Ann > Ann's Quotes

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”
― Jessamyn West

“I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose.”
― Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

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

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

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“Books, I found, had the power to make time
stand still, retreat or fly into the future.”
― Jim Bishop

“All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.”
― Katherine Paterson

“... that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them.
(Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”
― Charles W. Eliot

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.”
― Joseph Joubert

“…only then did I wake out of the book.”
― John McGahern

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: When you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.”
― Elmore Leonard, Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing

“I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving—we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it—but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

“What I mean by an educated taste is someone who has the same tastes that I have.”
― Edward Albee

“I did discover that if you're interested in low wages, a bookstore ranks below retail clothing sales, except the hours are worse.”
― Sue Grafton

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.”
― Peter Shaffer, Five Finger Exercise

“Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day's chalking.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace

“The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you.”
― Frederick Buechner

“We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan; and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence.”
― Joseph Roux

“If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction-and ultimately, without a major resolution.”
― Jasper Fforde, Something Rotten

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“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, The Polysyllabic Spree

“A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet.”
― Phyllis McGinley

“No two persons ever read the same book.”
― Edmund Wilson