Maureen > Maureen's Quotes

“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 find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
― Groucho Marx

“We read to know we're not alone.”
― William Nicholson, Shadowlands: A Play

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

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

“In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which are frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you...And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. ”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“The world was hers for the reading.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book.”
― Maureen Corrigan, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books

“When I got [my] library card, that was when my life began.”
― Rita Mae Brown

“Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.”
― David Sedaris

“A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.”
― Germaine Greer

“Right now, you and me here, put together entirely from atoms that have been part of millions of other organisms before they became us, sitting on this round rock with a core of liquid iron held down by this force that so troubles you called gravity, all the while spinning around the sun at 67 thousand miles an hour and whizzing through the Milky Way at 600 thousand miles an hour in a universe that very well may be chasing its own tail at the speed of light... and amidst all this frantic activity, fully cognizant of our own imminent demise, which is a very pretty way of saying we all know we're going to die, we reach out, to one another, sometimes for the sake of vanity, sometimes for reasons you're not old enough to understand yet, but a lot of the time we just reach out... and expect nothing in return. Isn't that strange? Isn't that weird? ... Isn't that... weird... enough?”
― Jonathan Tolins