List favourite quotations from books I've read

“Whippets are hounds – miners’ dogs, racers, rabbiters. They are very thin. On top they are velvet and underneath they are bald. They are warm and smell of buttered toast.”

“The pale shoots [of asparagus] were as fat as thumbs, delicately coloured and patterned at the tips. We ate them warm, with melted butter. We ate bread that had been baked that afternoon in the old boulangerie at Lumieres. We drank the light red wine from the vineyards in the valley. We supported local industry with every mouthful.”

Katy produced the second basket, and there, oh, delightful surprise! were seven little pies – molasses pies, baked in saucers – each with a brown top and crisp candified edge, which tasted like toffy and lemon-peel, and all sorts of good things mixed up together.

Got to get some Gollum quotations in :)

“Is it nice, my preciousss? Is it juicy? Is it scrumptiously crunchable?”

and:

“S-s-s-s-s,” said Gollum more upset than ever. He thought of all the things he kept in his own pockets: fish-bones, goblins’ teeth, wet shells, a bit of bat-wing, a sharp stone to sharpen his fangs on, and other nasty things. He tried to think what other people kept in their pockets.

Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick.

“What have you been doing?”
“Tending thrashing-machine, and wimbling haybonds, and saying “Hoosh!” to the cocks and hens when they go upon your seeds, and planting Early Flourballs and Thompson’s Wonderfuls with a dibble.”

‘I want to startle folk. I want to sing till the bells fall down. I want to draw the tears out of their eyes and the money out of their pockets…I want a sparkling band round my head, and sparkling slippers on my feet, and a gown that goes “hush! hush!” like growing grass.’

And Robert knew that if he waited another moment he should simply pick her up and walk away – over the moor – over the hills – over the world’s rim.

“The fruit was so plentiful that young hobbits very nearly bathed in strawberries and cream; and later they sat on the lawns under the plum-trees and ate, until they had made piles of stones like small pyramids or the heaped skulls of a conqueror, and then they moved on. And no one was ill, and everyone was pleased, except those who had to mow the grass.”

“People, in general…only ask advice not to follow it; or if they do follow it, it is for the sake of having someone to blame for having given it.”

“I have the most confused impressions of that walk. I recollect that it was neither night nor day, that morning was dawning but the street-lamps were not yet put out, that the sleet was still falling and that all the ways were deep with it. I recollect a few chilled people passing in the streets. I recollect the wet house-tops, the clogged and bursting gutters and water-spouts, the mounds of blackened ice and snow over which we passed, the narrowness of the courts by which we went. At the same time I remember that the poor girl seemed to be yet telling her story audibly and plainly in my hearing, that I could feel her resting on my arm, that the stained house-fronts put on human shapes and looked at me, that great water-gates seemed to be opening and closing in my head or in the air, and that the unreal things were more substantial than the real.”