February 2012
90 posts
“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.”
—Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
“So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do.”
—Dead Poets Society, 1989 (via pass-that)
“Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.”
— Louis L’Amour (Matagorda/The First Fast Draw)
“Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.”
—Harold Pinter (via libraryland)
“Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.”
—Jeanette Winterson (via tacit-delinquency)
“Why did you do all this for me?” he asked. “I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.’You have been my friend,’ replied Charlotte. ‘That in itself is a tremendous thing.”
—E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web (via 35bit)
“Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.”
—Clifton Fadiman, The New Lifetime Reading Plan (via excessivebookshelf)
“All good books have one thing in common—they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you’ve read one of them you will feel that all that happened, happened to you and then it belongs to you forever: the happiness and unhappiness, good and evil, ecstasy and sorrow, the food, wine, beds, people, and the weather. If you can give that to readers, then you’re a writer.”
—Ernest Hemingway (via theskeletonofme)
“There is no such thing as a child who hates to read; there are only children who have not found the right book.”
—Frank Serafini (via booksandnerds)
“Forever is composed of nows.”
—Emily Dickinson (via girlwithoutwings)
“That’s who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of.”
—John Green
“All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.”
—Albert Camus (via quote-book)
“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”
—Winston Churchill
“Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.”
—Mary Schmich (via excessivebookshelf)
“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”
—Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (via excessivebookshelf)
“We’re all strangers connected by what we reveal, what we share, what we take away—our stories. I guess that’s what I love about books—they are thin strands of humanity that tether us to one another for a small bit of time, that make us feel less alone or even more comfortable with our aloneness, if need be.”
—Libba Bray (via excessivebookshelf)
“My books are not dead weight, they are live weight—matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows.”
—Leon Wieseltier in defense of the personal library, for The New Republic (via thelifeguardlibrarian)
“I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them.”
—Emma Thompson (via theprobablestars)
“A person can grow only as much as his horizon allows.”
—John Powell (via kari-shma)
“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”
—Joseph Chilton Pearce (via saddest-summer)
“The world belongs to those who read.”
—Rick Holland (via booksandnerds)
- Sally Sparrow: I love old things. They make me feel sad.
- Kathy Nightingale: What's good about sad?
- Sally Sparrow: It's happy for deep people.
