Thursday Quotables: Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

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Welcome back to Thursday Quotables! This weekly feature is the place to highlight a great quote, line, or passage discovered during your reading each week.  Whether it’s something funny, startling, gut-wrenching, or just really beautifully written, Thursday Quotables is where my favorite lines of the week will be, and you’re invited to join in!

 

Kathryn was waiting at the car. She was crying, and laughing at herself for crying, outdone by the sheer unmitigated suck of it all. Later he would recall the scrabbling action in her hug, as if she were sliding down a cliff face and clawing for purchase. She shut the door behind him and stepped back, then tossed off a windmilling cartoon salute. Billy could not have been more spent if he’d just run a marathon. It felt like organ failure, like his face was melting, but the car was backing down the driveway and the worst was over.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Source: Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
Author: Ben Fountain
HarperCollins, 2012

What lines made you laugh, cry, or gasp this week? Do tell!

If you’d like to participate, it’s really simple:

  • Write a Thursday Quotables post on your blog. Try to pick something from whatever you’re reading now. And please be sure to include a link back to Bookshelf Fantasies in your post (http://www.bookshelffantasies.com), if you’d be so kind!
  • Comment on this post with the link to your own Thursday Quotables post. Or… have a quote to share but not a blog post? Leave your quote in the comments!
  • Have fun!

Thursday Quotables: Outlander

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Welcome back to Thursday Quotables! This weekly feature is the place to highlight a great quote, line, or passage discovered during your reading each week.  Whether it’s something funny, startling, gut-wrenching, or just really beautifully written, Thursday Quotables is where my favorite lines of the week will be, and you’re invited to join in!

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I’m actually traveling on the day of my Thursday Quotable #20, so I’m writing this week’s post a week in advance. Instead of picking a quote from my current reading, I’ll highlight a favorite of mine instead:

This week’s Thursday Quotable:

Ye are Blood of my Blood, and bone of my Bone.
I give ye my Body, that we Two might be One.
I give ye my Spirit, ’til our Life shall be Done.

Outlander (Outlander, #1)

Source: Outlander
Author: Diana Gabaldon
Random House, 1991

What lines made you laugh, cry, or gasp this week? Do tell!

If you’d like to participate, it’s really simple:

  • Follow Bookshelf Fantasies, if you please!
  • Write a Thursday Quotables post on your blog. Try to pick something from whatever you’re reading now.
  • Comment on this post with the link to your own Thursday Quotables post.
  • Make sure to include a link back to Bookshelf Fantasies in your post (http://www.bookshelffantasies.com).
  • Or… have a quote to share but not a blog post? Leave your quote in the comments!
  • Have fun!

Thursday Quotables: The Returned

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Welcome back to Thursday Quotables! This weekly feature is the place to highlight a great quote, line, or passage discovered during your reading each week.  Whether it’s something funny, startling, gut-wrenching, or just really beautifully written, Thursday Quotables is where my favorite lines of the week will be, and you’re invited to join in!

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This week’s Thursday Quotable — short but sweet:

His father’s love was an open door. It would never close — neither to keep you out nor to keep you in.

Source:  The Returned
Author: Jason Mott
Harlequin MIRA, 2013

The Returned

What lines made you laugh, cry, or gasp this week? Do tell!

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If you’d like to participate, it’s really simple:

  • Follow Bookshelf Fantasies, if you please!
  • Write a Thursday Quotables post on your blog. Try to pick something from whatever you’re reading now.
  • Comment on this post with the link to your own Thursday Quotables post.
  • Make sure to include a link back to Bookshelf Fantasies in your post (http://www.bookshelffantasies.com).
  • Or… have a quote to share but not a blog post? Leave your quote in the comments!
  • Have fun!

Thursday Quotables: The Humans

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Welcome back to Thursday Quotables! This weekly feature is the place to highlight a great quote, line, or passage discovered during your reading each week.  Whether it’s something funny, startling, gut-wrenching, or just really beautifully written, Thursday Quotables is where my favorite lines of the week will be, and you’re invited to join in!

If you’d like to participate, it’s really simple:

  • Follow Bookshelf Fantasies, if you please!
  • Write a Thursday Quotables post on your blog. Try to pick something from whatever you’re reading now.
  • Comment on this post with the link to your own Thursday Quotables post.
  • Make sure to include a link back to Bookshelf Fantasies in your post (http://www.bookshelffantasies.com).
  • Or… have a quote to share but not a blog post? Leave your quote in the comments!
  • Have fun!

This week’s Thursday Quotable:

I know that some of you reading this are convinced humans are a myth, but I am here to state that they do actually exist.

And a bit further on:

Magazines are very popular, despite no human’s ever feeling better for having read them. Indeed their chief purpose is to generate a sense of inferiority in the reader that consequently leads to a feeling of needing to buy something, which the humans then do, and then feel even worse, and so need to buy another magazine to see what they can buy next.

Source:  The Humans
Author: Matt Haig
Simon & Schuster, 2013

What lines made you laugh, cry, or gasp this week? Do tell!

Link up or share your quote of the week in the comments.

Thursday Quotables: The Cuckoo’s Calling

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Welcome back to Thursday Quotables! This weekly feature is the place to highlight a great quote, line, or passage discovered during your reading each week.  Whether it’s something funny, startling, gut-wrenching, or just really beautifully written, Thursday Quotables is where my favorite lines of the week will be, and you’re invited to join in!

If you’d like to participate, it’s really simple:

  • Follow Bookshelf Fantasies, if you please!
  • Write a Thursday Quotables post on your blog. Try to pick something from whatever you’re reading now.
  • Link up via the linky below (look for the cute froggy face).
  • Make sure to include a link back to Bookshelf Fantasies in your post (http://www.bookshelffantasies.com).
  • Have fun!

This week’s Thursday Quotable:

The buzz in the street was like the humming of flies. Photographers stood massed behind barriers patrolled by police, their long-snouted cameras poised, their breath rising like steam. Snow fell steadily on to hats and shoulders; gloved fingers wiped lenses clear. From time to time there came outbreaks of desultory clicking, as the watchers filled the waiting time by snapping the white canvas tent in the middle of the road, the entrance to the tall red-brick apartment block behind it, and the balcony on the top floor from which the body had fallen.

Source:  The Cuckoo’s Calling
Author: Robert Galbraith
Mulholland Books, 2013

Now that’s an opening that makes you want to keep reading!!

What lines made you laugh, cry, or gasp this week? Do tell!

Link up, or share your quote of the week in the comments.

Thursday Quotables: When You Were Here / Openly Straight

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Welcome back to Thursday Quotables! This weekly feature is the place to highlight a great quote, line, or passage discovered during your reading each week.  Whether it’s something funny, startling, gut-wrenching, or just really beautifully written, Thursday Quotables is where my favorite lines of the week will be, and you’re invited to join in!

If you’d like to participate, it’s really simple:

  • Follow Bookshelf Fantasies, if you please!
  • Write a Thursday Quotables post on your blog. Try to pick something from whatever you’re reading now.
  • Link up via the linky below (look for the cute froggy face).
  • Make sure to include a link back to Bookshelf Fantasies in your post (http://www.bookshelffantasies.com).
  • Have fun!

This week, I’m featuring two different passages from two different books — one that made my heart ache, and one that put a smile on my face.

Thursday Quotable #1:

My body is filled with complete emptiness and complete longing at the same time, only there’s not enough space in me for both, so they fight and argue and run masking tape down my middle to divide me.

Source:  When You Were Here
Author: Daisy Whitney
Little, Brown and Company, 2013

Thursday Quotable #2:

If it were up to my dad, my entire life would be on video.

Anything I do, he grabs his phone. “Opal,” he’ll yell to my mother, “Rafe is eating corn flakes. We gotta get this on film.”

Source:  Openly Straight
Author: Bill Konigsberg
Arthur A. Levine Books, 2013

What lines made you laugh, cry, or gasp this week? Do tell!

Link up, or share your quote of the week in the comments.

Thursday Quotables: Out of the Easy

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Welcome back to Thursday Quotables! This weekly feature is the place to highlight a great quote, line, or passage discovered during your reading each week.  Whether it’s something funny, startling, gut-wrenching, or just really beautifully written, Thursday Quotables is where my favorite lines of the week will be, and you’re invited to join in!

If you’d like to participate, it’s really simple:

  • Follow Bookshelf Fantasies, if you please!
  • Write a Thursday Quotables post on your blog. Try to pick something from whatever you’re reading now.
  • Link up via the linky below (look for the cute froggy face).
  • Make sure to include a link back to Bookshelf Fantasies in your post (http://www.bookshelffantasies.com).
  • Have fun!

This week’s Thursday Quotable:

We walked up St. Peter to Royal, back toward the shop. Neither of us spoke. We moved through the afterbirth of celebration, kicking cans and cups out of the way, stepping over pieces of costumes that had been abandoned through the course of the evening. Jesse grabbed a string of milky glass beads hanging from a doorway. He handed them to me, and I put them over my head. The day had a peace about it, like Christmas, when the world stops and gives permission to pause. All over the city, Orleanians were at rest, asleep in their makeup, beads in their beds.

In case you ever wondered what New Orleans was like the morning after Mardi Gras…

Source:  Out of the Easy
Author: Ruta Sepetys
Philomel Books, 2013

What lines made you laugh, cry, or gasp this week? Do tell!

Link up, or share your quote of the week in the comments.

Thursday Quotables: The Book of Secrets

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Welcome back to Thursday Quotables! This weekly feature is the place to highlight a great quote, line, or passage discovered during your reading each week.  Whether it’s something funny, startling, gut-wrenching, or just really beautifully written, Thursday Quotables is where my favorite lines of the week will be, and you’re invited to join in!

If you’d like to participate, it’s really simple:

  • Follow Bookshelf Fantasies, if you please!
  • Write a Thursday Quotables post on your blog. Try to pick something from whatever you’re reading now.
  • Link up via the linky below (look for the cute froggy face).
  • Make sure to include a link back to Bookshelf Fantasies in your post (http://www.bookshelffantasies.com).
  • Have fun!

This week’s Thursday Quotable:

“Right, okay, but that’s not the point. Don’t you ever want to, you know, escape? Like Holden tried to do, just pick up and leave without telling anybody where you’re going? We could go and never come back if we wanted. Imagine us living in a little town in Tuscany, a two-room cottage with a flagstone path and flowers in all the windows; we’d spend all day writing novels, and then in the afternoon we’d take walks and go out to cheese shops for gorgonzola.”

I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the dream of leaving had been brewing in Nate ever since I first met him. “You’re turning us into a chapter of A Room with a View,” I said, but when I thought of all the times I’d imagined visiting Hemingway’s Spain or Austen’s English countryside, Lewis’s Narnia or Tolkien’s Middle Earth, I could see the drive to leave for somewhere better had always been inside me too. All the best stories in the world were of escape.

Source:  The Book of Secrets
Author: Elizabeth Joy Arnold
Bantam Books, 2013

What lines made you laugh, cry, or gasp this week? Do tell!

Link up, or share your quote of the week in the comments.

Thursday Quotables: Gorgeous

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Welcome back to Thursday Quotables! This weekly feature is the place to highlight a great quote, line, or passage discovered during your reading each week.  Whether it’s something funny, startling, gut-wrenching, or just really beautifully written, Thursday Quotables is where my favorite lines of the week will be, and you’re invited to join in!

If you’d like to participate, it’s really simple:

  • Follow Bookshelf Fantasies, if you please!
  • Write a Thursday Quotables post on your blog. Try to pick something from whatever you’re reading now.
  • Link up via the linky below (look for the cute froggy face).
  • Make sure to include a link back to Bookshelf Fantasies in your post (http://www.bookshelffantasies.com).
  • Have fun!

This week’s Thursday Quotable:

By now I’d met tons of celebrities and almost none of them came even close to matching their magazine covers or baseball cards or ads for vitamin-infused bottled water. Queen Catherine, however, looked exactly and only like herself and I wanted to pull out a five-pound note and hold it up to her face just to check, and marvel at, the similarity and the Queen’s lack of vanity. She’d refused to have her nation’s money Photoshopped.

And one more, because I just can’t resist:

“The Crown Jewels,” said the prince, “and I don’t know why, but every time I say that I feel I should be unzipping my fly.”

LOL. This book cracks me up.

Source:  Gorgeous
Author: Paul Rudnick
Scholastic Press, 2013

What lines made you laugh, cry, or gasp this week? Do tell!

Link up, or share your quote of the week in the comments.

Thursday Quotables: Joyland

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Welcome back to Thursday Quotables! This weekly feature is the place to highlight a great quote, line, or passage discovered during your reading each week.  Whether it’s something funny, startling, gut-wrenching, or just really beautifully written, Thursday Quotables is where my favorite lines of the week will be, and you’re invited to join in!

If you’d like to participate, it’s really simple:

  • Follow Bookshelf Fantasies, if you please!
  • Write a Thursday Quotables post on your blog. Try to pick something from whatever you’re reading now.
  • Link up via the linky below (look for the cute froggy face).
  • Make sure to include a link back to Bookshelf Fantasies in your post (http://www.bookshelffantasies.com).
  • Have fun!

This week’s Thursday Quotable:

By early September, Heaven Beach was almost completely deserted, which suited my mood. That fall was the most beautiful of my life. Even forty years later I can say that. And I was never so unhappy, I can say that, too. People think first love is sweet, and never sweeter than when that first bond snaps. You’ve heard a thousand pop and country songs that prove the point; some fool got his heart broke. Yet that first broken heart is always the most painful, the slowest to mend, and leaves the most visible scar. What’s so sweet about that?

Source:  Joyland
Author: Stephen King
Hard Case Crime/Titan Publishing, 2013

What lines made you laugh, cry, or gasp this week? Do tell!

Link up, or share your quote of the week in the comments.