Eli > Eli's Quotes

“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

“He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
― Benjamin Franklin

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

“I might like to have someone courting me. But it would have to be someone who is a square shooter and who has a train load of courage. And it would have to be someone who doesn't have to talk down to folks to feel good, or to tell a person they are worthless ifthey just made a mistake. And he'd have to be not too thin. Why, I remember hugging [my brother] Ernest was like warpping your arms around a fence post,and I love Ernest, but I want a man who can hold me down in a wind. Maybe he'd have to be pretty stubborn. I don't have any use for a man that isn't stubborn. Likely a stubborn fellow will stay with you through thick and thin, and a spineless one will take off, or let his heart wander.”
― Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park

“Cats are connoisseurs of comfort.”
― James Herriot, James Herriot's Cat Stories

“The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.”
― Katherine Mansfield

“I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.”
― Anne Tyler

“To me the purpose of art is to produce something alive...but with a separate, and of course one hopes, with an everlasting life of its own.”
― Henry Green

“Even if you are on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”
― Will Rogers

“There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro

“Books should go where they will be most appreciated, and not sit unread, gathering dust on a forgotten shelf, don't you agree?”
― Christopher Paolini

“If I'm sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow?”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“Some nights the sky wept stars that quickly floated and disappeared into the darkness before our wishes could meet them. ”
― Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

“Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not-writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing - singing, laughing, learning.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“No one has ever become poor by giving.”
― Anne Frank, diary of Anne Frank: the play

“Whoever is happy will make others happy.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“I think a lot, but I don't say much.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“I wish to go on living even after my death.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“I love you, with a love so great that it simply couldn't keep growing inside my heart, but had to leap out and reveal itself in all its magnitude.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“Two is company, four is a party, three is a crowd. One is a wanderer.”
― James Thurber

“Nothing on earth can make up for the loss of one who has loved you.”
― Selma Lagerlöf

“Where words leave off, music begins.”
― Heinrich Heine

“I get a warm feeling among my books.”
― Anthony Powell

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

“We live for books.”
― Umberto Eco

“I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist