Linda > Linda's Quotes

“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.”
― Harold Bloom

“Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier. ”
― Kathleen Thompson Norris, Hands Full of Living

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“When the clergy addressed General Washington on his departure from the government, it was observed in their consultation that he had never on any occasion said a word to the public which showed a belief in the Christian religion and they thought they should so pen their address as to force him at length to declare publicly whether he was a Christian or not. They did so. However [Dr. Rush] observed the old fox was too cunning for them. He answered every article of their address particularly except that, which he passed over without notice... I know that Gouverneur Morris, who pretended to be in his secrets & believed himself to be so, has often told me that General Washington believed no more of that system than he himself did.

{The Anas, February 1, 1800, written shortly after the death of first US president George Washington}”
― Thomas Jefferson, The Complete Anas of Thomas Jefferson

“I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.”
― Diane Ackerman

“A life without rain is like the sun without shade.”
― Karen White, After the Rain

“The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach. I have heard them all, and of the three elemental voices, that of ocean is the most awesome, beautiful and varied.”
― Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

“What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this -- two things: I crave truth. And I lie. ”
― Tana French, In the Woods

“I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Có nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?

I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“French Braid reveals the gentle realities of family ties that constrict and those that fall apart altogether, while the daily hum of diligence and possibility reverberates in the background.”
― Anne Tyler, French Braid