Kimpatt > Kimpatt's Quotes

“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.”
― Phyllis Diller

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”
― Charles W. Eliot

“The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.”
― Joseph Joubert

“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.”
― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

“Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“A house without books is like a room without windows.”
― Horace Mann

“The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“I just got out of the hospital. I was in a speed reading accident. I hit a book mark and flew across the room.”
― Steven Wright

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“No furniture is so charming as books.”
― Sydney Smith , A Memoir of the Rev. Sydney Smith; 2 volume set

“When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.”
― John Berger, Keeping a Rendezvous: Essays

“What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Over the Teacups

“Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity.”
― George Steiner

“Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.”
― W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays

“…only then did I wake out of the book.”
― John McGahern

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

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

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
― Groucho Marx

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?”
― Henry Ward Beecherr

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert