"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)

"The future cannot blame the present, just as the present cannot blame the past. The hope is always here, always alive, but only your fierce caring can fan it into a fire to warm the world."
— Susan Cooper (Silver On The Tree)

"How many slams in an old screen door? Depends how loud you shut it. How many slices in a bread? Depends how thin you cut it. How much good inside a day? Depends how good you live 'em. How much love inside a friend? Depends how much you give 'em."
— Shel Silverstein (Where the Sidewalk Ends)

"What miracle is this? This giant tree.
It stands ten thousand feet high
But doesn't reach the ground. Still it stands.
Its roots must hold the sky."
— Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves)

"Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day."
— Albert Camus

"April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain."
— T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land)

"One reads books in order to gain the privilege of living more than one life. People who don't read are trapped in a mine shaft, even if they think the sun is shining."
— Garrison Keillor

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most."
— Margaret Atwood

"I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say."
— Daphne du Maurier (Rebecca)

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

"I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him. In my defense I must say it was an engrossing book, and it was very rare to come across another person in that particular part of the world in that war year of 1915."
— Laurie R. King

"What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore it knows it's not fooling a soul."
— Neil Gaiman (American Gods)

"'prepare a little hot tea or broth and it should be brought to them . . . without their being asked if they would care for it. Those who are in great distress want no food, but if it is handed to them, they will mechanically take it ' ... There was something arresting about the matter-of-fact wisdom here, the instinctive understanding of the physiological disruptions... I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat."
— Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking)

"Happiness

There's just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine."
— Jane Kenyon

"I am no fan of books. And chances are, if you're reading this, you and I share a healthy skepticisn about the printed word. Well, I want you to know that this is the first book I've ever written, and I hope it's the first book you've ever read. Don't make a habit of it."
— Stephen Colbert

"But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult! The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.
The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace."
— Kate Chopin (The Awakening)

"'Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange. Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never would.'"
— Susanna Clarke (Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell)

"Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come."
— Frances Mayes (In Tuscany)

"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Who gets to choose what battle
takes her down?"
— Marilyn Hacker

"Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book. People who are fond of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a moment. The temptation to be unreasonable and snappish is one not easy to manage.

"It makes me feel as if something had hit me," Sara had told Ermengarde once in confidence. "And as if I want to hit back. I have to remember things quickly to keep from saying something ill-tempered."
— Frances Hodgson Burnett (A Little Princess)

"Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot."
— D.H. Lawrence

"A motto I've adopted is, if at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried."
— Billy Collins

"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

"I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, that when looked at in the right way, did not become still more complicated."
— Paul Anderson

"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

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

"Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."
— G.K. Chesterton (Alarms and Discursions)

"We suffer each other to have each other a while."
— Li-Young Lee

"There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds."
— Alfred Lord Tennyson

"Does it matter whether you hate yourself? At least love your eyes that can see, your mind that can hear the music, the thunder of the wings."
— Robinson Jeffers

"It's freeing, to think that there's always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language."
— Mark Doty (Dog Years: A Memoir)

"The best kind of book," said Barnaby, "is a magic book."

"Naturally," said John."
— Edward Eager (Seven-Day Magic)

"I need to be frightened of things. I hate it, but I must need it, because it's what I do."
— Nigella Lawson

"Love can sweep you off your feet and carry you along in a way you've never known before. But the ride always ends, and you end up feeling lonely and bitter.

Wait. . .

It's not love I'm describing. I'm thinking of a monorail."
— Jack Handey

"Most people don't realize how important librarians are. I ran across a book recently which suggested that the peace and prosperity of a culture was solely related to how many librarians it contained. Possibly a slight overstatement. But a culture that doesn't value its librarians doesn't value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we?"
— Neil Gaiman

"...If at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Left Hand of Darkness)

"You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house-- , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced
upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening... "
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"What if she was meant to be, or could have been, someone important in my life? I think that's what scares me: the randomness of everything. That the people who could be important to you might just pass you by. Or you pass them by. How do you know...I felt that by walking away I was abandoning [them], that I spent my entire life, day after day, abandoning people."
— Peter Cameron (Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You)

"‘Wendy,’ Peter Pan continued in a voice that no woman has ever yet been able to resist, ‘Wendy, one girl is more use than twenty boys.’"
— J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan)

"Second star to the right and straight on 'til morning. "
— J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan)

"We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special."
— Stephen W. Hawking

"Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
"
— Angela Carter

"Use your head; cut off theirs."
— Max Brooks (The Zombie Survival Guide)

"The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness."
— John Muir

"People who have only good experiences aren't very interesting. They may be content, and happy after a fashion, but they aren't very deep. It may seem a misfortune now, and it makes things difficult, but well--it's easy to feel all the happy, simple stuff. Not that happiness is necessarily simple. But I don't think you're going to have a life like that, and I think you'll be the better for it. The difficult thing is to not be overwhelmed by the bad patches. You must not let them defeat you. You must see them as a gift--a cruel gift, but a gift nonetheless."
— Peter Cameron (Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You)

""Because it is morning, it is morning, and there is so much to see. "
— Libba Bray (The Sweet Far Thing)

"Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other."
— Dalai Lama XIV

"Breathless, we flung us on a windy hill, Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass."
— Rupert Brooke