormalities exaggerated by malnutrition, living mostly on what they could steal from the settlement that cast them out. Sometimes, if they were hungry enough, people like that accepted the claim that they weren't human as an excuse to eat humans they'd dismembered or killed on a raid. 

Even in the Eastern States we have legends of people like that. If they were large and hairy the legends have cast them as cryptids. The one in my part of the world is a recent addition to this set of folklore, from the nineteenth century. Born a human child to human parents, for some reason he went feral, lived in the woods, was seen covered only in heavy European-type body hair, and threatened to eat humans. He was not, however, one of the half-dozen or so murderers and child molesters in local history. Like most local people he left people alone if they left him alone.

Anyway, one summer when I was home from college, a young relative said "I don't like poetry; it's too flowery and nicely-nice," and I quoted these lines and said "There are lots of different kinds of poetry. Some poems aren't nice at all," and the young relative was interested enough to read the rest of the "translation of Beowulf" in my old English Lit. book. But the quote has stuck in my mind as a figurative description of the mental condition of people who don't like poetry.