Book meme

[qatarperegrine]

I've done some identify-the-song-from-my-favorite-line memes, and I recently did an identify-the-movie-from-my-favorite-quote meme. It occurs to me that what's missing is an identify-the-book-from-my-favorite-quote meme!

So, same basic rules as for movies: Pick umpteen of your favorite books. Select favorite lines from these books. Post them and see how long it takes friends to guess them. I'm sticking with novels, because asking you to identify quotes from my favorite theology books is just no fun at all.

1. There's only four things we [Americans] do better than anyone else
   • music
   • movies
   • microcode (software)
   • high-speed pizza delivery.
   -Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson


2. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
   -1984 by George Orwell


3. A lot of people experience the world with the same incredulity as when a magician suddenly pulls a rabbit out of a hat which has just been shown to them empty. ... We who live here are microscopic insects existing deep down in the rabbit's fur. But philosophers are always trying to climb up the fine hairs of the fur in order to stare right into the magician's eyes.
   -Sophie's World, by Jostein Gaarder


4. "Not fair! not fair!" he hissed. "It isn't fair, my precious, is it, to ask us what i got in its nassty little pocketses?"
   -The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkein


5. Magic shall be written upon the sky by the rain but they shall not be able to read it;
   Magic shall be written on the faces of the stony hills but their minds shall not be able to contain it;
   In winter the barren trees shall be a black writing but they shall not understand it.
   -Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke


6. "It isn't necessary to call me Father," the chaplain explained. "I'm an Anabaptist."
   -Catch 22, by Joseph Heller


7. "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
   "But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D."
   "Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
   "Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
   -Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams


8. Oh bliss! Bliss and heaven! Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now. As I slooshied, I knew such lovely pictures!
   -A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess


9. "Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, 'Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.' A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words."
   -Till We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis


10. "I remember," said one of the oldest mayflies, "when all this was fields, as far as you could see."
    The younger mayflies looked around.
    "It's still fields," one of them ventured, after a polite interval.
    "I remember when it was better fields," said the mayfly sharply.
    -Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett


11. "So the puppeteer requires that we believe that we're not puppets. We're forced to believe in free will."
    "Or so Valentine explained it to me."
    "But she doesn't really believe that, does she?"
    "Of course she doesn't. Her genes won't let her."
    -Xenocide, by Orson Scott Card


12. "If someone loves a flower of which just one example exists among all the millions and millions of stars, that's enough to make him happy when he looks at the stars."
    -The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint Exupéry


13. Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you - even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage, thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.
    Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world.
    -American Gods, by Neil Gaiman


14. "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."
    -Foundation, by Isaac Asimov

... and I can't find the quote I want from my favorite novel, so #15 will have to wait until tomorrow!

UPDATE: here's quote #15. Mum gets five bonus points for giving me the quote purely on the basis of the above paragraph.

15. "I don't want you to blame yourself for what happened. I know you would have come to get me if you could, but I couldn't have gone anyway, not with Agnes ill. I wanted to come, and if I hadn't they would have been all alone, and nobody would ever have known how frightened and brave and irreplaceable they were."
    -The Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis

Comments

[aristopheles.livejournal.com]

I believe that the answer to #2 is "1984".
I want to let someone else answer 4 and 7.

[qatar.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's the opening line of 1984. (I was going to go with "Do it to Julia," but that seemed too obvious.)

[aristopheles.livejournal.com]

I remembered it because I'd never heard of clocks "striking thirteen" before. Not sure I've heard it since, either.

[roseandsigil.livejournal.com]

9. is Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis, which I love.

[qatar.livejournal.com]

Yes!! I wasn't sure anyone would get that one. :-)

[canyonwren.livejournal.com]

Where are numbers 2-4? You're messing with my mind!

[qatar.livejournal.com]

Do you really not see them? I'm perplexed....

[qatar.livejournal.com]

Ah, I had an unclosed tag. Does it work now?

[canyonwren.livejournal.com]

I think I see all of them. The numbering goes from 1 straight to 5, though. I must be drinking too much if nobody else sees that.

[qatar.livejournal.com]

Weirdness. I've looked at it in Safari, Firefox and Explorer now, and I see them consecutively numbered.

[kit-ping.livejournal.com]

#4 is The Hobbit, I think, though it might be Fellowship of the Ring.

#7 is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I just digitized the radio shows and have been geeking out. :)

#10 is a Discworld book, one of Death's... I arbitrarily guess Reaper Man.

#11 is Ender's Game. (Possibly one of the sequels. Darn serieses!)

[kit-ping.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah: This is the coolest meme ever. :)

[qatar.livejournal.com]

4, 7 and 10 are right -- yes, that's Reaper Man. :-)

11 is indeed one of the sequels.

[roach2600.livejournal.com]

I'll have to throw out "Shadow Puppets" for number 11 ;)

[qatar.livejournal.com]

Nope, earlier.

[lasa.livejournal.com]

I believe that #1 is Snowcrash.

#13 is familiar, so I know it's a book I've read - I'll venture a guess - American Gods?

Also, I would have been game for theology books... ;)

[qatar.livejournal.com]

Correct on both counts!

I will have to round up some religion books and do a guess-the-quote meme for them, too. :-)

[materjibrail.livejournal.com]

Neat meme!
Is #5 Norrell and Strange?
#3 bugs me. I could almost quote it but can't remember where it's from. I'll say "Oh, of course"
#6 is one of y_pestis' favourite books
#12 should read something like "Si quelqu'un aime une fleur dont il n'y a qu'une example entre tous les milliers d'etoiles... And the flower is a rose
#15 ( And if this isn't it then you tell me what it is!)
"I don't want you to blame yourself for what happened. I know you would have come to get me if you could, but I couldn't have gone anyway, not with Agnes ill.
I wanted to come, and if I hadn't they would have been all alone, and nobody would ever have known how fightened and brave and irreplaceable they were."

[qatar.livejournal.com]

You're right on all counts (though I'm leaving 6 unguessed to give other people a chance!) And yes, you'll say "Oh, of course" for #3. No hints, though, because Leland just read it so he should be able to guess. :-)

And yes, that is exactly the quote I was looking for for #15! Five bonus points!

[materjibrail.livejournal.com]

Ooops. They were "frightened" not "fightened". That would be something very different.

Proud of myself for getting it!

[foobart.livejournal.com]

Hmmm...I didn't know numbers 5, 8, 12, or 13.

I know 11, but I don't know which of two books by the same author it's in.

But I suspect I'm not really allowed to play.

[qatar.livejournal.com]

I think you can guess #14, since nobody else has gotten it, and since you've marched around Washington D.C. with it on a placard. :-)

Number 6

[(Anonymous)]

This is a guess, but i would say number 6 isfrom Catch 22.

Rabbi_t

Re: Number 6

[qatar.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's Catch 22!

[(Anonymous)]

I'm quite certain 14 is quote by isaac asimov. i just cant remember the title of the book.

"foundation" was it?!

i also believe number 8 is from "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess


- fish

[qatar.livejournal.com]

Right and right! :-)

[canyonwren.livejournal.com]

Ok, the numbering is fine on my work computer, so neither of us is nuts. And #15 is a quote from probably my favorite book ever: The Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis.

[canyonwren.livejournal.com]

Although I think my favorite quote is from nearly the same place, when, in reference to her recorder, says, "You are here in place of the friends I love."

[qatar.livejournal.com]

Yay! The Doomsday Book is my favorite book, and I didn't realize I knew anyone else whose favorite it is too.

There has to be better grammar for that thought, but I can't find it right now. :-)

[apdraper2000.livejournal.com]

I'm ashamed to say I didn't recognize the quote from The Doomsday Book, which is one of my all-time favorites and one of the most intense reading experiences I've ever had - I mean my appreciation is not simply theoretical, as it is with some books.

I'm feeling a strong irresistable urge to do this meme. Damnit.

[qatar.livejournal.com]

I reread The Doomsday Book every year or two. There aren't many books that have drawn me in so inescapably. I really CARE about the characters. I cry every time I read it. I feel stupid mourning for fictitious people, but I can't NOT mourn for them.

Do the meme! Do the meme! :-D

I totally cheated; I decided on a list of about 20 books and then went hunting around the Internet for good quotes from them. In some cases I knew the quote I wanted, and in others I just picked one that sounded good. And for some (like Brave New World I couldn't find a quote that captured what I loved about the book, so I cut it from the list.

[apdraper2000.livejournal.com]

Okay - a pox on your head - but I'm trying to do the meme. Here's a really petty question - how did you do the indentations in your post? Do you know the tags, or did you do it in rich text to begin with?

[qatar.livejournal.com]

It's all about the tags, baby! Here's what you need if you don't know them.

Condensed version: at the beginning of the list, type <ol> (for "ordered list). At the end, typ </ol>. At the beginning of each list item, type <li> (for "list item," I imagine), and at the end it's best (though not entirely mandatory) to type </li>

That does all the numbering for you as well as the indentation. Make sure you preview before you post, because if you forget to close a tag it screws everything up!

#3

[materjibrail.livejournal.com]

SO WHAT IS #3?
(And yes, I know I was screaming.)

Re: #3

[qatar.livejournal.com]

Oops, I forgot to label the unguessed ones! I've done it now.

#3 is Sophie's World, of course! :-)