Barbara > Barbara's Quotes

“Memory is like a long, dark street, illuminated at intervals in a light so bright that it shows up every detail. And then one plunges into the dark stretch again.”
― Susan Hill, Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home

“Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of emotion and observation, multilayered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers. Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language. It will not get us anything that enters not just the conscious mind but the unconscious. It will not allow the book to burrow down into our memory and become part of ourselves, the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom and vicarious experience which helps to form us as complete human beings. It will not develop our awareness or add to the sum of our knowledge and intelligence. Read parts of a newspaper quickly or an encyclopaedia entry, or a fast-food thriller, but do not insult yourself or a book which has been created with its author's painstakingly acquired skill and effort, by seeing how fast you can dispose of it.”
― Susan Hill, Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home

“I love the book. I love the feel of a book in my hands, the compactness of it, the shape, the size. I love the feel of paper. The sound it makes when I turn a page. I love the beauty of print on paper, the patterns, the shapes, the fonts. I am astonished by the versatility and practicality of The Book. It is so simple. It is so fit for its purpose. It may give me mere content, but no e-reader will ever give me that sort of added pleasure.”
― Susan Hill, Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home

“Books help to form us. If you cut me open, you will find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me. Alice in Wonderland. the Magic Faraway Tree. The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Book of Job. Bleak House. Wuthering Heights. The Complete Poems of W H Auden. The Tale of Mr Tod. Howard''s End. What a strange person I must be. But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA.”
― Susan Hill, Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home

“Memory is the scribe of the soul”
― Aristotle

“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.”
― Aristotle

“The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living differ from the dead.”
― Aristotle

“One swallow does not make a summer, neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

“The more you know, the more you know you don't know.”
― Aristotle

“Wise men speak when they have something to say, fools speak because they have to say something”
― Aristotle

“Nature does nothing uselessly.”
― Aristotle, Politics

“A friend is a second self.”
― Aristotle

“Through discipline comes freedom.”
― Aristotle

“How did you go bankrupt?"
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.”
― Susan Hill, The Woman in Black

“My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening. Every evening.'

'You are a romantic, Edith,' repeated Mr Neville, with a smile.

'It is you who are wrong,' she replied. 'I have been listening to that particular accusation for most of my life. I am not a romantic. I am a domestic animal. I do not sigh and yearn for extravagant displays of passion, for the grand affair, the world well lost for love. I know all that, and know that it leaves you lonely. No, what I crave is the simplicity of routine. An evening walk, arm in arm, in fine weather. A game of cards. Time for idle talk. Preparing a meal together.”
― Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac

“Books you've read are like old friends. You look up and you see a title that you've read and had pleasure from and it makes you feel very comfortable.
~Robert A.M. Stern, Architect”
― Estelle Ellis, At Home with Books: How Booklovers Live with and Care for Their Libraries

“But questioning does not mean the end of loving, and loving does not mean the abnegation of intelligence”
― Winifred Holtby, South Riding

“I am a feminist because I dislike everything that feminism implies. I desire an end to the whole business, the demands for equality, the suggestion of sex warfare, the very name feminist. I want to be about the work in which my real interests like, the writing of novels and so forth. But while inequality exists, while injustice is done and opportunity denied to the great majority of women, I shall have to be a feminist. And I shan't be happy till I get . . . a society in which there is no distinction of persons either male or female, but a supreme regard for the importance of the human being. And when that dream is a reality, I will say farewell to feminism, as to any disbanded but victorious army, with honour for its heroes, gratitude for its sacrifice, and profound relief that the hour for its necessity has passed.”
― Winifred Holtby

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

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

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
― Albert Einstein

“It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.”
― Maurice Switzer, Mrs. Goose, Her Book

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt.”
― Charles M. Schulz

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

“If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.”
― Joan Powers, Pooh's Little Instruction Book