Nancy Chapman > Nancy's Quotes

“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.”
― J.K Rowling

“The odd thing about people who had many books was how they always wanted more.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, The Bell at Sealey Head

“Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books--whether it's strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking. Or a chance meeting with a stranger or friend who recommends a book we would never ordinarily reach for. Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives.”
― Cecelia Ahern

“Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.”
― Alain de Botton

“I am a part of everything that I have read.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

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

“If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.”
― Anne Fadiman

“No two persons ever read the same book.”
― Edmund Wilson

“Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.”
― Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

“We're all strangers connected by what we reveal, what we share, what we take away--our stories. I guess that's what I love about books--they are thin strands of humanity that tether us to one another for a small bit of time, that make us feel less alone or even more comfortable with our aloneness, if need be.”
― Libba Bray

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“My life is a reading list.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“It was amazing how many books one could fit into a room, assuming one didn't want to move around very much.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Well of Ascension

“For my whole life, my favorite activity was reading. It's not the most social pastime.”
― Audrey Hepburn

“You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.”
― Samuel Johnson, Works of Samuel Johnson. Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, A Grammar of the English Tongue, Preface to Shakespeare, Lives of the English Poets & more [improved 11/20/2010]

“Even a leaf in the wind settles sometimes.”
― Alison Goodman, Eon: Dragoneye Reborn

“Your face is marked with lines of life, put there by love and laughter, suffering and tears. It's beautiful.”
― Lynsay Sands