Bay > Bay's Quotes

“There's iron, they say, in all our blood,
And a grain or two perhaps is good;
But his, he makes me harshly feel,
Has got a little too much of steel.”
― Anon

“Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.”
― Stephen Fry

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.”
― Beatrix Potter

“Wicked people never have time for reading. It's one of the reasons for their wickedness.”
― Lemony Snicket

“I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

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

“Be careful about reading health books. Some fine day you'll die of a misprint.”
― Markus Herz

“He shook hands with Margaret. He knew it was the first time their hands had met, though she was perfectly unconscious of the fact.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless."

"Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them."

"I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Don't confuse drama with living.”
― Laura Wood

“It may be normal, darling; but I'd rather be natural.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The most terrible things can happen to a man, but he’ll never lose himself if he remembers he was once a child.”
― Robert Dinsdale, The Toymakers

“In films, we are voyeurs, but in novels, we have the experience of being someone else: knowing another person’s soul from the inside. No other art form does that. And this is why sometimes, when we put down a book, we find ourselves slightly altered as human beings. Novels change us from within.”
― Donna Tartt

“I think the power of books is that - that they teach us to care about others. It's a power that gives people courage and also supports them in turn. [. . .] Empathy - that's the power of books.”
― Sōsuke Natsukawa, The Cat Who Saved Books

“Everyone's right, and everyone's wrong.”
― Amie Kaufman, Jay Kristoff, Obsidio

“It's very dangerous to believe people, I haven't for years.”
― Agatha Christie, Sleeping Murder

“How could we explain that standing on a stage and speaking someone else’s words as if they are your own is less an act of bravery than a desperate lunge at mutual understanding? An attempt to forge that tenuous link between speaker and listener and communicate something, anything, of substance.”
― M. L. Rio, If We Were Villains: A Novel

“If definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be So what. A life lived in a simulation is still a life.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“There was no question of forgiving them. She had not, in any case, a forgiving nature; and the injury they had done her was not done by them. If she were to start forgiving she must needs forgive Society, the Law, the Church, the History of Europe, the Old Testament, great-great-aunt Salome and her prayer-book, the Bank of England, Prostitution, the Architect of Apsley Terrace, and half a dozen other useful props of civilization.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes

“And so it goes...”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl." Old wives' tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people!”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

“Well here comes Christmas! That astonishing thing that no 'commercialism' can defile — unless we let it.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters from Father Christmas