"…[I]f they hadn’t both been pretending, but had had what is called a heart-to-heart talk, that is, simply told each other just what they were thinking and feeling, then they would just have looked into each other’s eyes, and Constantine would only have said: ‘You’re dying, dying, dying!’ – while Nicholas would simply have replied: ‘I know I’m dying, but I’m afraid, afraid, afraid!’ That’s all they would have said if they’d been talking straight from the heart. But it was impossible to live that way, so Levin tried to do what he’d been trying to do all his life without being able to, what a great many people could do so well, as he observed, and without which life was impossible: he tried to say something different from what he thought, and he always felt it came out false, that his brother caught him out and was irritated by it."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

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

"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

"I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity."
— C.S. Lewis

"Everything you can imagine is real."
— Pablo Picasso

"Give a girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world."
— Marilyn Monroe

"You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation."
— Brigham Young

"Inside all of us is a Wild Thing"
— Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are)

"The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books"
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Who, being loved, is poor?"
— Oscar Wilde

"Te amo como se aman ciertas cosa oscuras,
secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma.
(I love you as certain darks things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.)"
— Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets/Cien Sonetos De Amor)

"I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes"
— Vladimir Nabokov

"Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light
and of every moment of your life"
— Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass)

"Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them."
— Leo Tolstoy

"He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"The business of art lies just in this, -- to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible."
— Leo Tolstoy (What Is Art?)

"Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed. "
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?"
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.""
— Leo Tolstoy

"We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And someday we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddamn steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in it and cover it up."
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."
— Ray Bradbury

"I hate a Roman named Status Quo!" he said to me. "Stuff your eyes with wonder," he said, "live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that," he said, "shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.""
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"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)

"Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"Konstantin Levin did not like talking and hearing about the beauty of nature. Words for him took away the beauty of what he saw."
— Leo Tolstoy

"I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years."
— Ray Bradbury

"It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them."
— George Eliot

"Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves."
— Annie Dillard