"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

"Let us read and let us dance — two amusements that will never do any harm to the world."
— Voltaire

"Read the heart and not the letter for the pen cannot draw near the good intent."
— Michelangelo Buonarroti

"With few words I shall make thee understand my soul."
— Michelangelo Buonarroti

"In my dreams, I never have an age."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"A witty woman is a treasure; a witty beauty is a power."
— George Meredith (Diana of the Crossways)

"A modest garden contains, for those who know how to look and to wait, more instruction than a library."
— Henri Frédéric Amiel

"Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone."
— Dorothy Parker

"It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part."
— Voltaire

"It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful."
— Vincent Van Gogh

"Books, the children of the brain."
— Jonathan Swift (A Tale of a Tub and Other Writings)

"All books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hours, and the books of all Time."
— John Ruskin (Sesame and Lilies)

"A man can see a hundred women, lust for a thousand more, but it is one scent that will open his eyes and turn him to love."
— Cs Richardson (The End of The Alphabet: A Novel)

"[I]t's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers."
— Judy Blume

"I am a human being, so nothing human is strange to me."
— Terence

"There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you. "
— Doris Lessing

"Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.' "
— Doris Lessing (The Golden Notebook)

"Remember that for all the books we have in print, are as many that have never reached print, have never been written down-even now, in this age of compulsive reverence for the written word, history, even social ethic, are taught by means of stories, and the people who have been conditioned into thinking only in terms of what is written-and unfortunately nearly all the products of our educational system can do no more than this-are missing what is before their eyes. For instance, the real history of Africa is still in the custody of black storytellers and wise men, black historians, medicine men: it is a verbal history, still kept safe from the white man and his predations. Everywhere, if you keep your mind open, you will find the words not written down. So never let the printed page be your master. Above all, you should know that the fact that you have to spend one year, or two years, on one book, or one author means that you are badly taught-you should have been taught to read your way from one sympathy to another, you should be learning to follow you own intuitive feeling about what you need; that is what you should have been developing, not the way to quote from other people."
— Doris Lessing

"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it."
— Samuel Johnson

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

"Run mad as often as you choose, but do not faint!"
— Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)

"It takes a long time to become a person."
— Candice Bergen (Knock Wood)

"Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can."
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"There was once a little girl who was so very intelligent that her parents feared that she would die. But an aged aunt, who had crossed the Atlantic in a sailing-vessel, said, 'My dears, let her marry the first man she falls in love with, and she will make such a fool of herself that it will probably save her life.'"
— Edith Wharton

"If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything is Illuminated: A Novel)

"But I don't mean to flatter you: if you are cast in a different mould to the majority, it is no merit of yours: Nature did it."
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

"I envy you your peace of mind, your clean conscience, your unpolluted memory. Little girl, a memory without blot of contamination must be an exquisite treasure-an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment: is it not?"
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

"Nightly awaits that sweet address
Principality of Sleep
Happy Land of Forgetfullness"
— Ivan Doig (The Whistling Season)

"Outward beauty is a true sign of inner goodness. This loveliness, indeed, is impressed upon the body in varying degrees as a token by which the soul can be recognized for what it is, just as with trees the beauty of the blossom testifies to the goodness of the fruit."
— Baldassare Castiglione (The Book of the Courtier)

"Every man carries within himself the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious, a hereditary factor of primordial origin."
— Carl Gustav Jung

"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed."
— Carl Gustav Jung

"I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting"
— William Shakespeare

"I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things – once commenced – only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending – sweet or sour – and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable?"
— A.S. Byatt (Possession)

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. "
— Philip K. Dick

"That perfect tranquility of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library."
— Aphra Behn (The Lucky Chance)

"The richest and fullest lives attempt to achieve an inner balance between three realms: work, love and play."
— Erik Erikson

"There is no frigate like a good book to take us to lands away."
— Emily Dickinson

"The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night."
— Isabel Allende

"Junot Diaz said about writers: "What we do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.""
— Junot Díaz

"Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy:
This wide and universal theatre
Presents more woeful pageants than the scene
Wherein we play in."
— William Shakespeare (As You Like It)

"O shut the door! and when thou hast done so,
Come weep with me; past hope, past cure, past help!"
— William Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet)

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
— Anaïs Nin

"For those who belong nowhere, and for those who belong to one place too much to belong anywhere else."
— Alden Nowlan

"Trust me, I'm telling you stories."
— Jeanette Winterson

"The child had indeed shut up but all the questions that had accumulated on his tongue circulated in his mouth, moved through the passages of his nose and climbed up from there to tickle into his teardrop ducts, so in his moss green pupils, curious, insistent, accusing sparks of questions continued to light up and fade away like fireflies flitting about on summer nights."
— Elif Shafak (The Flea Palace)

"He had lived his life as a good father but now Oscar Mendoza saw again his life as a boy. A daughter was a battle between fathers and boys in which the fathers fought valiantly and always lost. He knew that one by one each of his daughter would be lost, either honorably in the ceremony of marriage or, realistically, in a car pointed out towards the ocean well after dark. In his day, Oscar himself had made too many girls forget their better instincts and fine training by biting them with tender persistence at the base of their skull, just where the hairline grew in downy wisps. Girls were like kittens in this way, if you got them right at the nape of their neck, they went easily limp. Then he would whisper his suggestions, all the things they might do together, the wonderful dark explorations for which he was to be their guide. His voice traveled like a drug dripped down the spiraling canals of their ears until they had forgotten everything, until they had forgotten their own names, until they turned and offered themselves up to him, their bodies sweet and soft as marzipan."
— Ann Patchett (Bel Canto)

"She sat beside him on the bench, and her presence troubled him. He was inside the atmosphere, or light, or scent she spread, as a boat is inside the drag of a whirlpool, as a bee is caught in the lasso of perfume from the throat of a flower."
— A.S. Byatt (Angels & Insects: Two Novellas)

"Goodbye, said the fox. And now here is my secret, a very simple secret. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)

"...they danced as though they'd been waiting all their lives for each song."
— Amy Bloom (Come to Me)

"To laugh is to live profoundly."
— Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)