Top Ten Tuesday 05.08.12

Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted over at The Broke and the Bookish. This week's Top Ten is Top Ten Favorite Quotes from Books.

There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

Memory is a cruel mistress with whom we all must learn to dance.― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.― Jane Austen, Persuasion

The past can teach us, nurture us, but it cannot sustain us. The essence of life is change, and we must move ever forward or the soul will wither and die.― Susanna Kearsley, Mariana

A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mad, as if mad is a different direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don't go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life.― Kate Chopin, The Awakening

You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

If we accept time for what it is, how it flows and how we flow with it, I doubt very much that would continue wasting loads of it by constantly checking our watches.― Samantha Sotto, Before Ever After

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.― Doris May Lessing, Under My Skin