Wednesday, May 25, 2022

Challenge: Favorite Quote

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews.)

Prompt: Favorite quote from a book.

I can think of several off the top of my head, so I'm not sure I could narrow it down to just one. Let's take a look: 

  • "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold... but what the hell, it's home." Roger Zelazny riffing off Yeats in the Chronicles of Amber.
  • "I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don't know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure." Martha Wells in All Systems Red, opening The Murderbot Diaries with the most perfect introduction I've ever seen. Everything that's going to happen in the novella is promised to the reader right there in the first three lines.
  • "This is blasphemy, my dear Jessica; a very important human endeavor." Iris Murdoch, from The Nice and the Good. (I think that's the right book, and also it's possible that I'm slightly misquoting it as Google seems strangely unable to find it. I shall have to re-read the book.) I like the idea that blasphemy is not only a defining characteristic of humanity, but that the capacity for blasphemy is something that the gods might envy in us.

5 comments:

  1. I really need to read the Murderbot Diaries sometime!

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    1. I just hit the busy-bordering-on-horrible phase of my work year, and went back to them for comfort reading. Would highly recommend.

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  2. I love these quotes! And Murderbot is a lot of fun! The Zelazny quote is so frighteningly true.

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  3. I love the Murderbot books! A friend recc'd them and they are great. -Echo

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  4. I'm not familiar with these ones, but I like them.

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