Ann Theis > Ann 's Quotes

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

“...one of the secret masters of
the world: a librarian. They
control information. Don't ever p**s one off.”
― Spider Robinson, The Callahan Touch

“She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience

“Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.”
― Richard Powers

“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

“My alma mater was books, a good library.... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.”
― Malcolm X

“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”
― Voltaire

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

“Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.”
― Sir Francis Bacon

“In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which are frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you...And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. ”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“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

“We live for books.”
― Umberto Eco

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

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

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“Books may well be the only true magic.”
― Alice Hoffman

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

“The heart is a bloody thing. ”
― Toby Barlow

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”
― Plato

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

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

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Be careful about reading health books. Some fine day you'll die of a misprint.”
― Markus Herz

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

“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.”
― Mark Twain

“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

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

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw