Jan C > Jan C's Quotes

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

“Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company.”
― Benjamin Franklin Wade

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

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.”
― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

“Before you hate something you should try to understand it.”
― Martha Grimes, Dakota

“Normally death came at night, taking a person in their sleep, stopping their heart or tickling them awake, leading them to the bathroom with a splitting headache before pouncing and flooding their brain with blood. It waits in alleys and metro stops. After the sun goes down plugs are pulled by white-clad guardians and death is invited into an antiseptic room.

But in the country death comes, uninvited, during the day. It takes fishermen in their longboats. It grabs children by the ankles as they swim. In winter it calls them down a slope too steep for their budding skills, and crosses their skies at the tips. It waits along the shore where snow met ice not long ago but now, unseen by sparkling eyes, a little water touches the shore, and the skater makes a circle slightly larger than intended. Death stands in the woods with a bow and arrow at dawn and dusk. And it tugs cars off the road in broad daylight, the tires spinning furiously on ice or snow, or bright autumn leaves. ”
― Louise Penny, Still Life

“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

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.”
― Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.”
― Dr. Seuss, I Can Read with My Eyes Shut!

“Still, it doesn't do to murder people, no matter how offensive they may be.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, The Five Red Herrings

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear.”
― Joan Didion, Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations

“To me, the raveled sleeve of care is never more painlessly knitted up than in an evening alone in a chair snug yet copious, with a good light and an easily held little volume sloppily printed and bound in inexpensive paper. I do not ask much of it - which is just as well, for that is all I get. It does not matter if I guess the killer, and if I happen to discover, along around page 208, that I have read the work before, I attribute the fact not to the less than arresting powers of the author, but to my own lazy memory. I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours. In all reverence I say Heaven bless the Whodunit, the soothing balm on the wound, the cooling hand on the brow, the opiate of the people."

--Book review Of Ellery Queen: The New York Murders, from Esquire, January 1959”
― Dorothy Parker, The Portable Dorothy Parker

“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.”
― Raymond Chandler, The High Window

“We are always the same age inside. ”
― Gertrude Stein

“Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.”
― Peter De Vries, Reuben, Reuben

“With enough courage, you can do without a reputation.”
― Margaret Mitchell

“Omit needless words.”
― William Strunk Jr., The Elements of Style; How to Speak and Write Correctly

“When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book.”
― Margaret Walker

“The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Adventure is worthwhile in itself.”
― Amelia Earhart

“...you can hate a place with all your heart and soul and still be homesick for it.”
― Joseph Mitchell

“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn't know it.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina

“Sweet words are like honey, a little may refresh, but too much gluts the stomach.”
― Anne Bradstreet

“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”
― Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel