This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share quotes from books. While I love to quote books (ask Rudi how often I demand he stop doing something to listen while I read aloud), I don’t often record them someplace permanent. So instead of ten items, as would be normal on a Tuesday, I give you three: two quotes from my current reads and one from 2001, when I had a reading journal with a section for favorite passages:

“Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own.” – Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tucson

“The willingness to take a beating: That’s how you know you’re dealing with a man of substance. A man like that doesn’t linger on the sidelines throwing gasoline on someone else’s fire; and he doesn’t go home unscathed. He presents himself front and center, undaunted, prepared to stand his ground until he can’t stand at all.” – Amor Towles, The Lincoln Highway

“There were more books than the space seemed to allow. This is not unusual. Books, after all, have their own peculiar gravity, given the collective weight of words and thoughts and ideas. Just as the gravitational field around a black hole bends and wobbles the space around it, so, too, does the tremendous mass of ideas of a large collection of books create its own dense gravity. Space gets funny around books.” – Kelly Barnhill, The Ogress and the Orphans

How about you? Do you have favorite passages from books?