"What you do matters — but not much. What you are matters tremendously."
— Catherine Doherty

"Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change."
— H.G. Wells (The Time Machine)

"I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library."
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"I ask not for any crown
But that which all may win;
Nor try to conquer any world
Except the one within."
— Louisa May Alcott

"Laurie, you're an angel! How shall I ever thank you?"
"Fly at me again. I rather liked it," said Laurie, looking
mischievous, a thing he had not done for a fortnight."
— Louisa May Alcott (Little Women)

"...the love, respect, and confidence of my children was the sweetest reward I could receive for my efforts to be the woman I would have them copy."
— Louisa May Alcott (Little Women)

"And [he] sailed back over a year
and in and out of weeks
and through a day
and into the night of his very own room
where he found his supper waiting for him
and it was still hot"
— Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are)

"Remember what Bilbo used to say: It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to...

- Frodo to Sam"
— J.R.R. Tolkien

""When the light turns green, you go. When the light turns red, you stop. But what do you do when the light turns blue with orange and lavender spots?"
"
— Shel Silverstein

"It was missing a piece.
And it was not happy.
So it set off in search
of its missing piece.
And as it rolled
it sang this song - "Oh I'm lookin' for my missin' piece
I'm lookin' for my missin' piece
Hi-dee-ho, here I go,
Lookin' for my missin' piece.""
— Shel Silverstein

"What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books."
— A.S. Byatt

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

"Lascelles threw himself into the carriage, snorting with laughter and saying that he had never in his life heard of anything so ridiculous and comparing their snug drive through the London streets in Mr. Norrell's carriage to ancient French and Italian fables where fools set sail in milk-pails to fetch the moon's reflection from the bottom of a duckpond..."
— Susanna Clarke (Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell)

""As long as you are trying to be something other than what you actually are, your mind wears itself out." "
— J. Krishamurti

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. "
— Leo Tolstoy

"The vocation of every man and woman is to serve people. "
— Leo Tolstoy

"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

"Be orderly and disciplined in daily life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wild and violent in my art."
— Gustave Flaubert

"She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain."
— Louisa May Alcott (Work: A Story of Experience)

"We read to know that we are not alone."
— C.S. Lewis

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
— C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)

"The change which the writing wrought in me (and of which I did not write) was only a beginning; only to prepare me for the gods' surgery. They used my own pen to probe my wound. "
— C.S. Lewis (Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold)

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. "
— Alvin Toffler

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
— Dr. Seuss

"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go."
— Dr. Seuss

"Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You."
— Dr. Seuss (Happy Birthday to You!)

"I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I've bought a big bat. I'm all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!"
— Dr. Seuss

"You're off to Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting,
So... get on your way!"
— Dr. Seuss

"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go..."
— Dr. Seuss

"So the day became one of waiting, which was, he knew, a sin: moments were to be experienced; waiting was a sin against both the time that was still to come and the moments one was currently disregarding. "
— Neil Gaiman (Neverwhere: A Novel)

"Lying on the floor, with the carved panels of the ceiling flickering dimly above, I found myself thinking that I had always heretofore assumed that the tendency of eigh­teenth-century ladies to swoon was due to tight stays; now I rather thought it might be due to the idiocy of eighteenth-century men. "
— Diana Gabaldon (Dragonfly in Amber)

"By now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for falling into my trap. It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of this books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others. Plus, we get a kickback from the caffeine industry..."
— Brandon Sanderson (Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians)

"He knew her, he believed. He would teach her that she was not his possession, he would show her she was free, he would see her flash her wings."
— A.S. Byatt (Possession: A Romance)

"Please don't go. We'll eat you up. We love you so."
— Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are)

"Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while."
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"Have fun storming the castle!"
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"The women who went to the field, you say...
A few names were writ, and by chance live to-day;
But's a perishing record fast fading away,
Of those we recall, there are scarcely a score...
And what would they do if war came again?...
They would stand with you now, as they stood with you then,
The nurses, consolers, and saviors of men."
— Patricia O'Brien (The Glory Cloak: A Novel of Louisa May Alcott and Clara Barton)

"I was seeing what a writer can do with the tatters of truth, the unfinished stories that give us no rest. "
— Patricia O'Brien (The Glory Cloak: A Novel of Louisa May Alcott and Clara Barton)

"I continued up the stairs, this time on wings, suspecting for the first time that Louisa's book might outlive us all. "
— Patricia O'Brien (The Glory Cloak: A Novel of Louisa May Alcott and Clara Barton)

"Virtue, dear friend, needs no defense,
The surest guard is innocence:
None knew, till guilt created fear,
What darts or poisoned arrows were"
— Horace

"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility."
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Laughter is carbonated holiness."
— Anne Lamott

"No" is a complete sentence."
— Anne Lamott

"How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face."
— William Butler Yeats

"A mermaid found a swimming lad,
Picked him up for her own,
Pressed her body to his body,
Laughed; and plunging down
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown."
— William Butler Yeats

"Oh, poor Watcher. Did your life pass before your eyes — 'Cuppa tea, cuppa tea... almost got shagged... cuppa tea'?
"
— Joss Whedon (The Gift: Cinemanga)

"Write it. Shoot it. Publish it. Crochet it, sauté it, whatever. MAKE."
— Joss Whedon

"Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don’t care, I’m still free
You can’t take the sky from me
Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain’t comin’ back
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can’t take the sky from me
There’s no place I can be
Since I found Serenity
But you can’t take the sky from me…"
— Joss Whedon (Those Left Behind)

""Passion. It lies in all of us. Sleeping ... waiting ... and though unwanted, unbidden, it will stir ... open its jaws and howl. It speaks to us ... guides us. Passion rules us all. And we obey. What other choice do we have? Passion is the source of our finest moments. The joy of love ... the clarity of hatred ... the ecstasy of grief. It hurts sometimes more than we can bear. If we could live without passion, maybe we'd know some kind of peace. But we would be hollow. Empty rooms, shuttered and dank. Without passion, we'd be truly dead." "
— Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)