"From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood.""
— Betty Smith

"The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings - words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out. "
— Stephen King

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. "
— Mark Twain

"Always do what you are afraid to do. "
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Contemplation seems to be about the only luxury that costs nothing. "
— Dodie Smith

"Look at everything as though you were seeing it for the first time or the last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory. "
— Betty Smith

"There was once a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. He didn't call his Father and Mother "Father" and "Mother," but Harold and Alberta. They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotallers, and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on beds and the windows were always open. "
— C.S. Lewis

"Make your choice, adventurous Stranger;
Strike the bell and bide the danger,
Or wonder, till it drives you mad,
What would have followed if you had. "
— C.S. Lewis

"Only the margin left to write on now. I love you, I love you, I love you."
— Dodie Smith (I Capture the Castle)

"Oh, it is wonderful to wake up in the morning with things to look forward to!"
— Dodie Smith (I Capture the Castle)

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."
— Dr. Seuss

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."
— Theodore Roosevelt

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
— Thomas A. Edison

"You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body."
— C.S. Lewis

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

"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

"Fairy tales, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones)

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined."
— Henry David Thoreau

"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me."
— Ayn Rand

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."
— Winston S. Churchill

"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)

"Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right."
— Henry Ford

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares."
— Henri J.M. Nouwen (The Road to Daybreak: A Spiritual Journey)

"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)

"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it."
— Mark Twain

"Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay."
— Robert Frost

"We dance round in a ring and suppose, / But the Secret sits in the middle and knows."
— Robert Frost

"Death ends a life, not a relationship."
— Mitch Albom