Carolyn Marie > Carolyn Marie's Quotes

“I live in two worlds. One is a world of books. I've been a resident of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, hunted the white whale aboard the Pequod, fought alongside Napoleon, sailed a raft with Huck and Jim, committed absurdities with Ignatius J. Reilly, rode a sad train with Anna Karenina and strolled down Swann's Way. It's a rewarding world, but my second one is by far superior. My second one is populated with characters slightly less eccentric, but supremely real, made of flesh and bone, full of love, who are my ultimate inspiration for everything.”
― Rory Gilmore

“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“There were no embraces, because where there is great love there is often little display of it.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Hunger is the best sauce in the world.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn't through love, because love is hard, It makes demands. Hate is simple. So the first thing that happens in a conflict is that we choose a side, because that's easier than trying to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. The second thing that happens is that we seek out facts that confirm what we want to believe - comforting facts, ones that permit life to go on as normal. The third is that we dehumanize our enemy.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“Never trust people who don't have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“Everyone has a thousand wishes before a tragedy, but just one afterward.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“If you are honest, people may deceive you. Be honest anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfishness. Be kind anyway. All the good you do today will be forgotten by others tomorrow. Do good anyway.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“The love a parent feels for a child is strange. There is a starting point to our love for everyone else, but not this person. This one we have always loved, we loved them before they even existed. No matter how well prepared they are, all moms and dads experience a moment of total shock, when the tidal wave of feelings first washed through them, knocking them off their feet. It's incomprehensible because there's nothing to compare it to. It's like trying to describe sand between your toes or snowflakes on your tongue to someone who's lived their whole life in a dark room. It sends the soul flying.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“It doesn't take long to persuade each other to stop seeing a person as a person. And when enough people are quiet for long enough, a handful of voices can give the impression that everyone is screaming.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that’s always too small. No matter how hard you try to cover everyone,”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“Difficult questions, simple answers. What is a community?

It is the sum total of our choices.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“What you create, others can destroy. Create anyway. Because in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and anyone else anyway.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“Sometimes life doesn’t let you choose your battles. Just the company you keep.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“We live for books.”
― Umberto Eco

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“There is creative reading as well as creative writing.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“My arms are killing me.
I didn't know words could be so heavy.”
― Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger

“[I] read books because I love them, not because I think I should read them.”
― Simon Van Booy

“I love the smell of book ink in the morning.”
― Umberto Eco

“All I have learned, I learned from books.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation."

[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down."

[Letter to J. Beauchamp Jones, August 8, 1839]”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe

“Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.”
― Harold Bloom

“When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle