Books That Made Me Quotes & Sayings

Another case for the dumbness of reading, however, is that books do not contain answers, but rather pose more questions. And asking questions makes you look dumber, not smarter.
I thought Alice's Adventures in Wonderland would be a delightful romp through a child's subconscious, but while reading it I started to ask questions like "How do you really speak to other humans when our language often means the opposite of what is intended?" and "How do I really know anyone?" And so on, until I was asking the question "Why even exist at all?"
That didn't make me smarter! That made me wish for death, and being dead looks way dumber than being alive. — Dan Wilbur

Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them. — Charles Darwin

I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that's been made from one of my books, I know that it isn't going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I'll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it. — Stephen King

In that time he had managed to write books that made me consider him a friend more than a hundred years later. — Michel Houellebecq

It was then that he started his novel The People Immortal, and when I read it later, many of its pages seemed to me very familiar. He found himself as a writer during the war. His pre-war books were nothing more than searching for his theme and language. He was a true internationalist and reproached me frequently for saying "Germans" instead of "Hitler's men" when describing the atrocities of the occupiers.' Ehrenburg was persuaded that it was Grossman's all-embracing world view which made the xenophobic Stalin hate him. — Vasily Grossman

-The Wonderer's Dream-

Upon one lucky night I had a vision
A vision of a tree whose roots grew
Wide
Deep
and Long
And I followed it down until it lead me to another world
And in this world I learned there were worlds upon worlds
A world in which there was no slave or free
As there was nothing to be free from
This world was made of pure light
A light that radiates
In you
In me
And on the rare occasion it finds itself travelled and distant
and somehow, as luck may have it, in our world.

A poem for the Nalia Books — Queenbe Monyei

When I take my hand out of this blanket," he thought, "my nail will be grown back, my hands will be clean. My body will be clean. I'll have on clean shorts, clean undershirt, a white shirt. A blue polka-dot tie. A gray suit with a stripe, and I'll be home, and I'll bolt the door. I'll put some coffee on the stove, some records on the phonograph, and I'll bolt the door. I'll read my books and I'll drink coffee and I'll listen to music, and I'll bolt the door. I'll open the window, I'll let in a nice, quiet girl
not Frances, not anyone I've ever known
and I'll bolt the door. I'll ask her to read some Emily Dickinson to me
that one about being chartless
and I'll ask her to read some William Blake to me
that one about the little lamb that made thee
and I'll bolt the door. She'll have an American voice, and she won't ask me if I have any chewing gum or bonbons, and I'll bolt the door. — J.D. Salinger

I have a weird graphic I made for myself once, and it's the "lineage tree" of everyone that has inspired me and more importantly given me the permission to be myself in my work. There's a slew of people from theater: Erwin Piscator, Chekhov, Mac Wellman, Stein; and then a whole lot of wonderful works that are called novels: everything from Tristram Shandy to Bouvard and Pecuchet, to Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, and Finnegan's Wake and Invisible Man, and then contemporary writers I'm currently reading like Renee Gladman and Anakana Schofield. There are many more in my graphic also: there's Beckett's novels and Melancholy of Resistance, and there's Reznikoff and Dos Passos, there are contemporary poets I admire like Jena Osman, dance-writers like Michelle Ellsworth, and books I can't help read for fun like Muriel Spark. But there's Groucho Marx and Oscar Wilde. It's a huge question and the answers would likely change daily. But these I'm talking about here are in the pantheon. — Thalia Field

What captivated me about you was that you opened the door to another world for me. The values that dominated my childhood had no place there. That world enchanted me. I could leave the real world behind and be someone else, without any ties or obligations. With you, I was elsewhere, in a foreign place, foreign to myself. You gave me access to another dimension when I'd always rejected any fixed identity and just worn different identities on top of each other, though none of them were mine.
By speaking to you in English, I made your language mine. I've continued to talk to you in English right up to this day, even when you answered me in French. For me, English, which I knew mainly through you and through books, was from the start like a private language that preserved our intimacy against the intrusion of the real world, and its prevailing social normals. I felt like I was building a protected and protective world with you. — Andre Gorz

I seem to have been cast several several times to do it. I think in this one, Phoenix is not purely evil. She was in the comic books at some point but the way the writers created her or we always talked about her, was that she was torn with her powers taking over and trying to control them at the same time. It was challenging to play which made it interesting for me to play this character. — Famke Janssen

You're all Helen talks about. She's been reading Welsh history books and plaguing the family with accounts of Owain Glynd and something called the Eistedfodd." His eyes sparkled with friendly mockery. "Helen was hacking and spitting so much the other day that we thought she was coming down with a cold, until we realized she was practicing the Welsh alphabet."
Ordinarily Rhys would have made some sarcastic retort, but he'd barely noticed the gibe. His chest had gone tight with pleasure.
"She doesn't have to do that," he muttered.
"Helen wants to please you," Devon said. "It's her nature. Which leads to something I want to make clear: Helen is like a younger sister to me. And although I'm obviously the last man alive who should lecture anyone about propriety, I expect you to behave like an altar boy with her for the next few days."
Rhys gave him a surly glance. "I *was* an altar boy, and I can tell you that reports of their virtue are highly exaggerated. — Lisa Kleypas

I've never met a bug that hasn't made me jump. — Denise Dowling Mortensen

I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else. — Joshua Slocum

A long time ago, I opened a book, and this is what I found inside: a whole new world. It isn't the world I live in, although sometimes it looks a lot like it. Sometimes, though, it feels closest to my world when it doesn't look like it at all. That world is enormous, yet it all fits inside an everyday object. I don't have to keep everything I find there, but what I choose to take with me is more precious than anything I own, and there is always more where that came from. The world I found was inside a book, and then that world turned out to be made of even more books, each of which led to yet another world. It goes on forever and ever. At nine I thought I must get to Narnia or die. It would be a long time before I understood that I was already there. — Laura Miller

I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn't have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private - a comforting thought. — Nell Freudenberger

When I was a child I used to read books by Gerald Durrell, who founded Jersey Zoo. He had a job collecting animals for zoos and for a long time that is what I wanted to do. Later when I was a teenager I had a fantastic English teacher called Mrs. Stafford. Her enthusiasm made me decide to be a writer. — Melvin Burgess

I want you to marry me, Thomas." Marcus' attention had weight and heat on every exposed, raw part of him. "We can get a license in a state where it's legal, have a ceremony wherever you want, however you want. And I don't care if there's no law for it on the books, it will be the law between you and me and whatever God there is. I want it to be impossible for us to leave each other without a hell of a lot of paperwork, ugly custody battles over furniture, whatever.
"I want to marry you," he repeated. "I want you to know that every morning when you wake up and see me that I want to be there, that I made an oath to be there. To stand by you. And that there's no one else for me. Not ever. — Joey W. Hill

Perhaps we should explore some other options before swanning off to Ireland," Dad said, pushing his glasses up. "After all, Sophie, you've been through quite the ordeal."
"I'll nap on the plane. Look, we are dealing with the possibility of an army of demons. I don't know about you guys, but those words are right up there with 'root canal' and 'school on Saturdays' in terms of things that terrify me. Were already three weeks behind. We don't have time to just sit here and explore options or read more books or listen to more half-assed prophecies from this jerk," I said, pointing to Torin. He made a gesture that I think was the old-timey version of flipping me off.
"So, yeah," I continued. "Maybe this is a totally stupid idea. But if there's even a chance one of us can get into the underworld, then we have to take it."
"Okay, I do like you," Finley said, flashing me a grin. — Rachel Hawkins

I didn't go to bookshops to buy. That's a little bourgeois. I went because they were civilized places. It made me happy there were people who sat down and wrote and wrote and wrote and there were other people who devoted their lives to making those words into books. It was lovely. Like standing in the middle of civilization. — Jerry Pinto

Today at school I will learn to read at once; then tomorrow I will begin to write, and the day after tomorrow to cipher. Then with my acquirements I will earn a great deal of money, and with the first money I have in my pocket I will immediately buy for my papa a beautiful new cloth coat. But what am I saying? Cloth, indeed! It shall be all made of gold and silver, and it shall have diamond buttons. That poor man really deserves it; for to buy me books and to have me taught he has remained in his shirt sleeves ... And in this cold! It is only fathers who are capable of such sacrifices! ... — Carlo Collodi

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing - they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me. — Stephen Fry

When I was a kid, I read books that made me laugh but also made me shiver in terror. I wanted to make books that made other people feel the same way. — Bruce Coville

Pops says he loves me just the way I am, but not everyone in the world is like my father. Maman, for example. A difficult and dissatisfied woman. She made me learn flower arranging and how to walk properly
books on my head, the whole bit. These things ruined me for life. Now it sets my teeth on edge when I see flowers carelessly flung into a vase, and I'm forever looking at other women in the street and thinking, [I]Sloppy ... sloppy[/I]. And I know I shouldn't care, and I want to poke myself in the eye for caring, but I care anyway, so thanks for that, Maman. — Helen Oyeyemi

Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them. — Annie Dillard

I've seen people around me write books, and somehow they're always in the center of everything that happened; they were the one who made it happen. There's been a lot of those books that didn't really interest me much. — Paul Stanley

We live and breathe words ... It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. Reading your words, what you wrote, how you were lonely sometimes and afraid, but always brave; the way you saw the world, its colors and textures and sounds, I felt
I felt the way you thought, hoped, felt, dreamt. I felt I was dreaming and thinking and feeling with you. I dreamed what you dreamed, wanted what you wanted
and then I realized that truly I just wanted you. — Cassandra Clare

No," the Boss (Willie) corrected, "I'm not a lawyer. I know some law. In fact, I know a lot of law. And I made me some money out of law. That's why I can see what the law is like. It's like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain't ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is always going to nigh catch pneumonia. Hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shankbone's to the breeze. The law is too short and too tight for growing humankind. The best you can do is do something and then make up some law to fit and by the time that law gets onto the books you would have done something different ... " Willie Stark; All the King's Men — Robert Penn Warren

Every now and then, someone will tell me that one of my books has made them laugh out loud. I never believe them because: a.) my books don't make me laugh out loud; and b.) sometimes I have said this to a writer, when really what I meant was, 'Your book made me smile appreciatively.' — Mary Roach

All of this made me feel better about myself, and I was grateful to the books for teaching me-without my even having to read them- that there were people in the world more desperate, more self-absorbed, more boring than I was. - about memoirs — Brock Clarke

a light that made me think of long hours in dusty libraries, and old books, and silence. — Donna Tartt

I feel better in my mind because I'm doing what God made me to do. He said, 'Go write books, Steve, and you'll be happy.' I'm happy now, and that has had an effect on my life and my relationship with my wife and kids and even my friends. I've always wanted to be a writer. — Stephen King

Having found in many books different methods of going to GOD, and divers practices of the spiritual life, I thought this would serve rather to puzzle me than facilitate what I sought after, which was nothing but how to become wholly GOD'S. This made me resolve to give the all for the all; so after having given myself wholly to GOD, that He might take away my sin, I renounced, for the love of Him, everything that was not He; and I began to live as if there was none but He and I in the world. — Brother Lawrence

I'd always escaped into books, but now reading had become something more. It allowed me to be somewhere else, to feel something else, not just the numbness that overtook my body and made me wonder if I was still alive. — Demitria Lunetta

Suzanne Collins, it was such a big thing for me to make the handshake with her and to say, 'You can trust me. I will not screw up your books. And I won't let them be diluted and softened. And I won't let them be exploited and made guilty of the sins that are being commented on in the books.' I take that really seriously. — Nina Jacobson

One of the ways I stuck out was I was a very passionate reader. There was probably a cyclical nature to that; the more I felt like an outcast, the more I sought refuge in books, and the more I sought refuge in books, the more it made me not speak the same language as my peers. — Garth Risk Hallberg

When my younger son was 13 years old, he asked me to read 'Swallows and Amazons' to him while he made models. He liked it so much that I ended up reading all thirteen of Ransome's books, including the ones that I missed out on. This led my son to 'Treasure Island,' 'Robinson Crusoe' and 'Coral Island.' — Michelle Magorian

Let's get one thing out of the way: Mexican immigration is an oxymoron. Mexicans are indigenous. So, in a strange way, I'm pleased that the racist folks of Arizona have
officially declared, in banning me alongside Urrea, Baca, and Castillo, that their anti-immigration laws are also anti-Indian. I'm also strangely pleased that the folks of Arizona
have officially announced their fear of an educated underclass. You give those brown kids some books about brown folks and what happens? Those brown kids change the world. In the effort to vanish our books, Arizona has actually given them enormous power. Arizona has made our books sacred documents now. — Sherman Alexie

The year after I graduated college I had a job in a library. When people underlined passages in the library books, or made notes in the margins, the books were sent to me. I erased the lines and the notes. Yes, that was my job. — Lev Grossman

The way you start writing is by writing. Over and over again I have proven this to myself but I always forget it the next time. I always believe that I will never write again. The first time I finished a book a painter was visiting me. Her name is Ginny Stanford and her wonderful paintings have been the covers for nine of my books.
'I'll never write again,' I told her ... 'That's it ... It's over. It was great while it lasted, but now it's done.'
That afternoon she made me a wonderful drawing of a ship sinking in the waves of the sea. 'I'll never write again,' it said on the bottom of the picture. 'September, 1981. — Ellen Gilchrist

I'd have devoured those books I've come to love - the ones that have helped me reawaken my sexuality. The books that have made me realize it's okay to want more out of my sex life, to want my husband to push the envelope with me. Experiment with me. Demand more of me. — C.D. Reiss

I loved these books, but talk about impossible standards. Adults were never charmed by me. They scolded me or ignored me. When my eyes got starry, I was never told that I had an expressive face, a smile that lit up the room, or a special quality that made others happy. This was a lucky thing, I think now. Unable to imitate or compete with these heroines, I was left to forge my own way. — Nancy McCabe

I always had a problem when I did the audio books myself because they weren't made to have me doing all the voices. And to hear established actors, and you think, 'Wow, that sounds like it's supposed to sound,' is great. They've got the right inflections, which is an enormous skill. — Robert Rankin

I've always thought Harper Lee might have made a great decision. Much as you'd like to have more books by her, there's something about just one that's kind of mysterious and nice. On the other hand, the New York gossip about me was that I'd never write another book. So I thought, 'Well, I will then.' — Charles Frazier

I was in full digression! far from the subject! ... my colonel was losing track ... rapidly, of my story! my story! ... my own story! ... the gifts that I had personally received from Heaven! ... yet I had insisted, every time! truly extraordinary gifts! ... I'd made him repeat them a hundred times! ... enough so he'd remember! that I was the only true genius! the century's only writer! the proof: that no one ever spoke of me! ... everyone was jealous! Nobel! no Nobel! they had all joined forces to have me executed! ... they could just go fuck off! ... drop dead! since it was a question of death between me and them! I'll send their readers packing! all their readers! I'll make the public grow sick of their books! cabal! no cabal! since there was no room for two styles! ... it was mine or theirs! ... crawl or breastroke! ... you understand! ... the only inventor of the century! is me! me! me right here! the only genius, you might say! damned or not! ... — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

He pulled me up into the world of advanced literature, where you wrote essays about a line of Dante, where nothing could be made complex enough, where art dealt with the supreme, not in a high-flown sense because it was the modernist canon with which we were engaged, but in the sense of the ungraspable, which was best illustrated by Blanchot's description of Orpheus's gaze, the night of the night, the negation of the negation, which of course was in some way above the trivial and in many ways wretched lives we lived, but what I learned was that also our ludicrously inconsequential lives, in which we could not attain anything of what we wanted, nothing, in which everything was beyond our abilities and power, had a part in this world, and thus also in the supreme, for books existed, you only had to read them, no one but myself could exclude me from them. You just had to reach up. — Karl Ove Knausgard

I'm going to consult some witches' books. Not that I have many here to consult. But I'm not going to Bryn's house. I've made it twelve whole days without sleeping with him, and no scary skeleton in a tree is going to send me to Seduction Central now that Bryn's big case is finally over. — Kimberly Frost

I guessed she must be, at most, twenty, but there was something about her manner that made me think she could be ageless. She seemed trapped in that state of perpetual youth reserved for mannequins in shop windows. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn't control what came through it. — Nicole Krauss

I wanted to know what it was like to be a drug addict, and have an eating disorder, and have a loved one die, and fall in love. I saw my friends going through these things, I saw the world going through these things, and I needed to understand them. I needed to make sense of them. Books didn't make me wallow in darkness, darkness made me wallow in books, and it was books that showed me there is light at the end of the tunnel. — Jackson Pearce

I pulled them out of the fire myself. I read them all. Every word you wrote. You and I, Tess, we're alike. We live and breathe words. It was books that kept me from taking my own life after I thought I could never love anyone, never be loved by anyone again. It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. Reading your words, what you wrote, how you were lonely sometimes and afraid, but always brave; the way you saw the world, its colors and textures and sounds, I felt-I felt the way you thought, hoped, felt, dreamed. I felt I was dreaming and thinking and feeling with you. I dreamed what you dreamed, wanted what you wanted-and then I realized that truly I just wanted you. The girl behind the scrawled letters. I loved you from the moment I read them. I love you still. — Cassandra Clare

...I have big dreams, too. I used to think that made me different and strange. But when I came here and found all these books, I realized there are places in the world where I belong, even if I haven't found them yet. — Random House Disney

By what I have read in books, I think few that have held a pen were ever really wearied, or they would write of it more strongly. I had no care of my life, neither past nor future, and I scarce remembered there was such a lad as David Balfour. I did not think of myself, but just of each fresh step which I was sure would be my last, with despair - and of Alan, who was the cause of it, with hatred. Alan was in the right trade as a soldier; this is the officer's part to make men continue to do things, they know not wherefore, and when, if the choice was offered, they would lie down where they were and be killed. And I dare say I would have made a good enough private; for in these last hours it never occurred to me that I had any choice but just to obey as long as I was able, and die obeying. — Robert Louis Stevenson

The Pleiades and northern lights are still above the mountain. The mountain is in the east, and on its slopes there are reindeer. Reindeer always remind me of trees that have taken to moving. They remind me even more of trees than people do. In the distant past, reindeer were trees as people were, but they haven't come such a long way from their origins, and the branches can be seen although they no longer bear leaves.
I have my bedtime book in my hand and my pocket light and walk toward the mountain over the edges of the moorland in rubber boots. The book is a relative of mine, I feel; it is made out of trees and human thought, and thus the relationship becomes twofold. These are ancient poems that I am taking to the mountains and the reindeer. — Gyrdir Eliasson

Kyler half-jumped half-threw himself toward my open window. I was wussy. Closing my eyes, I balled my hands up near my chest and let out a little shriek. There was a sound of flesh hitting wood and my eyes flew open. He came through the open window, landing on his feet like a damn cat. He stumbled though and banged into my desk, causing books and my computer to shake.
He held his hands out to his sides and looked around slowly before his gaze settled on me. "I am awesome." I could barely breathe. "Yeah." A knock sounded on my bedroom door a second before it opened. Dad popped his head in, eyes wide. "I'm just making sure he made it up here alive." I nodded and Kyler flashed a grin. "I'm in one piece." "That's good to see." Dad started to close the door, but stopped. "Next time, use the front door, Kyler." "Yes, sir," Kyler said. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

I just finished reading Pearl Cleage 'What looks like Crazy on an ordinary day' and Ernessa T. Carter '32 Candles'; they were both fantastic. I had almost giving up hope of finding anything I'd like to read. They contained relatable topics and wrote in vernacular that made me feel at ease with the whole process. I think I'm rediscovering my love of books from these two amazing authors. — Ernessa T. Carter

The library turned out to be a very pleasant place, but it was not the comfortable chairs, the huge wooden bookshelves, or the hush of people reading that made the three siblings feel so good as they walked into the room. It is useless for me to tell you all about the brass lamps in the shapes of different fish, or the bright blue curtains that rippled like water as a breeze came in from the window, because although these were wonderful things they were no what made the three children smile. The Quagmire triplets were smiling, too, and although I have not researched the Quagmires nearly as much as I have the Baudelaires, I can say with reasonable accuracy that they were smiling for the same reason. — Lemony Snicket

Sometimes I think of atoms as tiny people who are extremely scared and hold hands with each other a lot. I imagine that my body is made of tiny, scared people, and they pick up mugs and books, which are made of other tiny, scared people. And when you sex someone it's just lots of tiny, scared people holding hands.
I think about the tiny people that are me and I feel less alone.
I'm an army of tiny people, trying their best. — Ben Brooks

Human existence is temporary and all the knowledge of the universe we acquire will in time be forgotten because there will be no humans left to benefit from any of the stuff we learned.
And yet, this doesn't invalidate scientific exploration to me. We seek to understand the universe because it makes our lives better and more rich. Similarly, we tell stories (and think about why and how to tell stories) because it makes human existence richer. Made-up stories matter. They bring us pleasure and solace and nurture empathy by letting us see the world through others' eyes. They also help us to feel unalone, to understand that our grief and joy is shared not just by those around us but by all those who came before us and all those still yet to come. — John Green

In Catcher in the Rye, the protagonist Holden Caulfield mentions reading books that make him wish he could be friends with the author and be able to call him on the phone and so forth. I would consider a literary work that made someone feel this way a success. Furthermore, it's the only kind of success in literature that means anything to me. — Thomas Ligotti

Andy: Andrew Makepeace Ladd, the Third, accepts with pleasure the kind invitation of Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Channing Gardner for a birthday party in honor of their daughter Melissa on April 19th, 1937 at half past three o'clock.
Melissa: Dear Andy: Thank you for the birthday present. I have a lot of Oz books, but not 'The Lost Princess of Oz.' What made you give me that one? Sincerely yours, Melissa.
Andy: I'm answering your letter about the book. When you came into second grade with that stuck-up nurse, you looked like a lost princess.
Melissa: I don't believe what you wrote. I think my mother told your mother to get that book. I like the pictures more than the words. Now let's stop writing letters. — A.R. Gurney

These days, there are many people around the world who listen to the songs that made me infamous and read the books that made me respectable. — Kinky Friedman

This was the Mecca of the American Dream, the world that everyone wanted. A world of sleek young women (allied with Slenderella to be so) in shorts and halters, driving 400-horsepower station wagons to air-conditioned, music-serenaded supermarkets of baby-sitter corporations and culture condensed into Great Books discussion groups. A life of barbecues by the swimming pool and drive in movies open all year. It did't appeal to me. Fuck health insurance plans and life insurance. They wanted to live without leaving the womb. It made me more alive to play a game without rules against society, and I was prepared to play it to the end. A tremor almost sexual passed through me as I anticipated the comming robbery. — Edward Bunker

My mother used to read to me every night when I was little. We got through most of the major fantasy books of that time. The Narnia books by C.S. Lewis were my favorites and, later, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. I started making dolls to fill in the gaps of the dolls I had. Obviously we couldn't buy centaurs and fauns and elves and fairies, so I made them to play with the normal dolls I had. I must have been about six years old when I started making fantasy dolls. — Wendy Froud

Look, Mr. uh, Wulf I appreciate your trying to warn me about this, Ireally do. But there's no such thing as vampires. They're made-up. We writers made them up. I'm sorry we did such a good job that we made the whole world paranoid, but it's true. They're fictional. Blame Bram Stoker. He started it. — Meg Cabot

I'm grateful for anything that reminds me of what's possible in this life. Books can do that. Films can do that. Music can do that. School can do that. It's so easy to allow one day to simply follow into the next, but every once in a while we encounter something that shows us that anything is possible, that dramatic change is possible, that something new can be made, that laughter can be shared. — Jonathan Safran Foer

That conversation with the taxi driver suddenly made clear to me the essence of the writer's occupation. We write books because our children aren't interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them. — Milan Kundera

Gideon and I sit there in the dark, wordless for a while, only our ragged breaths disturbing the silence. Memories of my sister overwhelm me - I see her impish grin as she leans over me at the orphanage, tugging on my hair until I wake up. I remember us climbing up to the roof as kids, sitting cross-legged next to the herbs and vegetables our caretakers were growing while we read the English books Rose had "borrowed" from her class at school. And then there was L.A. - all of our hope for a better life so quickly crushed, but Rose never let despair overtake her. She was there after every single night to hold me until the pain went away. And later, when I got numb to it all, she still made a point of holding me, of promising me that one day things would be different. — Paula Stokes

I love librarians more than any other people in the world. When I was an immigrant kid, they've made me feel like a human being and they gave me books that taught me English. — Gary Shteyngart

Most of the books I have are indicators of my insecurity. I really wanted to be an intellectual. I really wanted to understand Sartre. I thought that was what made people smart. I have tried to read Being and Nothingness no fewer than twenty times in my life. I really thought that every answer had to be in that book. Maybe it is. The truth is, I can't read anything with any distance. Every book is a self-help book to me. Just having them makes me feel better. I underline profusely but I don't retain much. Reading is like a drug. When I am reading from these books it feels like I am thinking what is being read, and that gives me a rush. That is enough. I glean what I can. I finish some of the unfinished thoughts lingering around in my head by adding the thoughts of geniuses and I build from there. There are bookmarks in most of the denser tomes at around page 20 to 40 because that was where I said, "I get it." Then I put them back on the shelf. — Marc Maron

I remember when I was very young, I had a fever - a long rheumatic fever in bed for four months. And in the days, I stayed alone with the maid. I only had my father's books with me. They were fantasy books about ghosts, and also books by Edgar Allen Poe that made a forever impression on me. — Dario Argento

Bicycling beyond the Divide did what all great books do: it told me about me. In its tale of a journey made by two different men-both of them Daryl Farmer-this book offers us not only moving vistas and meaningful people, but also hope, that rarest of literary commodities these days. I didn't want this to end. — Bret Lott

If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination - that another power has found them and generously presented them to me. — Orhan Pamuk

It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. — Cassandra Clare

Lady Gregory, in a note to her play Aristotle's Bellows, writes:
Aristotle's name is a part of our folklore. The wife of one of our labourers told me one day as a bee buzzed through the open door, Aristotle of the Books was very wise, but the bees got the best of him in the end. He wanted to know how they did pack the comb, and he wasted the best part of a fortnight watching them doing it. Then he made a hive with a glass cover on it and put it over them, and thought he would watch them, but when he put his eye to the glass, they had covered it with wax, so that it was as black as the pot, and he was as blind as before. He said he was never rightly killed until then. The bees beat him that time surely. — Hilda M. Ransome

But books were full of stories and stories were full of lies and lies hurt Jesus's feelings, so I didn't know what to think. I blamed my family. They were the ones who taught me so much about telling stories, and how not to do it, and then, in inspired moments of surprise, how to tell one so good you forgot what day it was, and I liked forgetting what day it was, so I made certain life choices that would allow me to get paid to forget what day it was and teach others to forget what day it was, which is, after all, what I think heaven probably is: the whole world, forgetting what day it is. You have to, I bet, with an endless supply of them. — Harrison Scott Key

But, in the end, the books that surround me are the books that made me, through my reading (and misreading) of them; they fall in piles on my desk, they stack behind me on my shelves, they surprise me every time I look for one and find ten more I had forgotten about. I love their covers, their weight and their substance. And like the child I was, with the key to the world that reading gave me, it is still exciting for me to find a new book, open it at the first page and plunge in, head first, heart deep. — Ramona Koval

Everything interesting was in the books; it was books that made me aware of the variety of the world. — Teju Cole

They came generally from people writing theses on fantasy or on the Dark Is Rising books. They were full of questions I'd never thought about and false assumptions that I didn't want to think about. They would ask me in great detail for, say, the specific local and mythical derivations of my Greenwitch, a leaf-figure thrown over a Cornish cliff as a fertility sacrifice, and I would have to write back and say, "I'm terribly sorry; I made it all up." They told me I echoed Hassidic myth, which I hadn't read, and the Mormon suprastructure, which I'd never even heard of. They saw symbols and buried meanings and allegories everywhere. I'd thought I was making a clear soup, but for them it was a thick mysterious stew.

from "In Defense of the the Artist" in Signposts to Criticism of Children's Literature (1983) — Susan Cooper

The thing I understood least of all was that knowledge led to despair and damnation. Our spiritual mentor had not said that those bad books had given a false picture of life: if that had been the case, he could easily have exposed their falsehood; the tragedy of the little girl whom he had failed to bring to salvation was that she had made a premature discovery of the true nature of reality. Well, anyhow, I thought, I shall discover it myself one day, and it isn't going to kill me: the idea that there was a certain age when knowledge of the truth could prove fatal I found offensive to common sense. — Simone De Beauvoir

I understood it now, understood a lot of things I had never understood before. And mostly I understood what a woman could mean to a man. Before, she had been a pair of eyes, and a shape, something to get excited about. Now she seemed something to lean on, and draw something from, that nothing else could give me. I thought of books I had read, about worship of the Earth, and how she was always called Mother, and none of it made much sense, but those big round breasts did, when I put my head on them, and they began to tremble, and I began to tremble. — James M. Cain

From my first stab at second base, I became obsessively concerned for my vaginal upkeep. I began shaving the day after I felt my first tongue down my throat. The first buzz was a disaster, causing horrifically itchy dull razor breakout that made me look like I made love to a poison ivy bush. Whenever I thought there was a chance of unveiling my privates, I smothered every breakout with the same foundation I used for the occasional teenage acne face breakouts. — Maggie Young

Mr. Jeavons, the psychologist at the school, once asked me why 4 red cars in a row made it a Good Day, and 3 red cars in a row made it a Quite Good Day, and 5 red cars in a row made it a Super Good Day, and why 4 yellow cars in a row made it a Black Day, which is a day when I don't speak to anyone and sit on my own reading books and don't eat my lunch and Take No Risks. He said that I was clearly a very logical person, so he was surprised that I should think like this because it wasn't very logical. I said that I liked things to be in a nice order. And one way of things being in a nice order was to be logical. Especially if those things were numbers or an argument. But there were other ways of putting things in a nice order. And — Mark Haddon

I spent the afternoon in a bookstore. There were no books in it. None had been printed for nearly half a century. And how I have looked forward to them, after the micro films that made up the library of the Prometheus! No such luck. No longer was it possible to browse among shelves, to weigh volumes in hand, to feel their heft, the promise of ponderous reading. The bookstore resembled, instead, an electronic laboratory. The books were crystals with recorded contents. They can be read the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it. But optons were little used, the sales-robot told me. The public preferred lectons - like lectons read out loud, they could be set to any voice, tempo, and modulation. — Stanislaw Lem

In my mind, I built stairways. At the end of the stairways, I imagined rooms. These were high, airy places with big windows and a cool breeze moving through. I imagined one room opening brightly onto another room until I'd built a house, a place with hallways and more staircases. I built many houses, one after another, and those gave rise to a city -- a calm, sparkling city near the ocean, a place like Vancouver. I put myself there, and that's where I lived, in the wide-open sky of my mind. I made friends and read books and went running on a footpath in a jewel-green park along the harbour. I ate pancakes drizzled in syrup and took baths and watched sunlight pour through trees. This wasn't longing, and it wasn't insanity. It was relief. It got me through. — Amanda Lindhout

Books woke me up. Books are my favorite man-made objects. I fetishize their design, smell, feel. And that they can contain such burning, complex communications is a miracle to me. — Ken Baumann

This morning, on the avenue, my death was walking next to me, under the plane-trees. I came back home, lied on the bed. My death looked tired as much as I was. A few minuts later, I woke up, made a coffee and opened a poems book. Some light came out from the book. I think it was at this moment that my death left the appartment, crossing the door, without noise. It was not her time, and perhaps she was depressed by the beauty of a few words, yes, perhaps the death doesn't support books and prefers the head ache maker television. — Christian Bobin

Who was he?" "A magician who took me in after I left the Bone-master. On his good days, he tried to teach me everything he knew." "What about his bad days?" "On his bad days, he generally thought he was an onion." "That's awful," said Jinx. "No, it's not. What was awful was when he thought he was a potato masher." "Oh." "He always said to me, 'Mildred, one day this will all be yours.'" Simon made a wide gesture, encompassing books, cats, and the door to Samara. "Er, he called you Mildred?" "Often as not." "Maybe he really meant to leave everything to Mildred," said Jinx. "If she ever shows up, we'll talk," said Simon. "But I think she may have been a dog he once had. — Sage Blackwood

I held it out and Caleb took it. This was the first book he had held in his hands. He made me smile, opening it upside down and back to front, but he touched the pages with the utmost care, as if gentling some fragile-boned wild thing. The godliest among us did not touch the Bible with such reverence as he showed to that small book. — Geraldine Brooks

How many nights and sunrises came to caress our hearts. Then, as often happens, I see I'm just lonely in living the poetry of these moments, and I'm throwing away my magic. I can find refuge in my songs, they surround me like a mother, but then I realize that this hug is becoming a cage, I'm prisoner in my dreams, and I wonder: "may I be condemned to dream forever?" ... I wish I could watch again beauty of the moon, creating a big heart made of shells on the beach, as a castaway's signal ... hoping to be seen by someone who's flying up there ... and loudly saying .. "Hey .. I'm here ! please help me to escape — Alice James Books

Even today, I hunt for the fabulous books that will change me utterly. I find myself happiest in the middle of a book which I forget that I am reading, but am instead immersed in a made-up life lived at the highest pitch. — Pat Conroy

I loved to read and to write, but then something happened. As I made my way through school, I kept getting handed books to read that didn't excite me and didn't even remotely connect to the realities of my life. — R.A. Salvatore

I always thought happiness was a choice and I always chose things that made me happy, and books were one of those. — Dean Koontz

One of the first things my father taught me was that the library was made for and available to me. It's a place where you not only learn from books but you learn responsibility - how to borrow, take care of, and give back. — Marcus Samuelsson

This week in school they made us read Frankenstein. It was cool. I liked it. I like books that make me think. That's why I'm in the advanced class. My favorite part is when the monster looks at Dr. Frankenstein and tells him it's his fault. It kinda reminds me of now. You called me a monster. I walked way. Then you threatened the monster. And so if it comes down to you or me, I have to pick me. — J.J. McAvoy

Al right, calm down. Fuck," Smithie said.
It was then I felt something not unpleasant but somewhat scary slide across my skin and I looked up to see the gang of hotties al standing, watching and every last one of them flashing a grin.
"What are you lookin' at?" I snapped, not to any one of them in particular, but in their general direction.
Don't ask me why I didn't run and hide in the books, I just didn't. I guess that wasn't me anymore.
"Babe, you just made me a regular," Mace said. — Kristen Ashley

Do you like manga?" she asked after a minute. "Anime?"
"Anime's cool. I'm not really into it, but 1 like Japanese movies,
animated or not."
"Well, I'm into it. I watch the shows, read the books, chat on the boards, and all that. But this girl I know, she's
completely into it. She spends most of her allowance on the books and DVDs. She can recite dialogue from
them." She caught my gaze. "So would you say she belongs here?"
"No. Most kids are that way about something, right? With me, it's
movies. Like knowing who directed a sci-fi movie made before I was born. — Kelley Armstrong

My books promised me that life wasn't just made up of workday tasks and prosaic things. The world is bigger and more colorful and more important than that. — Laura Amy Schlitz

I believe in books that do not go to a ready-made public. I'm looking for readers I would like to make. To win them, to create readers rather than to give something that readers are expecting. That would bore me to death. — Carlos Fuentes

Books had always been a way for my mother and me to introduce and explore topics that concerned us but made us uneasy, and they had also always given us something to talk about when we were stressed or anxious. — Will Schwalbe

In good time she made tea; and afterwards, when I brought down my books, looked into them, and showed me what she knew of them (which was no slight matter, though she said it was), and what was the best way to learn and understand them. I see her, with her modest, orderly, placid manner, and I hear her beautiful calm voice, as I write these words. The influence for all good, which she came to exercise over me at a later time, begins already to descend upon my breast. I love little Em'ly, and I don't love Agnes - no, not at all in that way - but I feel that there are goodness, peace, and truth, wherever Agnes is; and that the soft light of the coloured window in the church, seen long ago, falls on her always, and on me when I am near her, and on everything around. — Charles Dickens