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Best of 2011: Quotes of the Year

This was my favorite line of literature this year:

 "Moooooowwyn! Oh wonderful moooooowwwwyyn!" 

from Carmen Dog by Carol Emshwiller. I read The Mount, Carmen Dog and her short story collection this year and named Emshwiller my 2011 Author of the Year.

Other favorites:
  • "I don’t like what the moon is supposed to do./Confuse me, ovulate me,/ spoon-feed me longing." — “I’m Over the Moon," Brenda Shaughnessy
  • "Poverty afflicts everything in the end... Love, friendship, the chance to dream, how you live, with whom you live." — Air, Geoff Ryman
  • "I am amazed, I have been amazed as long as I can remember, and I shall die, most certainly in a state of incredulous amazement, at this remarkable world." — a Utopian in A Modern Utopia
  • "...yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them." — Moby Dick, Herman Melville
  • "Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God."— Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood
  • "We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects." — Herman Melville — via Healthy at 100 by John Robbins
  • "...the chariot is drawn by twelve unicorns, whose trappings are all chains of pearl..." —The Blazing WorldMargaret Cavendish

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