Wendy > Wendy's Quotes

“No! Please! I'll tell you whatever you want to know!" the man yelled.
"Really?" said Vimes. "What's the orbital velocity of the moon?"
"What?"
"Oh, you'd like something simpler?”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.”
― Terry Pratchett, Soul Music

“No book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep, it's meant to make you jump out of your bed in your underwear and run and beat the author's brains out.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age

“The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book.”
― Edward Abbey

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers

“It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent

“she thought it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“My education has been so unwitting I can't quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my books, but that's how I've stayed attuned to myself and the world around me for the past thirty-five years. Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude

“What was he doing during the trip? What was he thinking about? As he had during the morning, he watched the trees go by, the thatched roofs, the cultivated fields, and the dissolving views of the countryside that change at every turn of the road. Scenes like that are sometimes enough for the soul, and almost eliminate the need for thought. To see a thousand objects for the first and last time, what could be more profoundly melancholy? Traveling is a constant birth and death. It may be that in the murkiest part of his mind, he was drawing a comparison between these changing horizons and human existence. All aspects of life are in perpetual flight before us. Darkness and light alternate: after a flash, an eclipse; we look, we hurry, we stretch out our hands to seize what is passing; every event is a turn in the road; and suddenly we are old. We feel a slight shock, everything is black, we can make out a dark door, the gloomy horse of life that was carrying us stops, and we see a veiled and unknown form that turns him out into the darkness. (pg. 248)”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
― James Baldwin

“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

“Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.”
― Franz Kafka

“It is the first changes among familiar things that make such a mystery of time to the young; afterwards we lose the sense of the mysterious. I take changes in all I see as a matter of course. The instability of all human things is familiar to me, to you it is new and oppressive." (Mr. Bell)”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“It's silly to be depressed by it. I mean one thinks of it like being alive in a box, one keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead, which should make all the difference, shouldn't it? I mean, you'd never know you were in a box would you?... Even taking into account the fact that you're dead, it isn't a pleasant thought. Especially if you're dead, really. Ask yourself, if I asked you straight off-- I'm going to stuff you in this box now would you rather be alive or dead? Naturally you'd prefer to be alive. Life in a box is better than no life at all.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat?
Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat.
Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats.
Guildenstern: No, no, no--what you've been is not on boats.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Let there be nothing harmonious about our children's playthings, lest they grow up expecting peace and order, and be eaten alive.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Once I blazed across the sky,
Leaving trails of flame;
I fell to earth, and here I lie -
Who'll help me up again?
-A Shooting Star”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“I've never listened to an audiobook before, and I have to say it's a totally different experience. When you read a book, the story definitely takes place in your head. When you listen, it seems to happen in a little cloud all around it, like a fuzzy knit cap pulled down over your eyes”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“A benevolent malefactor, merciful, gentle, helpful, clement, a convict, returning good for evil, giving back pardon for hatred, preferring pity to vengeance, preferring to ruin himself rather than to ruin his enemy, saving him who had smitten him, kneeling on the heights of virtue, more nearly akin to an angel than to a man. Javert was constrained to admit to himself that this monster existed.

Things could not go on in this manner. ”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Who here wants to be a writer?' I asked. Everyone in the room raised his hand. 'Why the hell aren't you home writing?' I said, and left the stage.”
― Leon Uris, Qb VII

“My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.”
― Alan Moore

“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”
― Albert Camus

“YOU CAN'T BE TOO OLD TO SPY EXCEPT IF YOU WERE FIFTY YOU MIGHT FALL OFF A FIRE ESCAPE, BUT YOU COULD SPY AROUND ON THE GROUND A LOT.”
― Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy

“It is a mistake to use intense words without carefully weighing and measuring them, or they will have already been used when one needs them later.”
― Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you. ”
― Doris Lessing

“But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch.”
― Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy

“The lieutenant’s fooling around again with the telegraph girl at the station,” said the corporal, after he had gone. “He’s been running after her for a fortnight and he’s always frightfully furious when he comes from the telegraph office and he says about her: “She’s a whore. She won’t sleep with me!”
― Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk