Marisa's quotes

(showing 1-43 of 43)

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

tags: books, soul
11,093 people liked it

"Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like it's heaven on Earth."
— Mark Twain

tags: dance, heaven, hurt, inspirational, life, love, sing
15,964 people liked it

"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

tags: books, children, difficult, grown-ups, write, writers, writing
3,020 people liked it

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: books, reading
2,651 people liked it

"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

tags: books, inspirational
2,557 people liked it

"Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

tags: books, reading
2,083 people liked it

"When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes."
— Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

tags: books
1,344 people liked it

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
— Mark Twain (The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations)

tags: writing
923 people liked it

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

tags: books, morality, reading, writing
747 people liked it

"Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins."
— Neil Gaiman

tags: writing
195 people liked it

"If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it."
— Anaïs Nin

tags: writing
178 people liked it

"In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them."
— Mark Twain

tags: bookroom, books, wisdom
1,350 people liked it

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

tags: books, fire, star, universe
413 people liked it

"I don't remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books."
— Alberto Manguel (A History of Reading)

tags: books, child, chilldhood, read, reading
7 people liked it

"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."
— Groucho Marx

tags: books, humor, reading, television
2,837 people liked it

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
— Ray Bradbury

tags: culture, reading
1,312 people liked it

"Wicked people never have time for reading. It's one of the reasons for their wickedness."
— Lemony Snicket

tags: humor, reading, wicked
781 people liked it

"Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them."
— Arnold Lobel

tags: books, reading
377 people liked it

"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading."
— Logan Pearsall Smith

tags: life, reading
220 people liked it

"The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction)

tags: empathy, novel, reading
3 people liked it

"Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. "The Magic Flute" v. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. "The Last Supper" v. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on points. See? I mean, I don't know how scientific this is, but it feels like the novels are walking it."
— Nick Hornby

tags: on, reading
5 people liked it

"No book is really worth reading at age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty...Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a timetable.
"
— C.S. Lewis

tags: books, conformity, reading
8 people liked it

"I shudder to think of an eternity spend without books. I have hopes that every book that was ever lost is somewhere waiting for me when my life here finally ends."
— Mel Odom (The Quest for the Trilogy: A Rover Novel of Three Adventures)

tags: reading
4 people liked it

"There's bad apples in whatever way you want to group people - doesn't matter if it's religious, political or social. The big mistake is generalizing."
— Charles de Lint (Sweet Forget-Me-Not)

tags: prejudice, tolerance, wisdom
3 people liked it

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

tags: frost, glitter, gold, lost, poetry, roots, strength, strong, wander, wither
6,201 people liked it

"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
— Albert Einstein

tags: imagination, inspirational
5,664 people liked it

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: enemies, forgiveness, strategy
6,100 people liked it

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

tags: books, classic, humor
5,524 people liked it

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
— Douglas Adams

tags: deadlines, humor, work
5,318 people liked it

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

tags: inspirational, optimism, perception, pessimism
5,005 people liked it

"Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes... the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules... You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things... they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do."
— Jack Kerouac

tags: change, different, madness, misfits, nonconformity, progressive, rebels, troublemakers
165 people liked it

"[...] the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

tags: freethinker, inspirational, mad
1,108 people liked it

"I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time."
— Jack London

97 people liked it

"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. LeGuin

tags: books, reading
76 people liked it

"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pendants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas)

tags: happiness
72 people liked it

"The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

23 people liked it

"Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

tags: books, fantisy
20 people liked it

"The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places)

tags: reader, reading, stories, story
14 people liked it

"People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within. "
— Ursula K. LeGuin

17 people liked it

"When we're done with it, we may find—if it's a good novel—that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having meet a new face, crossed a street we've never crossed before."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

3 people liked it

"I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Other Wind)

tags: death, loss
2 people liked it

"And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia)

tags: death, life, p169
2 people liked it

"If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine.
"
— Diana Wynne Jones

11 people liked it

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