BOOK-A-HOLICS discussion

WHEN I GET A LITTLE MONEY, I BUY BOOKS; IF ANY IS LEFT I BUY FOOD AND CLOTHES.

DESIDERIUS ERASMUS
1466-1536

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Mark Twain (1835 - 1910), Speech in New York, Nov. 20, 1900

"How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can't scare him--he has known a fear beyond every other."

--Steinbeck, "The Grapes of Wrath"

"Forever was so many different things. It was always changing, it was what everything was really about. It was twenty minutes, or a hundred years, or just this instant, or any instant I wished would last and last. But there was only one truth about forever that really mattered, and that was this: it was happening."

"The Truth About Forever" by Sarah Dessen

Two that I live by:

"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature nor do the children of men, as a whole, experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."
Hellen Keller

"Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences progress in even greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as much as it desires: beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it shines forth in the Gospels, it will not go."
Goethe

"When you start to live outside yourself, it's all dangerous"

From 'Garden of Eden' by Ernest Hemingway, spoken by the character Catherine.

"..Let us consider whether doing wrong is more painful than suffering wrong. Do those who do wrong feel more pain than those who suffer wrong?"

From Gorgias - Socrates to Polus.

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."

The opening paragraph to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House .

"Until the day comes when God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these words; Wait and hope!" -The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

"I help because that is who I am." -Contact Harvest, Joseph Staten

"Endings are the most important part of stories." - Salvation on Sand Mountain, Dennis Covington

Tom Clancy
" Perfect is a pain in the ass and usually not worth the effort".

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

I couldn't have said it better myself, Mr. Calvino...

"Live Well, Laugh Often, Love Much"

"Silence is not a natural environment for stories...they need words. Without them they grow pale, sicken, and die. And then they haunt you."
Margaret Lea a character in the Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield.

"Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option."
Anonymous

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
— Mark Twain

Today's quote : "I was either the first one to see him dead, or the last one to see him alive, depending on what the twitching signified." -- Lord of Light, R. Zelazny

I have a whole text-file of my favorite quotes from Bartlett's, but since I just finished Lord of Light, I felt I had to put down my favorite quote from the book.

"So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone's older brother, and someone's older sister -- they become our heroes, too. We invent what we love, and what we fear. There is always a brave, lost brother -- and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them."

--John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

"Don't put off till tomorrow, what you can achieve today."

Steven Preece

Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most. ~ Shel Silverstein (I think)

We die only once, and for such a long time.
-Moliere

I thought this quote was perfect for those of us who have admitted to being book-a-holics...

"Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind." — Jeanette Winterson

Just when I thought you couldn't get any dumber, you go and do something like this....and TOTALLY REDEEM YOURSELF! from Dumb and Dumber.

I know it's not a book but it's hilarious. And I live this life!

If people persist in trespassing upon the
grizzlies' territory, we must accept the fact that the grizzlies,
from time to time, will harvest a few trespassers."
— Edward Abbey

Nice quote Matthew

well as someone who deals with the trespassing on both sides i have a very soft spot for that quote, and Ed for that matter.

"She preferred keeping her mouth shut and appearing a fool to opening it and removing the doubt."
-Joan Smith, Escapade

“Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized.”
— Terry Pratchett

"The rain set early in tonight,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its best to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break."
— Robert Browning

"A room without a book is like a body without a soul."

"You really are a bastard, Loki," Hel said in a flat voice. "I hate to be bitchy, sweetheart, but you weren't exactly born in wedlock yourseld."

Runemarks-Joanne Harris

"There are no such thing as chilren books and adult books. There are only good books and bad books; and we should read the good ones."

Stephanie Meyer in an interview

I don't know what I've gained from loving you, but the need for anyone else is what I've lost. - Roo McKuen

"Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them, and you have their shoes" - Frieda Norris

"And that's when she put her book down. And looked at me. And said it: "Life isn't fair, Bill. we tell our children that it is, but it's a terrible thing to do. It's not only a lie, it's a cruel lie. Life is not fair, and it never has been, and it's never going to be." -The Princess Bride.

"Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option."

"Give people the benefit of the doubt until they give you a reason not to."

Never, never, never quit.

- Winston Churchill

When it comes to quotes I guess I can agree with you Wes " WHEN I GET A LITTLE MONEY, I BUY BOOKS; IF ANY IS LEFT I BUY FOOD AND CLOTHES.
ERASMUS" thats why I've got it on my profile,
however there are so many others i really like like this one from Oscar Wilde
"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination."

Thanks, Thinker

Lesen Sie kein Buch, selbst ein gleichgültiges nicht, ohne vorher von Ihrem Beichtvater die Zustimmung erlangt zu haben (Don't read a book, even an indifferent one, without getting first the approval of your father confessor)
Maria Theresia of Austria to her daughter Maria Antonia, known as Marie Antoinette in April 1770

I hope my translation is okay

I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. ~Gilda Radner

Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.

-Eleanor Roosevelt

"I may not die now...but I'm going to die sometime. Every minute of the day, I get closer. And I'm going to get old."
— Stephenie Meyer (Twilight)

"Time flys like and arrow, fruit flies like a banana" Groucho Marx

This one makes me chuckle every time I read it...

Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarate, and the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning it into a slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself.
This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, and a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings in a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse."­


Fernando Pessoa <3 from "The Book of Disquiet"

Among the many worlds which man did not receive as a gift of nature, but which he created with his own spirit, the world of books is greatest.
Every child scrawling his first letters on his slate and attempting to read for the first time, in so doing, enters an artificial and most complicated world; to know the laws and rules of this world completely and to practice them perfectly, no single human life is long enough.
Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

Hermann Hesse

Steven wrote: ""Don't put off till tomorrow, what you can achieve today."

Steven Preece "

I have to say this is one of my favs. I have to find some of the others and post them some time.

"Love all. Trust a few. Do wrong to none"
William Shakespeare

"I have dreamed in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind."

Emily Bronte