Life in Phrases #Blog Hop

Hello Everyone! Welcome to the Long and Short Review Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge, where bloggers write on a common theme every Wednesday. This is my second year participating. Today’s topic is favorite book quotes. .

I am going to share several because our lives our complex, and it can take several to capture even just fraction of who we are.

Most of my favorite quotes are from children’s books, many of which carry such wisdom. I’ll start with the Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams, which speaks of the truth of love and being real in the world.

Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

My next stop is Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, which reminds us of the beauty of imagination as a foundation for joy and life.

Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast

The last quote from children’s book is from Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, which reminds us of what we lose as we grow up.

So many things are possible, just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible.

Moving onto adulthood, one of my favorite books was Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. That book captured the complexities of love, life and hardship. This quote reflects something profound about that for me.

Love is the longing for the half of our ourselves we have lost.

And I’ll end with my two favorite quotes from J.R.R. Tolkien, who has such an interesting sense of the world, and hobbits are often such perfect messengers of those sentiments. Both those quotes are about navigating life, which is never what you expect, and how you deal with it. From The Hobbit:

There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You can certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.

I’ll end it with more of a conversation from The Fellowship of the Ring.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Please visit the other bloggers participating in the Long and Short Wednesday Blogging Challenge. I always enjoy learning from them and with them.