Favorite Books and Quotes

First off one of the best works of fiction I've read was Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. "If there is anything more poignant than a body agonising for want of bread, it is a soul which is dying of hunger for light." This book was beautiful to me, I read it for the love of reading. And it was amazing! "It is nothing to die; it is horrible not to live." Jean Valjean, as the protagonist was so Christ-like yet was a criminal. "Laughter is sunshine; it chases winter from the human face."

Romeo and Juliet has been made and remade, it inspired the Twilight franchise, it has breed it's own cliche. But the original Shakespeare play is something everyone should read once.
"Come, gentle night, — come, loving black brow'd night,
Give me my Romeo; and when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of Heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun."

Next curiously enough is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. It was so clever and fun. "It's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then." I read them for fun and it was nice to read as an adult, you pick up jokes that a kid wouldn't because they are so intellectual.
"'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.

'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: 'we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'

'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.

'You must be' said the Cat 'or you wouldn't have come here.'"

The Old Man and the Sea by Earnest Hemingway was beautiful and relaxing in its simplicity. "A man can be destroyed but not defeated." I would recommend to read straight away.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte was read around sixteen and was better than watching a million sappy chick flicks. Just read the way Ms. Bronte writes: "Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt? May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonized as in that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love." She acted like you were her best friend reading her story and that is one of the great things about it.

Although sisters, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights is a very different writing style, more serious and thus it took me a year- or two to actually finish. the story near the end got depressing so I gave up. Boy was I glad I didn't, the end was tragic, wonderful, and agonizing all at once!
"I was a fool to fancy for a moment that she valued Edgar Linton's attachment more than mine — If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in eighty years, as I could in a day. And Catherine has a heart as deep as I have; the sea could be as readily contained in that house-trough, as her whole affection be monopolized by him — Tush! He is scarcely a degree nearer than her dog, or her horse — It is not in him to be loved like me, how can she love in him what he has not?"

I read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee in 8th grade and couldn't get why everyone else in the class didn't love and understand it, although more people read the book than normal in the class. "Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."



Another Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, is almost an Anti-Romeo and Juliet. Love is made fun of and put on display, Lovers are in a forest and the trickster Puck puts love spells on them to hilarious results. We read this in 9th or 10th grade and the WHOLE class loved it, we acted out the parts and laughed so much! As Puck says, "Lord, what fools these mortals be!"