Matthew Pearl > Quotes

“Shakespeare brings us to know ourselves. Dante, with his dissection of all others, bids us to know one another.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club

“He was outwardly calm but inwardly bleeding to death.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club

“Remember that there are two things in this life that are never worth crying about: what can be cured and what cannot be cured.”
― Matthew Pearl

“Strangers talking over piles of books do not remain strangers for long.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer

“Though a woman tempted man to eat, my dear Longfellow," said Holmes, "you never hear of Eve having to do with his drinking, for he took to that of his own notion.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club

“Imagine! It is the real power of a book--not what is on the page, but what happens when a reader takes the pages in, makes it part of himself. That is the definition of literature.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer

“When they dreamed of turning iron and metal into gold, they called it alchemy. The much more far-fetched dream of turning bound sheafs of plain paper into fortunes, they call publishing.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer

“A man's library opens up his character to the world.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer

“I prefer the society of one faithful person to an association of rapid talkers, who more than anything else seek admiration from one another.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club

“Every scientific truth goes through three stages. First, people say it conflicts with the Bible. Second, they say it has been discovered before. Last, they say they always believed it.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Technologists

“There was still the temptation to believe the world was a mere trap for human sin. But sin, the way he saw it, was only the failure of an imperfectly made being to keep a perfect law.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club

“Strangers talking over piles of books do not remain strangers for long. Had I never learned to like books, I would have become the dullest sort of hermit.”
― Matthew Pearl

“ 'Yes, we rather condemn people for eternity without the courtesy of informing them.' ”
― Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club

“Before long, I had lost my youth and my patience for indulging others. Books were everything in life; books were better than wine.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer

“An obscure character by the name of Belial. He is interpreted as a minion of the devil by some scholars, but that is wrong. It is ignorance. The name means, literally speaking, 'one who cannot be yoked,' and it is really every one of us who takes control of our own destiny while others blow in the wind. We may be punished for it, but we would never do it another way. We are all Belials.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer

“They always blamed my reading, you know, for my having fewer friends than my brother and for my weak eyes, never thinking that because I had weak eyes and because I was shy, having a book at the ready rescued me.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer

“What they don't realize is that sequels are bound to disappoint those who have waited for them.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer

“Dante's Hell is part of our world as much as part of the underworld, and shouldn't be avoided, Lowell said, but rather confronted. We sound the depths of Hell very often in this life.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club

“You are always better off to read a book, anyway, than to meet the person behind it.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer

“Why did nature not ask my advice about my features?”
― Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club

“Remember that only when past genius is transmitted into a present power shall we meet the first truly american poet. And somewhere, born to the streets rather than the athenaeum, we will come upon the first true reader. The spirit of the american is suspected to be timid, imitative, tame -- the scholar decent, indolent, complaisant. The mind of our country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. Without action, the scholar is not yet man. Ideas must work through the bones and arms of good men or they are no better than dreams.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club

“Money is good, but it is not all about a man. You will have successes and reversals, but remember it is your reaction to each of them that counts for your character.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Technologists

“ 'Till America has learned to love literature not as an amusement, not as a mere doggerel to memorize in a college room, but for its humanizing and ennobling energy, my dear reverend president, she will not have succeeded in that high sense which alone makes a nation out of a people. That which raises it from a dead name to a living power.' ”
― Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club

“The books do pretend, Mr. Branagan. Surely. But that is not all. Novels are filled with lies, but squeezed in between is even more that is true—without what you may call the lies, the pages would be too light for the truth, you see?”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Dickens

“exaggeration is the octopus of the English language”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer

“What begins as taste becomes religion”
― Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club

“These people build as if they were immortal and eat as if they were to die instantly.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club

“Books do pretend ...but squeezed in between is even more that is true—without what you may call the lies, the pages would be too light for the truth, you see?”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Dickens

“On the trees were no longer only leaves but brown fruits, on the bushes no longer blossoms but clusters of red berries. And the wind had a rough manliness in its voice - the tone not of a lover but of a husband.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club

“Recall that when the first presses produced copies of the Bible, the scribes who had to spend years at a time on the same work, just as it had been done for centuries, streamed out from the monasteries with quills raised in the air, decrying the work of the devil. When one of the pioneering tradesmen printed certain words in red ink to emphasize them, it was proof that he had used his own blood. That was why the printers’ assistants began to be called “devils.” Soon printers were threatened with burning, and some were indeed put into the fire along with their equipment. From the beginning, the creation of the modern book was viewed as the work of Satan—an attempt to usurp the word of God.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer