Marginalia Quotes

“Reading, for me, is like this: consumptive, pleasing, calming, as much as edifying. It's how I feel after a good dinner. That's why I do it so often: It feels wonderful. The book is mind and I insert myself into it, cover it entire, ear my way through every last slash and dot. That's something you can do with a book, unlike television or movies or the Internet. You can eat it, or mark it, like a dog does on a hydrant. ”
― Tara Bray Smith

“I used to always read with a pen in my hand, as if the author and I were in a conversation. ”
― Tara Bray Smith

“There is only one liberty, to come to terms with death, thereafter anything is possible.”
― Albert Camus

“I never minded the random scribblings of other readers, found them interesting in fact. It is a truth universally acknowledged that people write the darndest things in the margins of their books.”
― Tara Bray Smith

“…it’s very likely that the sentences I’ll underline in future will be different from the sentences I underlined in the past, when I was in Tangier—you don’t ever step into the same book twice after all.”
― Claire-Louise Bennett, Checkout 19

“We are all in wires, eventually, reduced to what we said, or didn't say, and what we wrote or didn't write, who loved or didn't love, or loved and lost and never told it except for writing in or to a book. We are all discarded, discordant, confusingly, and so I salute your bravery, book inscriber. Your heart is big enough for both of us, so that there is no room for mockery in me. Anyone willing to strip themselves this bare this fast this way deserves our breathlessness and our hearts' attention. Let's spend an hour, then longer, in contemplation. If you open, open all the way, or as much as you can bear, or else there's nothing here at all.”
― Ander Monson

“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.”
― Billy Collins

“Things are going up in fire and never been there." When she looked no wiser he said, "There was a warehouse in Finchley. Round between the bath shop and the Pizza Hut. I know there was because I used to go there and because I've seen it." He tap-tapped his eyepiece again. "But 'seen it' butters no bleeding parsnips these days. That warehouse burnt down, and now it didn't ever was there. The bath shop and the Pizza Hut are joined up now, and the only ash blowing around there's a charred bit of never.”
― China Miéville, Kraken