By this, I mean a book whose individual sentences tend to stick out more than the totality of the work. Sentences that can just strike your heart absent of context.
For me, glossing through my copies of Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre and Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin (both beautiful books in general) I have dozens of individual sentences underlined that are all so emotionally gripping.
Zero Zero Zero by Roberto Saviono so far this year...
Some bits... An Italian mafia chief imparting lessons to Mexican and South American cartel members in a secret meeting
The rules of the organization are the rules of life. Government laws are the rules of one side that wants to fuck the other side. And we ain’t gonna let ourselves get fucked by nobody. There’s people who make money without taking any risks, and they’re always gonna be afraid of those who make money by risking everything. If you risk it all, you have it all, capish? But if you think you gotta save yourself, or that you can do it without jail time, without fleeing, without going into hiding, then let me make it clear right from the start: you are not a man. And if you’re not a man, you can leave this room right now, and don’t even hope to ever become one, ’cause you will never ever be a man of honor
======
Crees en el amor? Love ends. Crees en tu corazón? Your heart stops. No? No love and no heart? So, do you believe in coño, in pussy? Well, even pussies dry up after a while. You believe in your wife? Soon as your money runs out, she’ll tell you you’re neglecting her. You believe in your children? As soon as you stop giving them money they’ll say you don’t love them. You believe in your mama? If you don’t nurse her, she’ll say you’re an ungrateful child. Listen to what I’m tellin’ you. You need to live, vivir. You got to live for yourselves. It’s for yourselves that you need to know how to be respected, and how to show respect. La famiglia. Respect the people who are useful to you and despise the ones who aren’t. The people who can give you something get your respect, and the ones who are useless lose it. Somebody who wants something from you, doesn’t he respect you? Somebody who’s afraid of you? So what happens when you got nothing to give? When you got nothing left? When you’re no longer useful? Then you’re basura, rubbish. If you have nothing to give, then you’re nothing, nada, nulla.
=========
I’m talkin’ to you; I even like some of you. Some of you, I’d like to smash your face. But even if I like you the best, if you got more pussy or more money than me, I want you dead. If one of you becomes my brother, and I make him my equal in the organization, then one thing is clear: He’s gonna try to fuck me over. Don’t think a friend will be forever a friend. I’ll be killed by somebody I shared my food with, my sleep, everything. I’ll be killed by somebody I ate with, somebody who gave me shelter. I don’t know who it’ll be or I’d already have eliminated him. But it’ll happen. And if he doesn’t kill me, he’ll betray me. Rules are rules. And rules are not laws. Laws are for cowards. Rules are for men. That’s why we have rules of honor. Rules of honor don’t tell you you have to be good, just, upright. Rules of honor tell you how to rule. What you have to do to handle people, money, power. Rules of honor tell you how to behave if you want to rule, if you want to fuck the guy above you, if you don’t want to be fucked by the guy below you. There’s no sense explaining them. Rules of honor exist, period. They evolved on their own, on and through the blood of every man of honor. How do you choose?
==========
You have to know who you want to be. If you rob, shoot, rape, deal drugs, you’ll make money for a while, but then they’ll take you and crush you. You can do it. Sure, you can do it. But not for long, ’cause you don’t know what might happen to you; people will fear you only if you stick a pistol in their mouth. But as soon as you turn your back, what happens? As soon as a job goes wrong? If you belong to the organization, you know there’s a rule for everything. If you want to make money, there’s ways to do it; if you want to kill, there are motives and methods; if you want to get ahead, you can, but you have to earn respect, trust, you have to make yourself indispensable. There’s even rules for if you want to change the rules. Whatever you do outside the rules, you never know how it might end. But whatever you do that follows the rules of honor, you always know exactly what it’s going to get you. And you know exactly how the people around you will react. So if you want to be an ordinary man, just keep doing what you’re doing. But if you want to become a man of honor, you got to have rules. And the difference between an ordinary man and a man of honor is that the man of honor always knows what’s happening, while the ordinary man gets screwed by chance, bad luck, or stupidity. Things happen to him. But the man of honor knows what’s gonna happen, and he knows when. You know exactly what belongs to you and what doesn’t; you know exactly how far you can push yourself, even if you want to push past every rule. Everybody wants three things: power, pussy, and money. Even the judge when he condemns bad people, even the politicians, they want dinero and pussy and power, but they want to get it by showing they’re indispensable, defenders of the law or the poor or who knows what. Everybody wants money, even though they go around saying they want something else, or doing things for other people. The rules of the Honored Society are rules for controlling everybody. The Honored Society knows you can have money, pussy, and power, but it also knows that the man who’s capable of giving up everything is the one who decides everybody else’s fate. Cocaine. That’s what cocaine is. All you can see, you can have it. Without cocaine, you’re nothing. With cocaine, you can be whoever you want. If you sniff cocaine, you screw yourself all on your own. The organization gives you rules for moving up in the world. It gives you rules for killing and for how you’re gonna be killed. You want to lead a normal life? You want to be worth nothing? Fine. All you need to do is not see, not hear. But remember this: In Mexico, where you can do whatever you want, get high, fuck little girls, drive as fast as you like, the only ones who really rule are the ones who have rules. If you do stupid stuff, you got no honor, and if you got no honor, you got no power. You’re just like everybody else.
=========
AMAZING STUFF
I was shocked at the number of times I thought, "Holy shit, that was good writing" while reading Blood Meridian
My diary desu
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Zen in the martial arts
Exactly. My copy of Monstrous Regiment is a mess and Soul Music would have been completely mutilated if I'd been using my hard copy to study it.
Les Miserables. I think I've highlighted 80% of it.
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Overall, a fantastic book, beautifully written. There are some amazing quotes and lines from it that stand out as well. Still one of my favorites.
“The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall.”
“She pulled in her horizons like a great fish net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulders. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”
Maybe not quite in the context you mean, but Meditations by Marcus Aurelias fits the quotability part.
Fahrenheit 451, I was gifted a very old copy from one of my teachers, and it's got generations of notes on literary allusions, metaphors, and general interest notes. It's probably my favorite book in my collection.
Cormac Mcarthy can sure as hell write a sentence.
Under Milk Wood. Dylan Thomas.
>From where you are, you can hear, in Cockle Row in the spring, moonless night, Miss Price, dressmaker and sweetshop-keeper, dream of her lover, tall as the town clock tower, Samson-syrup-gold-maned, whacking thighed and piping hot, thunderbolt-bass'd and barnacle-breasted flailing up the cockles with his eyes like blowlamps and scooping low over her lonely loving hotwaterbottled body...
​
>The only sea I saw
Was the seesaw sea
With you riding on it.
Lie down, lie easy.
Let me shipwreck in your thighs.
​
I could quote so much of this book. The opening page alone makes me swoon. It's a 'Play for Voices', so best experienced on stage (with a Welsh cast of actors). If you try reading the prose with a Welsh lilt it absolutely sings.
Here's a snippet of the opening performed by Michael Sheen.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
First quote is a little purple for my taste. Super abstract imagery. Though it does sound pretty. Second quote is phenomenal.
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Othello by Shakespeare
Twilight of the Idols.
“And then Young Sam had come along.
At first it had been fine. The baby was, well, a baby, all lolling head and burping and unfocused eyes, entirely the preserve of his mother.
And then, one evening, his son had turned and looked directly at Vimes, with eyes that for his father outshone the lamps of the world, and fear had poured into Sam Vimes’ life in a terrible wave.
All this good fortune, all this fierce joy … it was wrong.”
I understand but it does make sense within the plot line of the book. The MC is an African American woman in the early 20th century who, after a lot of trial and tribulation and dealing with some really shitty humans, meets the love of her life. She subsequently >!has to shoot him after he contracts rabies and tries to kill her.!< She’s reminiscing at the end of the story about how her life is still worth living despite the fact that she had this love that was everything she ever wanted. When it’s gone, she has the wisdom and maturity to recognize its worth and substance without giving up. It’s really a book worth reading by an author gone way too soon.
Edited for clarity and covering spoilers.
I sometimes do this and it’s often to mark sentences that stood out to me. Mostly because they were just really beautiful and I want to be able to reread them again later. But you can also underline a sentence because it’s relatable or because you found it funny or something like that. If you look up videos on why people annotate books you might find better examples and instructions
Most of Shakespeare for that matter. Othello is one of the best though. Even in a play like the comedy of errors
Ramayana
The Handmaid's Tale. Have loved it since I read it in college.
"Change is never instantaneous. In a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it."
Siddhartha.
Almost any book by C.S Lewis but especially The Abolition of man and Four Loves
Pretty much anything by Vonnegut.
And so it goes.
East of Eden.
Im not gonna lie, I've never highlighted nor underlined anything in any of the many books I've read. Could someone tell me why you personally do so?
Probably most erudite philosophy books.
Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky. I couldn’t stop writing quotes down while reading it.
the realm of possibilities by david levithan, recreationally/casually/whatever. academically, the house of mirth by edith wharton, gulliver's travels, andd the hunger games
All about love by bell hooks
Honestly, I only clicked on this post to see how long it took someone to say Pratchett. 😂
Jane Eyre. No one can turn a phrase like Charlotte.
Quotable? The Prince, by Machiavelli
Walden, by Henry David Thoreau, has the most individual passages and flickers of genius of any book I know. Time after time in my long life I’ve reached back to Walden to succinctly express something intangible. Just a few that live in my head:
And the passage that truly shaped my life, encouraging me to seek adventure in very literal ways:
> As I was leaving the Irishman's roof after the rain, bending my steps again to the pond, my haste to catch pickerel, wading in retired meadows, in sloughs and bog–holes, in forlorn and savage places, appeared for an instant trivial to me who had been sent to school and college; but as I ran down the hill toward the reddening west, with the rainbow over my shoulder, and some faint tinkling sounds borne to my ear through the cleansed air, from I know not what quarter, my Good Genius seemed to say—Go fish and hunt far and wide day by day—farther and wider—and rest thee by many brooks and hearth–sides without misgiving. Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth. Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home. There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played. Grow wild according to thy nature, like these sedges and brakes, which will never become English bay. Let the thunder rumble; what if it threaten ruin to farmers' crops? That is not its errand to thee. Take shelter under the cloud, while they flee to carts and sheds. Let not to get a living be thy trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the land, but own it not. Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs.
Adding to that, I also love when I receive a book with annotations and get to see what another person thought about the book when they read it. Especially when I know the person, it makes me feel close to them!
De Tocqueville's Democracy in America
Good Omens! I screenshot a lot of it, but highlight it as well
"gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide" lives rent free in my head
Fear and loathing in las vegas.
“With a bit of luck, his life was ruined forever. Always thinking that just behind some narrow door in all of his favorite bars, men in red woolen shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he’ll never know.”
God’s Snake by Irini Spanidou. “A cynic is someone who ascribes his own baseness to others.”
Heinlein's "Time Enough for Love."
Probably Catch-22, it's funny but often very poignant. Most things by Kurt Vonnegut, but Cat's Cradle in particular.
AWOL on the Appalachian Trail. Not beautiful writing, in fact it is rather spare. But he has some very insightful personal philosophy.
The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
on earth we’re briefly gorgeous by ocean vuong
Stephen King's: Dark Tower.
"They'll be water if God wills it."
I saved the most quotes ever from The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. Beautiful writing.
Not a book, but Emerson’s essays and especially Self-Reliance
"The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall" is purple. Again, sounds very pretty. People can write sentences for the sake of them sounding pretty. Don't really get why I'm being downvoted for saying it's purple and sounds nice.
​
>The kiss of his memory
ok, a metaphorical memory kiss is a little out there, but I'm definitely following
​
>made pictures of love and light
the kiss of his memory made pictures of love? right, so 9 words in we're 2 metaphors deep. sounding a bit twee, but I think I'm with you
​
>against the wall.
oh... so now we're throwing those double-stacked metaphors at a metaphorical wall? Trying to see what'll metaphorically stick? The wall of what, exactly? may as well keep it coming. The wall of her mind? A literal wall?
If I read this verbatim in a poem written by a thirteen-year-old, I wouldn't blink twice.
You're getting downvoted for being condescending, to be honest. It's purple, it's twee, it's as if a 13 year old wrote it.
It's fine if you don't like or understand the metaphors, it's fine if you like starker phrasing, it's even okay if you don't get the concept of prisms or memory, but don't say "it's fine" to write sentences just for the sake of sounding pretty, but then basically call the author a 13 year old.
Arundhati Roy, Jerry Pinto, Milan Kundera
Meditations A River Runs Through It Viktor Frankl's books
These books, I forbid myself to skim. I read and reread the lines to let them soak all the way in. (Also marked up and annotated.)
Moby Dick, or anything by Nietzche
Any Becky Chambers, When Women Were Dragons, The Handmaid’s Tale (even tho I’m a big fan of the book), Octavia E Butler, Before the coffee gets cold, The book of the unnamed midwife, Emotional Inheritance, A thousand ships, The whole picture.
Lol I love marking books 💕
All of Dune. I literally have a separate book that is nothing but Dune quotes.
I love that, I have never received an annotated book before but I kind of want one know 🙈
Honestly! I just started reading him and am in love
Working through discworld and good omens from the library and am very tempted to get my own copies so I can annotate and dog ear stuff
For real, I picked up a copy of civ and madness from the my schools library which was heavily annotated and despite having personal disagreement about writing on a library book it was really fascinating to see which parts stood out to them and learning about them through there notes to self
Personally I feel like if you own it more power to you
But if you borrow it from someone or the library and mess with it you're going to book hell
The Fire Next Time- James Baldwin
Mostly do it for non-fiction, not very nescisary for fiction and if anything could disrupt the flow of the story, with the exception of a reread where you may want to remember quotes you find compelling
Specifically in textbooks or art history books cause it's good for reference. I had a teacher who wrote a book and annotating it where I had questions was really helpful cause I could quickly find them and ask questions more directly as I can be quite rambling
Also worked well for philosophy stuff where I liked a particular quote or needed to double back pretty constantly to remember or reread things
I think it helps with my memory too, like books already have the advantage of accessing spacial memory and notes or underlines seems to dement it even further. like I remember stuff well reading a book but if I underline or specifically notate it I can specifically recall exactly where it was on a page. which let's you just leaf through the book very quickly and stare at the spot where you remember it to find it super quickly.
Most important thing is if everything is annotated noting is, that's why doing annotation on a second pass is usually the best move so they don't get to repetitive
Also I've found that for my comm class essay assignments with a chapter reading usually about 15 and online :( which makes sense cause it's usually from different books, not a purist just recall sooo much less from them) that highlighting is pretty much useless :/
Also if you annotate a borrowed book from a person or library your going to book hell, nicer than regular hell but still hell ya know :(
TLDR: for me it's useful for non fiction with specific bits you may want to recal for quotation and finding quickly and for a second pass on a fiction book
Don't annotate books that aren't yours,
Probably don't need to bother annotating digitaly
If everything is highlighted nothing is
God damn I love that books,
I cackled for like a full five minutes after reading the elvis bit and the last scene with Shadwell
"How many ya got?"
The Matrix by Lauren Groff
I recently read The Peregrine by J.A. Baker and the entire thing was beautiful beyond words. I underlined a bunch, but something that I’ve been repeating in my mind ever since is “the agonised sunlight of its eyes slowly heal with cloud”.
“Near the brook a heron lay in frozen stubble. Its wings were stuck to the ground by frost, and the mandibles of its bill were frozen together. Its eyes were open and living, the rest of it was dead. All was dead but the fear of man. As I approached I could see its whole body craving into to flight. But it could not fly. I gave it peace, and saw the agonised sunlight of its eyes slowly heal with cloud.”
Some of the other parts I couldn’t help but underline were
“Under the wind, a wren, in sunlight among fallen leaves in a dry ditch seemed suddenly divine, like a small brown priest in a parish of dead leaves and wintry hedges, devoted till death.”
and
“A dead curlew lay on top of the wall untouched, breast upward, with a broken neck. The jagged ends of bone had pierced the skin. When I lifted the soft damp body, the long wings fell out like fans. The crows had not yet taken the lovely river-shining of its eyes.”
Really, really recommend it.
Probably every book by fredrik backman.
“Death is a strange thing. People live their whole lives as if it does not exist, and yet it's often one of the great motivations for living. Some of us, in time, become so conscious of it that we live harder, more obstinately, with more fury. Some need its constant presence to even be aware of its antithesis. Others become so preoccupied with it that they go into the waiting room long before it has announced its arrival. We fear it, yet most of us fear more than anything that it may take someone other than ourselves. For the greatest fear of death is always that it will pass us by. And leave us there alone.”
“If you are honest, people may deceive you. Be honest anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfishness. Be kind anyway. All the good you do today will be forgotten by others tomorrow. Do good anyway.”
{{on earth we're briefly gorgeous}}
{{Invisible Cities}}
I was literally going to post Dune but read through all of the comments because I was already more than half sure somebody else mentioned it already.
TLDR turtles all the way down
My first John Green book is turtles all the way down , and I started reading the ebook version and realized I just ended up highlighting everything. There was really no point in highlights (in the best possible way). I just had to buy a physical copy.
I once heard him say "almost all of writing is editing" and that book was very well edited. There was nothing there that was a filler- an empty space. It was all meaningful and lush and vibrant. Even the most simple phrases were like magic. They were essential to the telling of the story. It's hard to explain and put into words.
The subtle art of not giving a fuck by mark Manson lol
I’m unreasonably excited by the fact that most books listed in this thread are in my reading list! For me, I’ve seen it mentioned several times already but it’s definitely Aurelius’ Meditations. Philosophy books tend to have more underlinable quotes than novels for obvious reasons
reallyidkwhat t1_itc2lo1 wrote
A little life. No longer human. Letters to a young poet.