literary quotes

Paperback Rainbow

Remember the 21-day photo challenge I did back in May? Well, a couple of those photos finally made it to my Etsy shop! One of them is "Paperback Rainbow." 

I really love this one. I hardly ever take pictures of books, but I love them more than I love just about any other tangible things. I picked these books for this shot because of their spine colors and similar sizes, but they turned out to be some of my favorites, too. This little photo is chock-full of literary goodness. In case you don't believe me, I've compiled a list of quotes from each one, from left to right--from Roy to G to Biv. :)

"Music is part of being human, and there is no human culture in which it is not highly developed and esteemed. Its very ubiquity may cause it to be trivialized in daily life: we switch on a radio, switch it off, hum a tune, tap our feet, find the words of an old song going through our minds, and think nothing of it. But to those who are lost in dementia, the situation is different. Music is no luxury to them, but a necessity, and can have a power beyond anything else to restore them to themselves, and to others, at least for a while." -Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia

"...handing everything over to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop trying. To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trust a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you." C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

"If they were not known to be contrary to the laws of nature how could they suggest the presence of the supernatural? How could they be surprising unless they were seen to be exceptions to the rules? And how can anything be seen to be an exception till the rules are known? ...Belief in miracles, far from depending on an ignorance of laws of nature, is only possible in so far as those laws are known." C. S. Lewis, Miracles

"When people say, 'You really, really must' do something, it means you don't really have to. No one ever says, 'You really, really must deliver the baby during labor.' When it's true, it doesn't need to be said." -Tina Fey, Bossypants

"...happiness has four stages. To eke out the most happiness from an experience, we must anticipate it, savor it as it unfolds, express happiness, and recall a happy memory." -Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

"There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace." -Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

“If you never stepped on anybody's toes, you never been for a walk.” -Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

"...I was going to be left alone on my butt on the other end of the continent. But why think about that when all the golden land's ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?" -Jack Kerouac, On The Road

"When God creates Eve, he calls her an ezer kenegdo ....The word ezer is used only twenty other places in the entire Old Testament. And in every other instance the person being described is God himself, when you need him to come through for you desperately." -John and Stasi Eldredge, Captivating

"For so much of my life I had been defending Christianity because I thought to admit that we had done any wrong was to discredit the religious system as a whole, but it isn't a religious system, it is people following Christ; and the important thing to do, the right thing to do, was to apologize for getting in the way of Jesus." -Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz

"...free will agrees very well with absolute necessity, for it was necessary that we should be free." -Voltaire, Candide

"There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him." -C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

"...only the person whom we really love, who touches our very roots, has the capacity to drive us crazy, and it may be only this person who has the capacity to help us find our deepest strengths." -Augustus Y. Napier and Carl Whitaker, The Family Crucible

Good stuff, eh? If I haven't convinced you that you need my print in your home library, I hope I've at least inspired you to get off the computer and go read a book. ;)