Ezra > Ezra's Quotes

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#1

“I'm a huge fan of mysteries; in fact, they're almost an addiction. If a week goes by without reading a mystery, I suffer withdrawal symptoms. Then I wander around like I'm sleepwalking and wake up in a bookshop, looking for a mystery novel. I've read just about every mystery story ever written...but it's not an intellectual pursuit; it's more like me getting my fill of gossip.”
― Sōji Shimada, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders

tags: murder-mysteries, mystery-novels, reading, the-tokyo-zodiac-murders, translated-novels

2 likes

#2

“For what it's worth: it's never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you're proud of, and if you find you're not, I hope you have the strength to start over again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

tags: hope, inspirational, life, living, proud, strength

127 likes

#3

“What mystery novels need are – some might call me old-fashioned – a great detective, a mansion, a shady cast of residents, bloody murders, impossible crimes and never-before-seen tricks played by the murderer. Call it my castle in the sky, but I’m happy as long as I can enjoy such a world. But always in an intellectual manner.”
― Yukito Ayatsuji, The Decagon House Murders

tags: detective-fiction, murder-mysteries, mystery-genre, the-decagon-house-murders

0 likes

#4

“These friends - and he laid his hand on some of the books - have been good friends to me, and for some years past, ever since I had the idea of going to London, have given me many, many hours of pleasure. Through them I have come to know your great England; and to know her is to love her. I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

tags: books, dracula, england, horror, london, vampire

40 likes

#5

“Remember what punishments befell us in this world when we ourselves did not cherish learning nor transmit it to other men.”
― Ælfrēd of Wessex

tags: anglo-saxon-england, anglo-saxon-history, british-history, intelligence, king-alfred, learning

1 likes

#6

“For someone who loved words as much as I did, it was amazing how often they failed me.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

tags: words

1935 likes

#7

“I've never asked for life to be easy. I've only ever asked it to be interesting.”
― Maggie Stiefvater

tags: life

0 likes

#8

“In King Lear, there is a man who is such a minor character that Shakespeare has not given him even a name: he is merely “First Servant.” All the characters around him – Regan, Cornwall, and Edmund – have fine long-term plans. They think they know how the story is going to end, and they are quite wrong. The servant has no such delusions. He has no notion of how the play is going to go. But he understands the present scene. He sees an abomination (the blinding of old Gloucester) taking place. He will not stand it.

His sword is out and pointed at his master’s breast in a moment: then Regan stabs him dead from behind. That is his whole part: eight lines all told. But if it were real life and not a play, that is the part it would be best to have acted.”
― C.S. Lewis

tags: courage, integrity, king-lear, morality, virtue

5 likes

#9

“Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

3267 likes

#10

“Why Anglo-Saxon history?” At the time it had struck the Gray Man as a foolish and unanswerable question. The things that drew him to that time period were surely unconscious and many-headed, diffused through his blood from a lifetime of influences.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves

tags: anglo-saxon-england, history, the-gray-man, the-raven-cycle

5 likes

#11

“Have lunch, have coffee, and continue to work hard on the things that won’t dry up and blow away: Your health, your career, your little art projects or poems or essays, your odd new half-interests, the complicated folds of your sensitivity and your darkness, and your belief in a world that wants you to be happy.”
― Heather Havrilesky

3 likes

#12

“Often the case with people who don't read fiction. Hollow inside, monochrome, so they can switch gears no problem. They swallow something and forget about it as soon as it goes down their throat. Constitutionally incapable of empathy. These are people who most need to read, but in most cases it's already too late.”
― Kōtarō Isaka, Bullet Train

tags: life, reading

20 likes

#13

“Know that you can start late, look different, be uncertain and still succeed.”
― Misty Copeland

18 likes

#14

“Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

tags: algernon, humor, literature, reading

245 likes

#15

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

tags: francis-abernathy, the-secret-history

3192 likes

#16

“I am so, so alive.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Scorpio Races

tags: inspirational, the-scorpio-races

287 likes

#17

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

3989 likes

#18

“Gower is the first English writer to use "history" as an English word. He regularly rhymes the term with "memory," for to his way of thinking history and memory are correlative. That is, without history, there can be no memory; and without memory, there can be no history. But the point of historical knowledge is not to enable people to live in the past, or even to understand the past in the way we would expect a modern historian to proceed; rather, it is to enable people to live more vitally in the present.”
― Russell A. Peck, Confessio Amantis: Volume 2

tags: british-history, british-literature, confessio-amantis, english-history, history, john-gower, literary-criticism, medieval-british-lit, medieval-literature

1 likes

#19

“I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

tags: books, literature, reading, words

572 likes

#20

“It is likely I will die next to a pile of things I was meaning to read.”
― Lemony Snicket

1963 likes

#21

“Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafon

323 likes

#22

“A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Angel's Game

tags: the-angel-s-game

227 likes

#23

“Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant or we are incalculably precious and interesting. I tend toward the second view.”
― Marilynne Robinson

tags: humanity, life, meaning, perspective

6 likes

#24

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 2nd Series

tags: quoted-by-wally-lamb

430 likes

#25

“How the time passed away, slipped into nightfall as if it had never been!”
― "The Wanderer" Poet

tags: elegies, elegy, medieval-lit, medieval-literature, the-exeter-book, the-wanderer

0 likes

#26

“Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

tags: apothegm, optimism

5050 likes

#27

“The Wars of the Roses…were one of the most confused and confusing chapters of English history; in which each usurper, as soon as he had gained the throne, found himself having to defend it against the next; in which so many members of the feuding families were closely inter-related; in which a man could be both hero and villain at one and the same time… One by one, the royal houses of England destroyed each other and themselves.”
― Ludovic Kennedy

tags: british-history, lancaster, the-plantagenets, the-wars-of-the-roses, york

0 likes

#28

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

tags: empathy, thankful, understanding, understanding-others

2804 likes

#29

“They too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

tags: ancient-greeks, classics, language, scholarship

86 likes

#30

“Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.”
― Jeffrey Cranor, It Devours!

75 likes

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