I have so many quotes that I bring back to mind - my mother did that with EVERYTHING we said or at least that is how it seemed - we would ask a question about the most mundane thing and Mom would quote or break out in song with lyrics that were directly related to the question - I do not think that women ever said anything without starting her announcement or thought with a quote - one of my more joyful memories of my mother. Where I do not necessarily say my quote outloud, when I hear someone talking I smile in my head and make a connection.
The Harry Potter series gave me so many but these come to mind.
Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.
Nothing like a nighttime stroll to give you ideas.
And then from one of my all time favorite books - A Child's Christmas in Wales -
It snowed last year too: I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.
When standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and looks at the fireman in the smoke, cinders and melting snowballs and says, Would you like anything to read? Just love it... often when I am at loose ends looking for a book I remember that scene as well as, when I see someone acting ridiculous so that instead of getting myself in a twist I remember this scene.
Oh and in Mapp and Lucia they pepper their conversations with, la bella lingua and they say ta ta to each other with, Au reservoir! And seeing someone bluster how can you not think in your head of Major Benjy loudly saying, Qui-hi. Evidently a phrase he used when he called his servants in India.
From One Hundred Years of solitude there is this fun, Cease, cows, life is short.
And this profound and simple logic - I love it. a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.
But my all time favorite is long and I pull it out several times a year to read - the irony of it - the sadness of knowing the circumstance experienced where this logic is so right and appropriate and yet, the satire and the truth of it overwhelms me everytime - from Slaughter House Five.
“The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.
But the Gospels actually taught this:
Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. So it goes.
The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again:
Oh, boy–they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch _that_ time!
And that thought had a brother: “There are right people to lynch.” Who? People not well connected. So it goes.
The visitor from outer space made a gift to the Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.
So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn’t possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.
And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections.”
