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Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Top Ten (Fiction) Books That Made Me Think



Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish

Top Ten (Fiction) Books That Made Me Think


I decided to put favorite quotes under each title and tried to pick quotes that exemplified themes that left me pondering.

1. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”

2. Til We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis
“It was when I was happiest that I longed most..."
"The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.”

3. The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis
The demon instructing a lower ranking demon (refers to God as "our Enemy"):
“Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”

4. The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis
"Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains.”

"Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?”

5. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”

“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”

6. 1984 by George Orwell
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

7. The Space Trilogy by C. S. Lewis (Especially Perelandra and That Hideous Strength)
“Long since on Mars and more strongly since he came to Perelandra, Ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and both from fact was purely terrestrial-was part and parcel of that unhappy distinction between soul and body which resulted from the fall. Even on earth the sacraments existed as a permanent reminder that the division was neither wholesome nor final. The Incarnation had been the beginning of its disappearance. In Perelandra it would have no meaning at all.” - Perelandra

8. The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis (Especially The Last Battle)
“I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now...Come further up, come further in!” - The Last Battle

9. The Giver by Lois Lowry
“Always in the dream, it seemed as if there were a destination: a something--he could not grasp what-that lay beyond the place where the thickness of snow brought the sled to a stop. He was left, upon awakening, with the feeling that he wanted, even somehow needed, to reach the something that waited in the distance. The feeling that it was good. That it was welcoming. That it was significant. But he did not know how to get there.”

10. A Wrinkle in Time (Series) by Madeleine L'Engle
“I think your mythology would call them fallen angels. War and hate are their business, and one of their chief weapons is un-Naming - making people not know who they are. If someone knows who he is, really knows, then he doesn't need to hate. That's why we still need Namers, because there are places throughout the universe like your planet Earth. When everyone is really and truly Named, then the Echthroi will be vanquished.”
A Wind in the Door

“A burst of harmony so brilliant that it almost overwhelmed them surrounded Meg, the cherubim, Calvin, and Mr. Jenkins. But after a moment of breathlessness, Meg was able to open herself to the song of the farae, these strange creatures who were Deepened, rooted, yet never seperated from eachother, no matter how great the distance. We are the song of the universe. We sing with the angelic host. We are musicians. The farae and the stars are the singers. Our song orders the rhythm of creation.” ― A Wind in the Door

2 comments:

Jenna St. Hilaire said...

Wow, I've read 8 of your 10. And they're all awesome. This is a great list.

Couldn't pick from the Lewis books myself, so I threw them all under one number. But I like how you worked it--you got lots of his quotes in there. Was there ever a more quotable writer? I submit that there was not. :)

Somewhere Only We Know said...

Great list! I need to read CS Lewis. New follower by the way. Check out my TTT.

Sandy @ Somewhere Only We Know