Laura's quotes

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"Dad was a man who, due to his underprivileged background perhaps, never hesitated when it came to the verbs to get or to take. He was always getting something off the ground, his act together, his hands dirty, the show on the road, someone's goat, the message, out more, on with things, lost, laid, away with murder. He was also always taking charge, the bull by the horns, back the night, something in stride, someone to the cleaners, a rain check, an axe to something, Manhattan."
— Marisha Pessl

4 people liked it

"She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it)."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

333 people liked it

"Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'

'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!'"
— Lewis Carroll

tags: beliefs, breakfast, humor, impossible
265 people liked it

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to."

"I don't much care where –"

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland)

tags: adventure
201 people liked it

"Be what you would seem to be - or, if you'd like it put more simply - never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise."
— Lewis Carroll

65 people liked it

"Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop"
— Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland)

88 people liked it

"'When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’"
— Lewis Carroll (Through The Looking Glass)

tags: language
42 people liked it

"Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world."
— Jasper Fforde (First Among Sequels)

tags: humor, poetry
163 people liked it

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

tags: reading
2,949 people liked it

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."
— C.S. Lewis

tags: christianity, religion, sun
2,501 people liked it

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
— C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)

tags: love
1,508 people liked it

"If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world."
— C.S. Lewis

tags: god, world
963 people liked it

"A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest."
— C.S. Lewis

tags: children-s, entertainment, stories
877 people liked it

"No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond."
— C.S. Lewis

tags: age, books, reading
774 people liked it

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

tags: books, soul
10,832 people liked it

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
— Groucho Marx (The Essential Groucho)

tags: animals, books, dogs, friends, humor
6,500 people liked it

"So many books, so little time."
— Frank Zappa

tags: books, humor
9,126 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
2,973 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
2,593 people liked it

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library."
— Jorge Luis Borges

tags: books, library
3,083 people liked it

"There is no friend as loyal as a book."
— Ernest Hemingway

tags: books, friends, novelist, quotes
1,590 people liked it

"You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me."
— C.S. Lewis

tags: books, inspirational, reading, tea
1,647 people liked it

"Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself."
— George Bernard Shaw

tags: books, children
1,002 people liked it

"Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all."
— Abraham Lincoln

tags: books, originality, unique
487 people liked it

"A house without books is like a room without windows."
— Horace Mann

tags: books, house, windows
538 people liked it

"Sometimes the facts in my head get bored and decide to take a walk in my mouth. Frequently this is a bad thing."
— Scott Westerfeld (So Yesterday)

tags: scott, scott-la, so, westerfeld, yesterday
46 people liked it

"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)

tags: first-love
19 people liked it

"Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts."
— Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind)

tags: description, language, words
52 people liked it

"It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story."
— Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind)

39 people liked it

"When we are children we seldom think about the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind."
— Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind)

tags: childhood, innocence
14 people liked it

"Take no heed of her.... She reads a lot of books."
— Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair)

tags: books, reading
197 people liked it

"The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It's not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don't know its happening until one day you feel you've lost something but you're not sure what it is. It's like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you 'sir'. It just happens."
— Robert R. McCammon (Boy's Life)

23 people liked it

"See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand."
— Robert R. McCammon (Boy's Life)

16 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
15,595 people liked it

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."
— Dr. Seuss

tags: cry, crying, experience, happiness, joy, life, optimism, sadness, smile, smiling
14,261 people liked it

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away."
— Maya Angelou

tags: life
10,880 people liked it

"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

tags: confidence, inspirational, wisdom
10,134 people liked it

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
— Mark Twain

tags: action, actions, disappointed, disappointment, discover, dream, dreams, explore, sail
7,446 people liked it

"Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else."
— Albert Einstein

54 people liked it

"A library is thought in cold storage."
— Herbert Samuel

tags: libraries, storage, thought, wisdom
2 people liked it

"If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality."
— C. S. Lewis

tags: morality, morals
15 people liked it

"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

tags: books
80 people liked it

"If information is the currency of democracy, then libraries are the banks."
— Wendell Ford

4 people liked it

"There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration. "
— Andrew Carnegie

6 people liked it

"In our democratic society, the library stands for hope, for learning, for progress, for literacy, for self-improvement and for civic engagement. The library is a symbol of opportunity, citizenship, equality, freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and hence, is a symbol for democracy itself."
— Vartan Gregorian

2 people liked it

"There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library."
— Ray Bradbury

58 people liked it

"A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not an article for mere consumption, but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital."
— Thomas Jefferson

15 people liked it

"Libraries should be the beating heart of the school, not mausoleums for dusty books."
— Stephanie Harvey, Nonfiction Matters

5 people liked it

"The library, I believe, is the last of our public institutions
to which you can go without credentials.
You don't even need the sticker on your windshield
that you need to get into the public beach.
All you need is the willingness to read."
— Harry Golden

3 people liked it

"Libraries are not made; they grow."
— Augustine Birrell

6 people liked it

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