Christine > Christine's Quotes

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
― James Baldwin

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
― Edmund Burke

“I cannot live without books.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World

“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”
― Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.”
― Elbert Hubbard, Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Vol. 3: American Statesmen

“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

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
― Cicero

“Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.”
― Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“Books are a narcotic.”
― Franz Kafka

“Depression - that limp word for the storm of black panic and half-demented malfunction - had over the years worked itself out in Charlotte's life in a curious pattern. Its onset was often imperceptible: like an assiduous housekeeper locking up a rambling mansion, it noiselessly went about and turned off, one by one, the mind's thousand small accesses to pleasure.”
― Sebastian Faulks