zxia > zxia 's Quotes

“You should date a girl who reads.
Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”
― Rosemarie Urquico

“My confession begins," Father S said, "as the confessions of many men begin - with three words"

"Father forgive me?" Michael hazarded a guess. Father S signed.

"I met Eleanor.”
― Tiffany Reisz, The Angel

“I love humanity but I hate humans. —Albert Einstein”
― S.T. Abby, The Risk

“There are only two reasons why you leave someone you're still in love with - either it's the right thing to do, or it's the only thing to do.”
― Tiffany Reisz, The Siren

“Nora— Forgive me for copyediting, but it must be said—you have raped the semicolon yet again. Stop it. It wasn’t asking for it no matter how it was dressed. If you don’t know how to use punctuation then do away with it altogether, write like Faulkner and we’ll pretend it’s on purpose.”

Bite me, Easton, Nora said to herself as she corrected her sexually compromised semicolon in chapter eighteen. Seriously, bite me.”
― Tiffany Reisz, The Siren

“Many waters cannot quench love, Nor will rivers overflow it. Song of Solomon 8: 7.”
― Tiffany Reisz, The Angel

“Love is an open wound that you hope never heals.”
― Tiffany Reisz, The Angel

“Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“Biology enables, Culture forbids.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’. Hammurabi would have said the same about his principle of hierarchy, and Thomas Jefferson about human rights. Homo sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights. But don’t tell that to our servants, lest they murder us at night.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Most people don’t understand what humor is. They think it’s something lighthearted and cheerful. Like ‘good humor.’ But it isn’t. It’s looking into the darkness and spitting at it with a joke. Humor is dark. Humor is that we’re all going to die.”
― B.G. Harlen, Break Her

“The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.”
― Voltaire

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“To die, it's easy. But you have to struggle for life.”
― Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History

“′Classic′ - a book which people praise and don't read.”
― Mark Twain

“Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”
― Mark Twain

“Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.”
― Mark Twain

“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.”
― Isaac Asimov

“If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard, are sweeter”
― John Keats, Ode On A Grecian Urn And Other Poems

“Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.”
― Victor Hugo

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin

“If you come back to me," he said, making a rare concession, "will you run or crawl?"

Nora had pressed her whole body into him at that moment. Resting her head on his strong shoulder, she watched as a tear forged a river down his long and muscled back.

"I'll fly.”
― Tiffany Reisz, The Siren

“Nothing to do but follow your crazy,”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

“Have you ever met the rose who was afraid of her own thorns?”
― Tiffany Reisz, The King

“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

“I’m going to love Lily how I want to love her. Overwhelmingly, uncompromisingly. Look away if you have to.”
― Krista Ritchie, Thrive

“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own