Book Quotations Quotes & Sayings

Not everything that can be extracted appears in anthologies of quotations, in commonplace books, or on the back of Celestial Seasonings boxes. Only certain sorts of extracts become quotations. — Gary Saul Morson

A forward critic often dupes us With sham quotations peri hupsos, And if we have not read Longinus, Will magisterially outshine us. Then, lest with Greek he over-run ye, Procure the book for love or money, Translated from Boileau's translation, And quote quotation on quotation. — Jonathan Swift

The whole man was in all his judgments and activities, and a discriminating zest for life, for 'common life', informs every page he wrote. He saw education as actualizing the potentiality for the leisured activities of thought, art, literature and conversation. 'Grete clerk' as he was, he was never willfully esoteric: quotations and allusions rose unbidden to the surface of his full and fertile mind, but whether drawn from Tristram Shandy or James Thurber they elucidate not decorate. His works are all of a piece: a book in one genre will correct, illumine, or amplify what is latent in another. — Jocelyn Gibb

I've compiled a book from the Internet. It's a book of quotations attributed to the wrong people. — Jerry Seinfeld

I almost trust her to burn the bridges while standing at the cliff herself. She hardly agrees to be on the same page as others, either ahead of all or all in a different book. — Parul Wadhwa

I did not buy a book called Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen Donaldson, which has the temerity to compare itself, on the front cover, to 'Tolkien at his best.' The back cover attributes the quote to the Washington Post, a newspaper whose quotations will always damn a book for me from now on. How dare they? And how dare the publishers? It isn't a comparison anyone could make, except to say 'Compared to Tolkien at his best, this is dross.' I mean you could say that even about really brilliant books like A Wizard of Earthsea. I expect Lord Foul's Bane (horrible title, sounds like a Conan book) is more like Tolkien at his worst, which would be the beginning of The Simarillion.
The thing about Tolkien, about The Lord of the Rings, is that it's perfect. — Jo Walton

A book that furnishes no quotations is no book - it is a plaything. — Thomas Love Peacock

Ralph Keyes calls quotation collectors "quotographers," the men and women who gather catchwords, watchwords, war words, winged words, maxims, mottos, sayings, and quips into books of a thousand pages. Through the centuries quotation collectors have saved quotations that would otherwise be lost. — Willis Regier

Part book about creativity, part compendium of useful tidbits, quotations and research results, and part annotated bibliography, this is a wildly useful and highly entertaining resource. — Stephanie S. Tolan

It is too bad that most Olympians do not train as hard as the Lashkar jihadis whose main aim in life is to kill people. — Vivek Pereira

Well named, Quotology contains everything you always wanted to know about quotations, quoters, quotees, quotation books, 'quoox' (quotations out of context), and their fascinating history. — Marjorie Garber

and thought to tart it up with a few Shakespeare quotations, having a vague recollection from my undergraduate days that the Bard was fond of joking about the great pox. I dusted off my battered copy of the Riverside Shakespeare and started leafing through it. Holy crap, I thought, there is a lot of stuff here on syphilis. My curiosity was piqued, and I did some more digging. Was there a connection between Shakespeare's syphilitic obsession, contemporary gossip about his sexual misadventures, and the only medical fact known about him with certainty - that his handwriting became tremulous in late middle age? I wrote an article that appeared in Clinical Infectious Diseases, supposing it to be of scant interest beyond its immediate specialty audience. To my surprise, it generated a fair amount of Internet buzz, and inspired a segment on The Daily Show. I began to think that there might be interest in a book on the topic of writers and disease, written from a medical perspective. — John J. Ross

When you broadcast your book reading voluntarily, it creates moments of fascinating serendipity. — Clive Thompson

I do have personal relationships with a lot of "fans," in quotations. I answer all my mail, I get emails from fans, and I try to answer them all. That's important to me, but occasionally there's the thing where people basically ask me to write book reports for them, and I don't have that kind of time. I feel like there's a certain sexism involved, like because I'm a woman I'm supposed to constantly be like giving to everybody. — Kathleen Hanna

For some Church members the Book of Mormon remains unread. Others use it occasionally as if it were merely a handy book of quotations. Still others accept and read it but do not really explore and ponder it. The book is to be feasted upon, not nibbled (see 2 Nephi 31:20). — Neal A. Maxwell

Now the situation is different, I admit: I have a wristwatch, I compare the angle of its hands with the angle of all the hands I see; I have an engagement book where the hours of my business appointments are marked down; I have a chequebook on whose stubs I add and subtract numbers. At Penn Station I get off the train, I take the subway, I stand and grasp the strap with one hand to keep my balance while I hold the newspaper up in the other, folded so I can glance over the figures of the stock market quotations: I play the game, in other words, the game of pretending there's an order in the dust, a regularity in the system, or an interpretation of different systems, incongruous but still measurable, so that every graininess of disorder coincides with the faceting of an order which promptly crumbles. — Italo Calvino

My quarrel with him is, that his works contain nothing worth quoting; and a book that furnishes no quotations, is me judice, no book, - it is a plaything. — Thomas Love Peacock

Books of quotations ... afford me one of the most undemanding but satisfying forms of reading pleasure. — P.D. James

On the analogy of 'Dictionary Johnson,' we call Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the just-published Yale Book of Quotations (well worth the $50 price), 'Quotationeer Shapiro.' ... Shapiro does original research, earning his 1,067-page volume a place on the quotation shelf next to Bartlett's and Oxford's. — William Safire

Those were my last words. To be listed in some book of quotations, alphabetically after Wilde:
Wilde, Oscar (of the wallpaper in his bedroom): "Either it goes, or I do."
Wilding, Adelyn (of the gum splooches on the sidewalk): "Ditto." — Roberta Pearce

Give a man a beer, the remote and a La-Z-Boy and he's a happy camper! All Things Caveman humor cartoon book will help you understand that hairy guy beside you. — Laurie Foxx

I think the effective use of quotation is an important point in the art of writing. Given sparingly, quotations serve admirably as a climax or as a corroboration, but when they are long and frequent, they seriously weaken the effect of a book. We lose sight of the writer - he scatters our sympathy among others than himself - and the ideas which he himself advances are not knit together with our impression of his personality. — George Eliot

In my book an erection constitutes personal growth. — Amunhotep El Bey

Most of the classical citations you shall hear or read in the current journals or speeches were not drawn from the originals, but from previous quotations in English books ... — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Luminous quotations, also, atone, by their interest, for the dulness of an inferior book, and add to the value of a superior work by the variety which they lend to its style and treatment. — Christian Nestell Bovee

I challenge the homes of Israel to display on their walls great quotations and scenes from the Book of Mormon. — Ezra Taft Benson

It often happens that the quotations constitute the most valuable part of a book. — Vicesimus Knox

I'm writing a book on Procrastination. I hope to start it tomorrow. I've been thinking about it for almost six years now. — Ron Moore

Observation:

Thanks to technological advances, avid readers seem to be replacing DTBAD (Dead Tree Book Acquisition Disorder) with an alphabet soup of more more modern-day hoarding behaviors: EBAD (E-Book Acquistion Disorder), EGAD (Electronic Gadget Acquisition Disorder), and ABAD (Audiobook Acquisition Disorder). Of course, there's also MYBAD (Movie and YouTube Acquisition Disorder: the hoarding or obsessive viewing of digital films and videos, some based on books). If any of these syndromes describes you, take heart: there's probably an app for that! - 8/9/2013 — Lisa Tolliver

Three years to make a book, five lines to ridicule it, and the quotations wrong. — Albert Camus

Without reading many different books, you can never leave the port of ignorance and can never obtain the peaceful mind of knowing the truth! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

I'm writing a new book called 'Ventroliquism for Dummies'. — Ron Moore