Fem (Little Miss Booksniffer) > Fem (Little Miss Booksniffer)'s Quotes

“Celtic 'is a magic bag, into which anything may be put, and out of which almost anything may come . . . Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reason.”
― J. R. R. Tolkien

“Aside from criminology, I’d say archaeology has the highest body count.”
― Jarod Kintz, $3.33

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad / Roughing It

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”
― Roald Dahl

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
― W.B. Yeats

“The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“I grabbed my book and opened it up.

I wanted to smell it.

Heck, I wanted to kiss it.

Yes, kiss it.

That's right, I am a book kisser.

Maybe that's kind of perverted or maybe it's just romantic and highly intelligent.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“What an unequaled gift for disaster you have.”
― Naomi Novik, Uprooted

“Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.”
― Paul Theroux

“Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.”
― Paul Theroux

“Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.”
― Paul Theroux

“You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“...[the birds] were the yellow of all yellows, the kind of yellow that every other yellow secretly wishes to be.”
― Redmond O'Hanlon, Into the Heart of Borneo

“Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away

“We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.”
― Bill Bryson

“Don't gobblefunk around with words.”
― Roald Dahl, The BFG

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
― Philip Pullman

“All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“Children are not less intelligent than adults; what they are is less informed.”
― Philip Pullman

“When I die, Dublin will be written on my heart.”
― James Joyce

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time look like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight-Tomas shoved a hand into the wind outside the truck-tonight you could almost taste time.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

“I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“It's a life's work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong. And that is something I don't want to be wrong about.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men