"If nature has made you for a giver, your hands are born open, and so is your heart; and though there may be times when your hands are empty, your heart is always full, and you can give things out of that--warm things, kind things, sweet things--help and comfort and laughter--and sometimes gay, kind laughter is the best help of all."
— Frances Hodgson Burnett (A Little Princess)

"When you will not fly into a passion people know you are stronger than they are, because you are strong enough to hold in your rage, and they are not, and they say stupid things they wish they hadn't said afterward. There's nothing so strong as rage, except what makes you hold it in--that's stronger. It's a good thing not to answer your enemies."
— Frances Hodgson Burnett (A Little Princess)

"Much more surprising things can happen to anyone who, when a disagreeable or discouraged thought comes into his mind, just has the sense to remember in time and push it out by putting in an agreeable, determinedly courageous one. Two things cannot be in one place."
— Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden)

"We are of the opinion that instead of letting books grow mouldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read."
— Jules Verne (A Journey to the Center of the Earth)

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

"We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered."
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

"Every exit is an entrance somewhere else."
— Tom Stoppard

"There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it. "
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

"If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time."
— Edith Wharton

"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 does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone)

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

"You know that place between sleeping and awake, that place where you can still remember dreaming? That's where I'll always think of you."
— J.M. Barrie

"When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
— C.S. Lewis

"It is a good rule . . . to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books."
— C.S. Lewis

"I am a product [...of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass."
— C.S. Lewis

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

"It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between."
— C.S. Lewis

"He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it. "
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 1)