Steffi ~mereadingbooks~ > Steffi ~mereadingbooks~'s Quotes

“Immortality,' said Crake, ' is a concept. If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then 'immortality' is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you'll be...”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed

“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

“Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book. . . . an intertextual being: a book cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“I wonder if the reason I tend to say yes to everything is because I deeply believe that I can survive anything.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.”
― Joseph Joubert

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?”
― Henry Ward Beecherr

“We lose weeks like buttons, like pencils.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“Some people majored in English to prepare for law school. Others became journalists. The smartest guy in the honors program, Adam Vogel, a child of academics, was planning on getting a Ph.D. and becoming an academic himself. That left a large contingent of people majoring in English by default. Because they weren't left-brained enough for science, because history was too try, philosophy too difficult, geology too petroleum-oriented, and math too mathematical - because they weren't musical, artistic, financially motivated, or really all that smart, these people were pursuing university degrees doing something no different from what they'd done in first grade: reading stories. English was what people who didn't know what to major in majored in.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

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

“The scholar's greatest weakness: calling procrastination research.”
― Stephen King, 11/22/63

“Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxi pad commercial, windex commercial - you'd think all women do is clean and bleed.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“A weapon men use against women is the refusal to take them seriously.”
― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

“Italians give their city sexes, and they all agree that the sex for a particular city is quite correct, but none of them can explain why. I love that. London's middle-aged and male, respectably married but secretly gay.”
― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

“When you write it, don't write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don't try to give an explanation. Just say that I don't know what to make of it, just write it like I tell it, so the reader can make up his own mind.”
― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

“What begins at the water shall end there, and what ends there shall once more begin.”
― Doug Dorst, S.

“There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.”
― Margaret Atwood , MaddAddam

“I need some kind of... like... last minute, poorly-set-up deus ex machina!!”
― Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim, Volume 3: Scott Pilgrim & The Infinite Sadness

“As with most of life's problems, this one can be solved by a box of pure radiation.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.”
― John Williams, Stoner