Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Quotes

Hi all, I know I've been away for a little while, but I just got back from China! I spent some time in glorious Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou. It was amazing, let me tell you. I am currently debating on whether or not to post some pictures and travel commentary here, because I know this is a book blog. Let me know your thoughts- are you interested at all or shall I keep my blog purely book related?

Ok, on to the quotes. I must say I found this difficult, as I'm not a quote underliner. So I had to go back and remember books which really spoke to me, and the passages that moved me the most. Here goes.

1. How many Sundays-how many hundreds of Sundays like this-lay ahead of me? "Quiet, peaceful and lonely," I said aloud to myself. On Sundays, I didn't wind my spring. -Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

2. I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?
- John Steinbeck, East of Eden

3. Lord, what fools these mortals be!
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

4. Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.
- Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

5. You deserve to need me, not to have me.
-Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors

6. In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which are frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you...And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too.
— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

7. Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

8. None of us really changes over time. We only become more fully what we are.
— Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

9. Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed.
— Anne Rice, The Witching Hour

10. You're only the fairest when your fairest to yourself.
-Gail Carson Levine, Fairest