Maria > Maria's Quotes

“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.”
― Anna Quindlen

“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.”
― Anna Quindlen

“those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers...”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“A finished person is a boring person. ”
― Anna Quindlen

“In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.”
― Anna Quindlen

“Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung...”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“I went to collect the few personal belongings which...I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.”
― Colette

“You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I do not understand how anyone can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

“Paper is more patient than man.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“Writing is prayer.”
― Franz Kafka

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”
― William Wordsworth