Evalangui > Evalangui's Quotes

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.”
― David Sedaris, Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“Do you hate people?”

“I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.”
― Charles Bukowski, Barfly

“The misery of having no time to read a thousand glorious books.”
― George Gissing

“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”
― Logan Pearsall Smith

“Real life is sometimes boring, rarely conclusive and boy, does the dialogue need work.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan

“The cats are asleep at the end of my bed and all around me, the thundery silence of L'Escarènere, caught at last in the rising flood of warm air, carrying the sand from the south. The Alps are folded above in the flickering light. And on the desk in the room beneath lies the writing which insists that the only escape is through the absolute destruction of everything you have ever known, loved, cared for, believed in, even the shell of yourself must be discarded with contempt; for freedom costs no less than everything, including your generosity, self-respect, integrity, tenderness - is that really what i wanted to say? It's what I have said. Worse still, I have pointed out the sheer creative joy of this ferocious destructiveness and the liberating wonder of violence. And these are dangerous messages for which I am no longer responsible.”
― Patricia Duncker

“You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.”
― Philip Roth

“I came to New York and in only hours, New York did what it does to people: awakened the possibilities. Hope breaks out.”
― Phillip Roth

“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.”
― Philip Roth

“Yes, alone we are, deeply alone, and always, in store for us, a layer of loneliness even deeper. There is nothing we can do to dispose of that. No, loneliness shouldn’t surprise us, as astonishing to experience as it may be. You can try yourself inside out, but all you are then is inside out and lonely instead of inside in and lonely. My stupid, stupid Merry dear, stupider even that your stupid father, not even blowing up buildings helps. It’s lonely if there are buildings and it’s lonely if there are buildings and it’s lonely if there are no buildings. There is no protest to be lodged against loneliness⎯not all the bombing campaigns in history have made a dent in it. The most lethal of manmade explosives can’t touch it. Stand in awe not of Communism, my idiot child, but of ordinary, everyday loneliness.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
― C.S. Lewis

“I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career. ”
― C.S. Lewis

“What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.”
― C. S. Lewis

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”