Weekly Geeks this week asked us to share our favourite bookish quotes. We all have our favourite bookish quotes. Some well-known, and some not so well-known. This week’s geeky assignment for us is to share some of those favourites. It can be just one favourite that we’d like to highlight, or a whole list. It can be quotes from books, or quotes about books and reading. We can tell everyone where the quote is from, and/or who said it …. or we can create a quote quiz and make the readers guess. (Guessers! No fair googling!) Whatever we decide to do, we should have fun doing it!
The first quote comes from a book I read last year. The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson. Jim Thompson was ahead of his time. For those who don’t know what the book is about it is the story of Lou Ford, a small town sheriff’s deputy. He is an ordinary (if slightly dull) man. Except no one knows that behind his benign exterior there lies a dark secret. Once he meets a woman called Joyce Lakeland though his time is up. Soon things spiral out of control and the dead bodies start piling up. A must read for fans of crime fiction!
There is a nightmarish quality to the narrative. It’s because Lou’s life is somewhat of a nightmare. As he describes it,
“It was like being asleep when you were awake and awake when you were asleep. I’d pinch myself, figuratively speaking–I had to keep pinching myself. Then I’d wake up kind of in reverse; I’d go back into the nightmare I had to live in. And everything would be clear and reasonable.”
This heartbreaking one from the short story Magdalena Looking from the book Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland,
“She thought of all the people in all the paintings she had seen that day, not just Father’s, in all the paintings of the world, in fact. Their eyes, the particular turn of a head, their loneliness or suffering or grief was borrowed by an artist to be seen by other people throughout the years who would never see them face to face. People who would be that close to her, she thought, a matter of a few arms’ lengths, looking, looking, and they would never know her.”
And then there is one of my favourite comic plays by the wicked Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, which is a treasure trove of quotable quotes like this one,
JACK. … Her mother is perfectly unbearable. Never met such a Gorgon . . . I don’t really know what a Gorgon is like, but I am quite sure that Lady Bracknell is one. In any case, she is a monster, without being a myth, which is rather unfair . . .
And finally my favourite quote about reading is the one by Arthur Christopher Benson I use as my tagline,
“All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality — the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.”
This has been a fun week at the Weekly Geeks! Can’t wait to read what quotes everyone else has posted!
A Paperback Life 
have you watched the film version of The Killer Inside Me? It’s not an easy watch and I don’t know whether it’s entirely successful but Casey Affleck delivers a good performance as Lou Ford.
No, I haven’t. I kind of actively avoid watching adaptations of books I’ve read. Most of what I have watched, I have hated. Casey Affleck is a good actor though. I liked him better than Brad Pitt in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
I really love your final one – because that is how it is – escape. I do not understand some of those people who criticise escapism. Isn’t all fiction escapism? Otherwise, read a non-fiction.
Weekly Geeks has been fun this week – I love quotes!
Yes, that is why I read books, to escape. When I read a book it feels like I am travelling through it. I can go places I’ve never been to and will probably never be. That is why this particular quote holds so much meaning for me.
I love quotes too!