"Have you ever heard somebody sing some lyrics that you've never sung before, and you realize you've never sung the right words in that song? You hear them and all of a sudden you say to yourself, 'Life in the Fast Lane?' That's what they're saying right there? You think, 'why have I been singing 'wipe in the vaseline?' how many people have heard me sing 'wipe in the vaseline?' I am an idiot.
"
— Ellen DeGeneres

"Procrastination isn’t the problem, it’s the solution. So procrastinate now, don’t put it off. "
— Ellen DeGeneres

"Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted."
— John Lennon

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

"The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours"
— Alan Bennett (The History Boys: The Film)

"There is no Frigate like a book
To take us Lands away,
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry..."
— Emily Dickinson

"We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel...is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become."
— Ursula K. Le Guin

"Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They depen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything."
— Steven Wright

"It is not true that 'we have only one life to live'; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish."
— S.I. Hayakawa (Language in Thought and Action)

"You know how it is when you're reading a book and falling asleep, you're reading, reading... and all of a sudden you notice your eyes are closed? I'm like that all the time."
— Steven Wright

"Books, I found, had the power to make time
stand still, retreat or fly into the future."
— Jim Bishop

"In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own."
— Anna Quindlen (How Reading Changed My Life)

"We lusty bibliophiles know that reading, unlike just about anything else, is both good for you and loads of fun."
— Kevin Smokler (Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times)

"You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes."
— Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

"I have good reason to be content,
for thank God I can read and
perhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths."
— John Keats

"What a blessing it is to love books as I love them, to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal."
— Thomas Babington Macaulay

"We don't want to feel less when we have finished a book; we want to feel that new possibilities of being have been opened to us. We don't want to close a book with a sense that life is totally unfair and that there is no light in the darkness; we want to feel that we have been given illumination."
— Madeleine L'Engle (Walking on Water)

"A book is a garden carried in one's pocket."
— Chinese Proverb

"He that loves reading has everything within his reach."
— William Godwin

"Nothing was truly unbearable if you had something to read."
— Jincy Willett (The Writing Class)

"I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages... and fell into it as into a pool during dry season."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul."
— Ursula K. Le Guin

"I could not remember when the lines above Atticus's moving finger separated into words, but I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory, listening to the news of the day, Bills to be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Dow -- anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night. Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing. "
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"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)

"Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not."
— Oprah Winfrey

"Every day brings a chance for you to draw in a breath, kick off your shoes, and dance."
— Oprah Winfrey

"Step Away from the Mean Girls…
…and say bye-bye to feeling bad about your looks.
Are you ready to stop colluding with a culture that makes so many of us feel physically inadequate? Say goodbye to your inner critic, and take this pledge to be kinder to yourself and others.

This is a call to arms. A call to be gentle, to be forgiving, to be generous with yourself. The next time you look into the mirror, try to let go of the story line that says you're too fat or too sallow, too ashy or too old, your eyes are too small or your nose too big; just look into the mirror and see your face. When the criticism drops away, what you will see then is just you, without judgment, and that is the first step toward transforming your experience of the world."
— Oprah Winfrey

"Education is the key to unlocking the world, a passport to freedom."
— Oprah Winfrey

"You always get weirdos like Edward who seem to attract women for some reason. If Edward wasn’t a fictional character and you met him in reality he is like one of those guys who would probably be an axe murderer or something."
— Stephenie Meyer (The Twilight Saga)

"Remember, if the time should come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy, remember what happened to a boy who was good, and kind, and brave, because he strayed across the path of Lord Voldemort. Remember Cedric Diggory."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire)

"It is our choices, Harry, that show us who we truly are, far more than our abilities."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets)

"It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default."
— J.K. Rowling

"It's going to be alright sir," Harry said over and over again, more worried by Dumbledore's silence than he had been by his weakened voice. "We're nearly there ... I can Apparate us both back ... don't worry ..."

"I am not worried, Harry," said Dumbledore, his voice a little stronger despite the freezing water. "I am with you."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)

"The scar had not pained Harry for nineteen years. All was well."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)

"Dumbledore says people find it far easier to forgive others for being wrong than being right."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)

"For future reference, Harry, it is raspberry...although of course, if I were a Death Eater, I would have been sure to research my own jam preferences before impersonating myself."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)

"We'll be there Harry," said Ron
"What?"
"At your Aunt's and Uncle's house," said Ron, "And then we'll go with you wherever you're going."
"No-" said Harry quickly; he hadn't counted on this, he had meant them to understand that he was undertaking the most dangerous journey alone.
"You said it once before," said Hermione quickly, "that there was time to turn back if we wanted to. We've had time, haven't we? We're with you whatever happens."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)

"'Now, you two – this year, you behave yourselves. If I get one more owl telling me you've – you've blown up a toilet or –'

'Blown up a toilet? We've never blown up a toilet.'

'Great idea though, thanks, Mum.'"
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone)

"Dumbledore's man through and through, aren't you Potter?"
"Yeah I am," said Harry. "Glad we straightened that out."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)

"We all have good and bad inside of us. It's what side we choose to follow that defines who we really are."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix)

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."
— T.H. White (The Once and Future King)

"Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other."
— Mark Twain

"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)

"Each morning when I open my eyes I say to myself: I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it."
— Groucho Marx

"It's easy to look back and say if things had been perfect, I could have accommodated all of those things into my life. But as a therapist I do not allow that word to be uttered in my office after the first session, because I believe the only reason for the existence of that word is to make us feel bad. It's the only word in the language (that I know of) that is defined in common usage by what can't be. It sets a vague standard that can't be met because it is never truly characterized. I prefer to think that we're all out here doing our best under the circumstances, looking at our world through the only eyes through which we can look at it: our own."
— Chris Crutcher (King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography)

"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

"Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul."
— Joyce Carol Oates

"Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."
— Mark Twain