The Terror of Knowing

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme which was created by The Broke and Bookish and each week those lovely ladies decide on a topic around which you create lists (because who doesn’t love a good list) of ten books that fit the given theme. This week’s topic is: Quotes I Loved From Books I Read In The Past Year Or So.

Phew, that’s a bit of a mouthful but, in short, here are my top ten quotes from books I’ve read recently, with recently here meaning books I’ve read since the start of 2015. Because I’m incapable of choosing favourites, especially when it comes to quotes which I collect, these are listed roughly in reverse order of when I read them, such organisation!

1. “Myths are simply stories about truths we’ve forgotten.” (The Sword of Summer by Rick Riordan)
2. “The Darkling slumped back in his chair. ‘Fine,’ he said with a weary shrug. ‘Make me your villain.’ ” (Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo)
3. “Senior year. And then life. Maybe that’s the way it worked. High school was just a prologue to the real novel. Everybody got to write you — but when you graduated, you got to write yourself.” (Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz)
4. “Humans were so circular; they lived the same slow cycles of joy and misery over and over, never learning. Every lesson in the universe had to be taught billions of times, and it never stuck. Maybe it was good that the world forgot every lesson, every good and bad memory, every triumph and failure, all of it dying with each generation. Perhaps this cultural amnesia spared them all. Perhaps if they remembered everything, hope would die instead.” (Blue Lily, Lily Blue by Maggie Stiefvater)
5. “She wore a dress Ronan thought looked like a lampshade. Whatever sort of lamp it belonged on, Gansey clearly wished he had one.
   Ronan wasn’t a fan of lamps.” (The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater)
6. “When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”(A Clash of Kings by George RR Martin)
7. “Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer to achieve immortality by not dying.” (The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett)
8. “Truly, life is wasted on the living, Nobody Owens. For one of us is too foolish to live, and it is not I.” (The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman)
9. “Real life was something happening in her peripheral vision.” (Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell)
10. “She recognized that that is how friendships begin: one person reveals a moment of strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit it.” (The Interestings – Meg Wolitzer)

As you can see from these smattering of favourite quotes from recent reads, I like a mix of the beautiful and the silly, the profound and the ridiculous, from love to death to something in-between. What are some of your favourite quotes from recent reads or of all-time?