"Only the phoenix rises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 10: The Wake)

"It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane."
— Philip K. Dick

"Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like it's heaven on Earth."
— Mark Twain

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
— Albert Einstein

"Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live."
— Gustave Flaubert

"Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love."
— Mother Teresa

"There is neither happiness nor unhappiness in this world; there is only the comparison of one state with another. Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss. It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.....the sum of all human wisdom will be contained in these two words: Wait and Hope."
— Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo)

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"So many books, so little time."
— Frank Zappa

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
— Mark Twain

"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."
— Groucho Marx

"You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me."
— C.S. Lewis

"My alma mater was books, a good library.... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity."
— Malcolm X

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"I just got out of the hospital. I was in a speed reading accident. I hit a book mark and flew across the room."
— Steven Wright

"The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books"
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."
— Joseph Brodsky

"Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home."
— Anna Quindlen (How Reading Changed My Life)

"Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"Let us read and let us dance — two amusements that will never do any harm to the world."
— Voltaire

"No matter who you are, no matter where you live, and no matter how many people are chasing you, what you don't read is often as important as what you do read."
— Lemony Snicket

"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading."
— Logan Pearsall Smith

"A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read."
— Terry Pratchett (Guards! Guards!)

"Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
'Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.'"
— Billy Collins

"Anyway -- because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next -- and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis -- at any time of night or day."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which are frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you...And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. "
— Italo Calvino (If On a Winter's Night a Traveler)

"Those who dance are considered insane by those who cannot hear the music."
— George Carlin

"Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian."
— Robert Orben

"I came from a real tough neighborhood. In the library the sign says 'shut the fuck up!'"
— Rodney Dangerfield

"A funny thing is if you're out hiking and your friend gets bit by a poisonous snake, tell him you're going for help, then go about ten feet and pretend YOU got bit by a snake. Then start an argument about who's going to get help. A lot of guys will start crying. That's why it makes you feel good when you tell them it was just a joke."
— Jack Handey (Deep Thoughts)

"I love mankind, it's people I can't stand."
— Charles M. Schulz

"Humans think they are smarter than dolphins because we build cars and buildings and start wars etc...and all that dolphins do is swim in the water, eat fish and play around. Dolphins believe that they are smarter for exactly the same reasons."
— Douglas Adams

"I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours."
— Jerome K. Jerome

"There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line."
— Oscar Levant

"Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life."
— Terry Pratchett (Jingo)

"Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry."
— Terry Pratchett (Thief of Time)

"Don't let the bastards grind you down."
— Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)

"So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall."
— Roald Dahl

"And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it."
— Roald Dahl

"I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn't be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage."
— Roald Dahl

"A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"Ever had a flying burrito hit you? Well, it's a deadly projectile, right up there with cannonballs and grenades."
— Rick Riordan (The Titan's Curse)

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
— Albert Einstein

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
— Groucho Marx (The Essential Groucho)

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye."
— Miss Piggy

"Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow."
— Mark Twain