Unpacking My Library Quotes & Sayings

I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood
it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation
which these books arouse in a genuine collector. — Walter Benjamin

Power,' as the sociologist Nachman Ben-Yehuda writes, 'enters the picture in two ways': the first entails constructing and legitimizing the moral system itself; the second, in enforcing it. In this view, 'deviants are those who simply do not have enough power to prevent others from defining them as such'. — Shuli Barzilai

Anybody who thinks there's nothing wrong with this world needs to have his head examined. Just when things are going all right, without fail someone or something will come along and spoil everything. Somebody should write that down as a fundamental law of the Universe. The principle of perpetual disappointment. If there is a God who created this world, he should scrap it and try again. — Athol Fugard

You only have one life, but if you live it well, that's enough. The only reality is now, today. What are you waiting for to be happy? — Isabel Allende

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
- Walter Benjamin, Unpacking My Library — Phillip Lopate

My center is giving way, my right is pushed back, my left is wavering. The situation is excellent. I shall attack! — James Keller

It is proven that when women are educated, the ability of the country goes up immediately. — Angelique Kidjo

North Korea was (and remains as of this writing in 2009) the last place on earth where virtually everything is grown on collective farms. The state confiscates the entire harvest and then gives a portion back to the farmer. — Barbara Demick

by the lane that turns immediately into the woods, or the broad road that lies open before him into the distance, and shows him the far-off spires of some city, or a range of mountain-tops, or a rim of sea, perhaps, along a low horizon. In short, he may gratify his every whim and fancy, without a pang — Robert Louis Stevenson

The book borrower ... proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures ... as by his failure to read these books. — Walter Benjamin

We know how to organize warfare, but do we know how to act when confronted with peace? — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

I got very lucky with 'Harry Potter.' I got that role because I'm a ginger! Red hair was my only qualification! — Domhnall Gleeson

If I had foreseen Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I would have torn up my formula in 1905. — Albert Einstein

I had seen a photograph of Sara at two. In it, her hair is platinum and falls around her face in happy disarray. She is dressed in yellow. Babyhood clings to her still and in the sunlight she appears incandescent. She is golden and delicious, sweet as a lemon drop. But her father never asks to see her. — Deborah Doucette

Vader completed his meditation and opened his eyes. His pale, flame-savaged face stared back at him from out of the reflective black transparisteel of his pressurized meditation chamber. Without the neural connection to his armor, he was conscious of the stumps of his legs, the ruin of his arms, the perpetual pain in his flesh. He welcomed it. Pain fed his hate, and hate fed his strength. Once, as a Jedi, he had meditated to find peace. Now he meditated to sharpen the edges of his anger. — Paul S. Kemp