What’s the Most Beautiful Thing You’ve Read? 20 Lines That Stayed With Me

Late last night on Instagram, a little kitten asked this dog, “What’s The Most Beautiful Thing You’ve Read?”

The unassumingly innocent question sent this dog tumbling down the rabbit hole. Puppy days to silver years, I have eaten through my fair share of homework. I’ve devoured on books, from Ruskin Bond’s hymn to the hills to James Herriot chronicles and Charles Bukowski’s beer-stained genius. And as a homage to my kind, I’ve read the greatest of words on dogs too.

But do I have a favourite? Something akin to the Tolkien universe; that one sentence to rule them all. What about you?

The most beautiful quotes from books I keep returning to

The postcard that stayed with you, the envelope that peeks at you from afar, the Mary Oliver poem your broken heart found solace in, the letter with dog eared corners, that note on the book which your fingers tremble to flip open now. Those skirmishes on notepads that haunt you…

While it would be hard to recall all the word ordainment that has made this dog laugh or cry, here are a few of the most beautiful lines I have ever read:

1. “Perhaps the greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability to cope with pain. Classic thinking teaches us of the four doors of the mind, which everyone moves through according to their need. First is the door of sleep… Second is the door of forgetting… Third is the door of madness… Last is the door of death. The final resort. Nothing can hurt us after we are dead, or so we have been told.”
   — Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

   View this post on Instagram (Abhilasha Pande, @abhilashapande)

2. “When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages – a special odour of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers.”
   — Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

3. “My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”
   — David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

   Remembering all the dear (departed) dogs this #WorldPoetryDay — @kaalicharan, March 21, 2017

Ignorance is bliss… who would have thought of this stark realization in a Gothic Lovecraft story?

4. “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents… someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality… that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
   — H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

   All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it. #NowReading — @kaalicharan, March 15, 2017

5. “You-You alone will have stars as no one else has them… And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me… It will be as if, in place of the stars, I had given you a great number of little bells that knew how to laugh.”
   — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

6. “It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening.”
   — Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

7. Harry Potter: Is this all real? Or is it just happening inside my head? Dumbledore: Of course it’s happening inside your head, Harry. Why should that mean that it’s not real?
   — J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

8. Fate always gives you two choices, the one you should take, and the one you do.
   — Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

The not so subtle realization that an animated movie could leave you scarred, scared and sad came with ‘Watership Down’. It grips you in an uneasy chokehold but yet I believe everyone should read/watch this heartbreaking tale:

9. “Animals don’t behave like men. If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill. But they don’t sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures’ lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.”
   — Richard Adams, Watership Down

10. “Rain doesn’t make your car dirty. Dirt makes your car dirty.”
    — Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

11. “All human wisdom is contained in these two words, ‘Wait and Hope’.”
    — Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

12. “I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.”
    — John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America

    View this post on Instagram (@dogwith_blog)

13. All that is gold does not glitter, / Not all those who wander are lost; / The old that is strong does not wither, / Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
    — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

14. ‘Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, when we were underneath it?’ ‘Supposing it didn’t,’ said Pooh after careful thought. Piglet was comforted by this.
    — A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

15. “Think how you love me. I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.”
    — F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

Something this unbearably beautiful!

16. “I am haunted by humans.”
    — Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

17. “To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.”
    — Herman Melville, Moby Dick

    #wednesdaywisdom from ‘Reasons to Stay Alive’ by Matt Haig — @kaalicharan, April 5, 2017

18. “What an astonishing thing a book is… one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years… Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
    — Carl Sagan, Cosmos

19. “The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
    — Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

See Also: Date A Girl Who Reads

And then there’s a lyrical melody that’s unrequited love — Charlie Brown’s Little Red-Haired Girl, Calvin’s trysts with Susie Derkins or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”.

Like dog hair found on bookshelves, everything takes me to you.

View this post on Instagram (Dog with Blog, @dogwith_blog)

20. “Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.”
    — Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

    “To be with you or not to be with you is the measure of my time” — Jorge Luis Borges. @kaalicharan, March 27, 2017

See also, beautiful untranslatable words that your dog knows.

Over to you, what’s the most beautiful thing you’ve read?