Top Ten Quotes from My 2015 Nonfiction Reading & Tuesday Intro (The Fishermen)

Top Ten Tuesday
This week’s Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by The Broke and the Bookish) topic is Top Ten Quotes I Loved From Books I Read In The Past Year Or So. I’ve been participating in Nonfiction November this month, so I thought I’d stick to my favorite quotes from nonfiction I’ve read this year.

Top Ten Eleven Quotes from My 2015 Nonfiction Reading

Brave Enough, Home is Burning, My Southern Journey, Three-Year Swim Club, Underground Girls of Kabul


Brave Enough

My advice to my adolescent self? You know who you are, so let yourself be her now.

We do not have the right to feel helpless. We must help ourselves. After destiny has delivered what it delivers, we are responsible for our lives.

You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding.

Home is Burning

I guess when we’re about to die we drop all the other distractions and go back to the basics: family, peaceful walks, spending time with loves ones. Fuck the rest.

I wanted to tell people that they’d done everything they could and that they were good people for caring so much, but also to get the fuck out so the people who mattered more in his life could get more time with him.

My Southern Journey

They say a kitchen is the heart of the house, but I believe a porch is its soul. From the very steps, you knew if you were welcome or not, knew everything you needed to know about the people inside.

Cicero said a room without books is like a body without a soul, but I don’t know about that. I just know I like to have them close, when the sun goes down.

The Three-Year Swim Club

Every day, they built something out of nothing.

He also never sat down when the boys were in the water. To do so, he’d decided, was to appear lazy and to separate himself from the swimmers’ efforts. Neither would he separate himself from conditions the swimmers themselves had to endure. No matter what the weather, no matter how cold the wind might blow, no matter if it rained torrentially, Sakamoto vowed never to don a jacket or a sweater if his swimmers couldn’t.

The Underground Girls of Kabul

The Afghan women I have met, sometimes with little education but a lifetime of experience of being counted as less than a full human being, have a distinct view of what exactly freedom is. To them, freedom would be to avoid an unwanted marriage and to be able to leave the house. It would be to have some control over one’s own body and to have a choice of when and how to become pregnant. Or to study and have a profession. That’s how they would define freedom.

Perhaps this decline speaks to how much women pretending to be men really is one of the clearest symptoms of a segregated society so dysfunctional that it inevitably must change.

Tuesday Intro

Every Tuesday, fellow blogger Bibliophile By the Sea hosts First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros, where bloggers share the first paragraph of the book they are currently reading or thinking about reading soon.
 The Fishermen, Chigozie Obioma

Plot Summary from Amazon (adapted for length)

In a Nigerian town in the mid 1990’s, four brothers encounter a madman whose mystic prophecy of violence threatens the core of their close-knit family.

Told from the point of view of nine year old Benjamin, the youngest of four brothers, THE FISHERMEN is the Cain and Abel-esque story of an unforgettable childhood in 1990’s Nigeria, in the small town of Akure. When their strict father has to travel to a distant city for work, the brothers take advantage of his extended absence to skip school and go fishing. At the ominous, forbidden nearby river, they meet a dangerous local madman who persuades the oldest of the boys that he is destined to be killed by one of his siblings. What happens next is an almost mythic event whose impact-both tragic and redemptive-will transcend the lives and imaginations of its characters and its readers.

Here’s a portion of the first paragraph:

We were fishermen: My brothers and I became fishermen in January of 1996 after our father moved out of Akure, a town in the west of Nigeria, where we had lived together all our lives. His employer, the Central Bank of Nigeria, had transferred him to a branch of the bank in Yola – a town in the north that was a camel distance of more than one thousand kilometres away – in the first week of November the previous year. I remember the night Father returned home with his transfer letter; it was on a Friday. From that Friday through that Saturday, Father and Mother held whispering consultations like shrine priests. […]

Would you keep reading?

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29 Comments

  1. Diane wrote:

    I saw this one Sarah and from the description and now the intro, I’m guessing it’s not for me. I hope you love it though.

    Posted 11.17.15 Reply
    • admin wrote:

      Well…I’m about 70% through and am having trouble finishing it 🙁

      Posted 11.17.15 Reply
  2. Carmen wrote:

    Great quotes!
    The Fishermen sounds very gritty; I like the premise, though the intro is sort of a repetition of part of the premise, I guess.

    Posted 11.17.15 Reply
  3. Great quotes. I have BRAVE ENOUGH on my to read list – I hope I get around to it soon!

    My TTT- http://rachelwritesthings.blogspot.com/2015/11/top-ten-quotes-i-loved-from-books-i.html

    Posted 11.17.15 Reply
  4. The Fisherman sounds like an emotional read. I would keep reading, based on what you shared. How are you finding it?

    I didn’t participate in the Top Ten list this week. I am bad about jotting down memorable quotes. I like the ones you shared though. I think my favorites, the ones that spoke to me most as I read them, are the quotes from Brave Enough.

    Posted 11.17.15 Reply
    • admin wrote:

      Brave Enough has some great quotes! Unfortunately, Fishermen is having trouble holding my attention. I’m about 70% in and having trouble finishing it 🙁

      Posted 11.17.15 Reply
  5. Becca wrote:

    Great quotes! My 2 favorites you shared were:

    Every day, they built something out of nothing.

    The Afghan women I have met, sometimes with little education but a lifetime of experience of being counted as less than a full human being, have a distinct view of what exactly freedom is. To them, freedom would be to avoid an unwanted marriage and to be able to leave the house. It would be to have some control over one’s own body and to have a choice of when and how to become pregnant. Or to study and have a profession. That’s how they would define freedom.

    Just awesome.

    Posted 11.17.15 Reply
    • admin wrote:

      Love both of those too! There were a lot of great ones to choose from!

      Posted 11.17.15 Reply
  6. I am curious, because who doesn’t want to know more about a madman? But I probably wouldn’t pick it up…thanks for sharing. Here’s mine:
    “TRUTH BE TOLD”

    Posted 11.17.15 Reply
  7. JaneGS wrote:

    Love the Top Ten Quotes–makes me want to read all those books, especially Southern Journey. Not sure about the opening of The Fishermen–actually seemed a bit clinical with too much detail and not enough heart.

    Posted 11.17.15 Reply
    • admin wrote:

      It’s not panning out so well for me 🙁

      Posted 11.17.15 Reply
  8. I love, love, love the quote from Home is Burning! I may have to give this one a read, Sarah! I’ve looked at The Fishermen, but I just don’t think I would enjoy it; I’ll be curious to hear what you think.

    Posted 11.17.15 Reply
    • admin wrote:

      Home is Burning had some freaking awesome quotes to choose from!

      Posted 11.17.15 Reply
  9. Judy wrote:

    It is one of those mornings where I keep finding meaningful stuff on the web. Reading your quotes was one of those finds. Thanks!

    Posted 11.17.15 Reply
    • admin wrote:

      Glad to hear that – thank you!

      Posted 11.17.15 Reply
  10. Donna wrote:

    I love the cover and the intro is good, but I don’t think it is my kind of story. Girl Who Reads

    Posted 11.17.15 Reply
  11. Andi wrote:

    These quotes are seriously amazing. I want to know something more about every single book, but especially Home is Burning.

    Posted 11.17.15 Reply
    • admin wrote:

      I really liked Home is Burning…incredibly sad, inspiring, and also funny as sh&t!

      Posted 11.17.15 Reply
  12. Wow, The Underground Girls of Kabul sounds like a powerful book.

    Posted 11.17.15 Reply
    • admin wrote:

      It definitely was.

      Posted 11.17.15 Reply
  13. I’m curious about The Fisherman and although I like the comparison to Cain and Abel, I fear it probably isn’t for me!

    Posted 11.17.15 Reply
    • admin wrote:

      It’s proving to not be for me either 🙁

      Posted 11.17.15 Reply
  14. The introduction didn’t really grab me — but I hope you enjoy it.

    Posted 11.17.15 Reply
  15. I think that quote from My Southern Journey is the best I’ve read today. There’s something about it that just hits home with me.

    Posted 11.17.15 Reply
    • admin wrote:

      His writing was amazing in that collection! Heartfelt, hilarious…he hit it all!

      Posted 11.17.15 Reply
  16. That first paragraph is quite compelling. I want to know what will happen next, but I also want to find out more about this area. Thanks for sharing.

    Posted 11.18.15 Reply
  17. I love that you focused on nonfiction quotes! Brave Enough had soooooooo many quotes – I had checked it out of the library, but I know I need to buy it because I was copying nearly every page into my quote notebook. You and I have similar tastes in quotes!

    Posted 11.18.15 Reply
  18. For some reason, I can’t make myself collect quotes as I read, but I enjoyed reading yours 🙂

    Posted 11.21.15 Reply
    • admin wrote:

      Oooh – it’s all about the Kindle’s highlighting function 🙂

      Posted 11.23.15 Reply

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