Elizabeth's quotes

(showing 1-50 of 54)

"Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers."
— Virginia Woolf

tags: guineas, three
12 people liked it

"The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you've struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong."
— Virginia Woolf

tags: 1936, 28, diary, january
11 people liked it

"But suppose it was truth double strong, it were no truth to me if I couldna take it in. I daresay there's truth in yon Latin book on your shelves; but it's gibberish and no truth to me, unless I know the meaning o' the words."
— Elizabeth Gaskell (North and South)

tags: language, meaning, truth, words
9 people liked it

"I've always thought tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune."
— Lois McMaster Bujold (Shards of Honour)

27 people liked it

"Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn--that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness--that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling."
— Jane Austen

tags: autumn, poets
4 people liked it

"It is a happy thing that time quells the longings of vengeance and hushes the promptings of rage and aversion. I had left this woman in bitterness and hate, and I came back to her now with no other emotion than a sort of ruth for her great sufferings, and strong yearning to forget and forgive all injuries - to be reconciled and clasp hands in amity."
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

tags: forgiveness
2 people liked it

"She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain."
— Louisa May Alcott (Work: A Story of Experience)

tags: books
838 people liked it

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."
— Virginia Woolf

tags: women
3,000 people liked it

"It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language"
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

tags: books, novels, reading
216 people liked it

"She was a great and insatiable reader, surprisingly well acquainted with the classics of literature, and unexpectedly lavish in the purchase of books. Her neighbours never forgot to mention, in describing her, the awe-inspiring fact that she 'took in the English Times and the Saturday Review, and read every word of them,' but it was hinted that the bookshelves that her own capable hands had put up in her bedroom held a large proportion of works of fiction of a startlingly advanced kind, 'and,' it was generally added in tones of mystery, 'many of them French.'"
— Edith Oenone Somerville

tags: reading
1 person liked it

"What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning, but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more."
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

34 people liked it

"It isn't the big troubles in life that require character. Anybody can rise to a crisis and face a crushing tragedy with courage, but to meet the petty hazards of the day with a laugh - I really think that requires spirit.
It's the kind of character that I am going to develop. I am going to pretend that all life is just a game which I must play as skillfully and fairly as I can. If I lose, I am going to shrug my shoulders and laugh - also if I win."
— Jean Webster (Daddy Long Legs)

tags: character, webster
16 people liked it

"Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.

(in Athenaeum, December 1923)
"
— Virginia Woolf

tags: austen, biography, criticism, jane
8 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
1,662 people liked it

"book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. it is not a hobby. those who do it must do it. those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind."
— Jeanette Winterson

tags: books, obsession
253 people liked it

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

tags: books
109 people liked it

" There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been."
— A.S. Byatt

18 people liked it

"Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like."
— Walter Benjamin (Illuminations: Essays and Reflections)

tags: books, writers, writing
5 people liked it

"How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!"
— Walter Benjamin (Illuminations: Essays and Reflections)

tags: book, books, collecting, travel
4 people liked it

"always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair they loved or they loathed, they lived in a world of superlatives"
— Nancy Mitford (The Pursuit of Love)

4 people liked it

"Well-behaved women rarely make history."
— Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

tags: it-s-so-true
2,252 people liked it

"The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea"
— Isak Dinesen

115 people liked it

"There is no such thing as a true tale. Truth has many faces and the truth is like to the old road to Avalon; it depends on your own will, and your own thoughts, whither the road will take you.
"
— Marion Zimmer Bradley (The Mists of Avalon)

43 people liked it

"I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No - I must keep my own style & go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other."
— Jane Austen (Jane Austen's Letters)

tags: be, true, writing, yourself
5 people liked it

"It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region."
— Edith Wharton

15 people liked it

""I entirely agree that a historian ought to be precise in detail; but unless you take all the characters and circumstances into account, you are reckoning without the facts. The proportions and relations of things are just as much facts as the things themselves." -Gaudy Night"
— Dorothy L. Sayers

4 people liked it

"If I had my life over again[, ] I'd have thought more about words. And thought about them earlier."
— Enid Bagnold (The Loved and Envied)

tags: words
2 people liked it

"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

tags: books, old-books, reading
322 people liked it

"As a woman, I have no country. As a woman my country is the world. "
— Virginia Woolf

tags: women
208 people liked it

"I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most."
— Margaret Atwood

tags: reading
66 people liked it

"When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning."
— Neil Gaiman (Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions)

767 people liked it

"The man was hit in one eye by a stone, and that eye turned inward so that it looked into his mind, and he died of what he saw there"
— Patricia A. McKillip (The Forgotten Beasts of Eld)

10 people liked it

"'It is fate that I am here,' George persisted, 'but you can call it Italy if it makes you less unhappy.'"
— E.M. Forster (A Room With a View)

16 people liked it

"Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

tags: freedom, women, writing
419 people liked it

"It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting "Cathy" and banging your head against a tree."
— Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones's Diary)

46 people liked it

"There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can't know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you've reached it. I believe this."
— Alice Munro

22 people liked it

"To have a viable civilization, people have to have a benign government, a semblance of education, spare time, imagination, and manners"
— Jonathan Chamberlain Williams

tags: wit
3 people liked it

"Two things cannot be in one place. Where you tend a rose, a thistle cannot grow."
— Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden)

45 people liked it

"Ah, good conversation - there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing."
— Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)

24 people liked it

"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."
— Dorothy Parker

tags: author, book, humorist, poet, wit
501 people liked it

"The odd thing about people who had many books was how they always wanted more."
— Patricia A. McKillip (The Bell at Sealey Head)

tags: bibliophiles, books, readers, reading
47 people liked it

"[...] it is safer to wander without a guide through an unmapped country than to trust completely a map traced by men who came only as tourists and often with biased judgement. "
— Marie-Louise Sjoestedt (Gods and Heroes of the Celts)

tags: interpretation, scholarship, translation
1 person liked it

"Nature and Books belong to the eyes that see them."
— Emily Brontë

tags: books, nature
22 people liked it

"Is this a kissing book?"
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

tags: books, kissing, movie
234 people liked it

"Never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention. "
— Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn)

34 people liked it

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
— Flannery O'Connor

tags: criticism, humor, writing
351 people liked it

"All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not."
— Nick Hornby

tags: books
162 people liked it