Monday, November 30, 2009

Grab-A-Line Monday


Last week we had selections from several YA novels:
Tricia shared from Maggie Stiefvater's Ballad

When I woke up, my mouth was stuffed with golden music. It was like having a song stuck in my head, but with taste and color and sensation attached to it. It was all wood smoke and beads of rain on oak leaves and shining gold strands choking me.

Sherrie had this from Beautiful Creatures
The truth was killing me. Maybe Lena was going to be Claimed on her sixteenth birthday, but I had been claimed since birth. I had no more control over my fate than she did. Maybe none of us did.

Nandini quoted from the City of Ember:
The sky arched over them, higher than they could have imagined, a pale, clear blue. Lina felt as though a lid that had been on her all her life had been lifted off. Light and air rushed through her, making a song, like the songs of Ember, only it was a song of joy. She looked at Doon and saw that he was smiling and crying at the same time, and she realized that she was, too.
And a passage from Shakespeare:
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind:
Nor hath Love's mind of any judgment taste;
Wings and no eyes, figure unheedy haste:
And therefore is Love said to be a child,
Because in choice he is so oft beguil'd.

- A Mid-Summer Night's Dream
My line this week is a lot more light-hearted than my usual offering. It is from Brue Covile's middle grade novel, Juliet Dove, Queen of Love, a magic shop book. The dad, a professor of poetry, is lamenting the current sorry state of education and threatens to run for the school board:
Do you suppose I could get elected on the motto 'Less self-esteem, more poetry?'
What caught you this week?

4 comments:

tanita✿davis said...

*snort*
I love Bruce Coville.

Tricia J. O'Brien said...

Funny. I was reading lite this week, middle grade, Patricia Wrede's Dealing With Dragons. I was finishing up NaNo and only needed a smattering of any more words in my head. But I did like these for their off-the-wallness:
"Linderwall was a large kingdom, just east of the Mountains of Morning, where philosophers were highly respected and the number five was fashionable."

Nandini said...

Hi Yat-Yee,
Here's a passage from Kristin Cashore's FIRE (which I loved). I have a list of favorite places in books, the Queen's House in Fire is one of them ...

The Queen's House--for Fire reminded herself that this was Roen's house, not Brigan's--seemed a good place to soothe an unhappy soul. The rooms were small and cozy, painted soft greens and blues and full of soft furniture, the fireplaces huge, the January fires in them roaring. It was obvious a child lived here, for her school papers and balls and mittens and playthings, and Blotchy's nondescript chewed-up belongings, had found their way into every corner.

Sherrie Petersen said...

Here's a quote from John Muir. Oddly enough, I came across it in the book, "The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things" :)

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

So true!