Barbara > Barbara's Quotes

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”
― Charles W. Eliot

“Some people watch the world with their ears.”
― Matt de la Pena, Last Stop on Market Street

“Words matter, in fact. They're not pointless, as you've suggested. If they were pointless, then they couldn't start revolutions and they wouldn't change history. If they were just words, we wouldn't write songs or listen to them. We wouldn't beg to be read to as kids. If they were just words, then stories wouldn't have been around since before we could write. We wouldn't have learned to write. If they were just words, people wouldn't fall in love because of them, feel bad because of them, ache because of them, and stop aching because of them." (p. 210) (Henry Jones)”
― Cath Crowley, Words in Deep Blue

“Books. Cats. Life is Good.”
― Edward Gorey

“It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”
― Epictetus

“Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.”
― Margaret Mead

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You

“Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, books had no real existence in our world. Like seeds in the beak of a bird waiting to fall to earth, or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being. they lie dormant hoping for the chance to emerge.They want us to give them life.”
― John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things

“The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.”
― Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World, Or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher, Residing in London, to His Friends in the Country, by Dr. Goldsmith

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung...”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes...you're Doing Something.”
― Neil Gaiman

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
― Frederick Douglass

“We read to know we're not alone.”
― William Nicholson, Shadowlands: A Play

“My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn't have any excuse to be stupid.”
― Joan Bauer, Rules of the Road

“Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.”
― Maya Angelou

“I had a dream about you last night... you were a giant slinky and I watched you fall down the stairs.”
― Amy Summers, I Had a Dream About You

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

“Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.”
― Guy de Maupassant

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You'll find what you need to find. Just read.”
― Neil Gaiman

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“When I get nervous, I go to the library and hang around. The libraries are filled with people who are nervous. You can blend in with them there. You're bound to see someone more nervous than you are in a library. Sometimes the librarians themselves are more nervous than you are. I'll probably be a librarian for that reason. Then if I'm nervous on the job, it won't show. I'll just stamp books and look things up for people and run back and forth to the staff room sneaking smokes until I get hold of myself. A library is a great place to hid.”
― M.E. Kerr, Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!

“Tucker, to make anything work, from meat loaf to a marriage, there are two things you have to do. Forgive and continue.”
― M.E. Kerr, Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!

“It seemed to him that anyone with any trouble at all eventually found his way to a city library, and the really troubled ones became regulars.”
― M.E. Kerr, Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!