Collected Works Quotes & Sayings

Well ... yes, and here we go again. But before we get to The Work, as it were, I want to make sure I know how to cope with this elegant typewriter - (and, yes, it appears that I do) - so why not make this quick list of my life's work and then get the hell out of town on the 11:05 to Denver? Indeed. Why not? But for just a moment I'd like to say, for the permanent record, that it is a very strange feeling to be a 40-year-old American writer in this century and sitting alone in this huge building on Fifth Avenue in New York at one o'clock in the morning on the night before Christmas Eve, 2000 miles from home, and compiling a table of contents for a book of my own Collected Works in an office with a tall glass door that leads out to a big terrace looking down on The Plaza Fountain. Very strange. — Hunter S. Thompson

The mystics and their "collected works." When one addresses oneself to God, and to God alone, as they claim to do, one should be careful not to write. God doesn't read ... — Emil Cioran

It is from this wide extension of design that so much instruction is derived. It is this which fills the plays of Shakespeare with practical axioms and domestick wisdom. It was said of Euripides, that every verse was a precept and it may be said of Shakespeare, that from his works may be collected a system of civil and oeconomical prudence. Yet his real power is not shown in the splendour of particular passages, but by the progress of his fable, and the tenour of his dialogue; and he that tries to recommend him by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen. — Samuel Johnson

[Shahrazad] had perused the books, annals and legends of preceding Kings, and the stories, examples and instances of by gone men and things; indeed it was said that she had collected a thousand books of histories relating to antique races and departed rulers. She had perused the works of the poets and knew them by heart; she had studied philosophy and the sciences, arts and accomplishments; and she was pleasant and polite, wise and witty, well read and well bred. — Richard Francis Burton

I flipped to the author's photo in the Library of America edition of O'Connor's collected works, and forked it over. Solitary examined the photo.
"Okay," she said, handing it back, "I'll read it."
What in Flannery O'Connor's countenance met with Solitary's approval?
"I dunno," she said. "She looks kind of busted up, y'know? She ain't too pretty. I trust her. — Avi Steinberg

My mother was a Bloomsbury figure: a great friend of TS Eliot, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell. My grandmother, Mary Hutchinson, gave her life to works of art, being an admirer of Matisse and Giaometti, whom I collected as a young man because of her. — Jacob Rothschild

In the end, we are collected works. — Gabrielle Zevin

Had not the outrageous flair of Sybilla, and since George was a natural horseman it seemed almost inevitable that they should more often than not end up side by side, at some distance from the others. William never came, preferring to work at his painting, which was his profession as well as his vocation. He was gifted to the degree that his works were admired by academicians and collected by connoisseurs. Only Eustace affected to find it displeasing that his only son preferred to retire alone to the studio arranged for him in the conservatory and make use of the morning light, rather than parade on horseback for the fashionable world to admire. When they did not ride, they drove in the carriage, went shopping, paid calls upon their more intimate friends, or visited art galleries and exhibitions. — Anne Perry

What am I then ... ? Everything that I have seen, heard, and observed I have collected and exploited. My works have been nourished by countless different individuals, by innocent and wise ones, people of intelligence and dunces. Childhood, maturity and old age all have brought me their thoughts ... their perspectives on life. I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name Goethe. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

How good Mrs. West could have written such books and collected so many hard works, with all her family cares, is still more a matter of astonishment! Composition seems to me impossible with a head full of joints of mutton and doses of rhubarb. — Jane Austen

Straightening, I asked, "What do you believe in?"
"Old love songs, best friends, the collected works of J.R.R.Tolkien, crispy pork egg rolls with just the right amount of grease, the Big Boss and eternity."
"The Big Boss?"
Zachary pointed up, as if to heaven.
"Pious,"I teased. — Cynthia Leitich Smith

Eva walked along the wall that held all of Michael's books. Shelves of science texts - physics, astronomy, a full set of Darwin's writings, new works in biomedical genetics - these were at the bottom, and books on philosophy and religion at the top. A row of poetry books caught her eye. Rumi, Whitman, Neruda - impossible to comprehend what he might be looking for in the poets' works he collected. Love possibly, but not love the way she understood it. She couldn't wait until she would no longer have to study, but Michael - he loved to study even when he wasn't a student. — J.J. Brown

With Carmina Burana, my collected works begin. — Carl Orff

Last month I was banging on about how books were better than anything - -how just about any decent book you picked would beat up anything else, any film or painting or piece of music, you cared to match it up with. Anyway, like most theories advanced in this column, it turned out to be utter rubbish. I went to a couple of terrific exhibitions at the Royal Academy (and that's a hole in my argument right there - one book might beat up one painting, but what chance has one book, or even four books, got against the collected works of Guston and Vuillard?) ... — Nick Hornby

There is no coherent knowledge , i.e. no uniform comprehensive account of the world and the events in it. There is no comprehensive truth that goes beyond an enumeration of details, but there are many pieces of information , obtained in different ways from different sources and collected for the benefit of the curious. The best way of presenting such knowledge is the list - and the oldest scientific works were indeed lists of facts, parts, coincidences, problems in several specialized domains. — Paul Feyerabend

a library shaped by the aspirations and concerns of people who came of age in the late sixties [the collected works of Thoreau, Lopez, Abbey, Ginsberg, Snyder, Kerouac, the entirety of the Foxfire series as well as The Gulag Archipelago, The Tropic of Cancer, a smattering of Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, The Rubaiyat, The Sand County Almanac, Them] ["The Basement," The Awl, Feb 5, 2015]. — Ariana Kelly

Lincoln once noted how the printing press spread knowledge by making works widely available that had previously been the province of a privileged few. The same is true when primary sources are collected, transcribed, and published; when exhaustive reference works are produced; when scholars leave published books and carefully organized research files; and when interest in a subject grows to the point that entire institutions - libraries, journals, and museums - are devoted to assisting its students. The main problem with studying Lincoln is not finding sources, but choosing which sources to follow. A — Joshua Wolf Shenk

John Updike: our greatest suburban chic-boutique man of letters. A smug and fatal complacency has stunted his growth beyond hope of surgical repair. Not enough passion in his collected works to generate steam in a beer can. Nevertheless, he is considered by some critics to be America's finest *living* author: Hold a chilled mirror to his lips and you will see, presently, a fine and dewy moisture condensing
like a faery breath!
upon the glass. — Edward Abbey

I'm lucky enough to work with, I think, the greatest writer there's ever been, Shakespeare. Whose collected works would always be under my pillow if I was only ever allowed one book to keep, and who never bores me. — Samuel West

[T]he pain was unspeakable, worse than reading the collected works of Edith Wharton. — Kevin Hearne

If the Chandos portrait is not genuine, then we are left with two other possible likenesses to help us decide what William Shakespeare looked like. The first is the copperplate engraving that appeared as the frontispiece of the collected works of Shakespeare in 1623 - the famous First Folio. — Bill Bryson

The good thing about Heavy Books (Ex: The Collected Works of William Shakespeare), is that when you're glue-ing something you can use them for weights. — John Arnold

The usual bad poem in somebody's Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one's teeth. — Randall Jarrell

Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness. — C. G. Jung

My life is in these books. Read these and know my heart. We are not quire novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works. — Gabrielle Zevin

The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot. — Henry David Thoreau

The past is our treasure. Its works, whether we know them or not, flourish in our lives with whatever strength they had. From it we draw provision for our journey, the collected wisdom whose harvests are all ours to reap and carry with us, though we may never live again in the fields that grew them. — Freya Stark

It was said of Euripides, that every verse was a precept; and it may be said of Shakespeare, that from his works may be collected a system of civil and economical prudence. — Samuel Johnson

But if any man undertake to write a history, that has to be collected from materials gathered by observation and the reading of works not easy to be got in all places, nor written always in his own language, but many of them foreign and dispersed in other hands, for him, undoubtedly, it is in the first place and above all things most necessary, to reside in some city of good note, addicted to liberal arts, and populous; where he may have plenty of all sorts of books, and upon inquiry may hear and inform himself of such particulars as, having escaped the pens of writers, are more faithfully preserved in the memories of men, lest his work be deficient in many things, even those which it can least dispense with. — Plutarch

The words you can't find, you borrow.
We read to know we're not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone.
My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.
We are not quite novels.
The analogy he is looking for is almost there.
We are not quite short stories. At this point, his life is seeming closest to that.
In the end, we are collected works. — Gabrielle Zevin

The forbidden cabinet. The forbidden fruit. That fruit is - a volume, a huge blue-lilac volume with a gold inscription slantwise: Collected Works of A.S. Pushkin. I read the fat Pushkin in the cabinet with my nose in the book and on the shelf, almost in darkness and almost right up against it and even a little bit suffocated by his weight that came right into the throat, and almost blinded by the nearness of the tiny letters. I read Pushkin right into the chest and right into the brain. — Marina Tsvetaeva