System Bookshelves Quotes & Sayings

Their ships were steeds, and they rode the waves like jennets. — Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

I refused to have bookshelves, horrified that I'd feel compelled to organise the books in some regimented system - Dewey or alphabetical or worse - and so the books lived in stacks, some as tall as me, in the most subjective order I could invent.
Thus Nabokov lived between Gogol and Hemingway, cradled between the Old World and the New; Willa Cather and Theodore Dreiser and Thomas Hardy were stacked together not for their chronological proximity but because they all reminded me in some way of dryness (though in Dreiser's case I think I was focused mainly on his name): George Eliot and Jane Austen shared a stack with Thackeray because all I had of his was Vanity Fair, and I thought that Becky Sharp would do best in the presence of ladies (and deep down I worried that if I put her next to David Copperfield, she might seduce him). — Rebecca Makkai

The cacophony of contemporary popular culture makes it hard to discern the call of truth and wisdom. There is no area in which practicing asceticism is more important. — Rod Dreher

When I trust deeply that today God is truly with me and holds me safe in a divine embrace, guiding every one of my steps I can let go of my anxious need to know how tomorrow will look, or what will happen next month or next year. I can be fully where I am and pay attention to the many signs of God's love within me and around me. — Henri Nouwen

The world is filled with good, but it's equally overwhelmed with bad. People who commit horror and evil. You have to concentrate on what you can do, what you can influence. The ones who you can hunt down. — Robert Bryndza

Being strong doesn't mean that you never break! Being strong means that even if you break into a million pieces, you still have the courage to pick those pieces up, put them back together, and keep going on. — Manprit Kaur

If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat - in other words, turn you into an adult. — P. J. O'Rourke