Emily > Emily's Quotes

“You can never be overdressed or overeducated.”
― Oscar Wilde

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

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Always do what you are afraid to do.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”
― Oscar Wilde

“All art is quite useless.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.”
― P. J. O'Rourke

“I don't know about you, but I'm kind of fed up with realism. After all, there's enough reality already; why make more of it? Why not leave realism for the memoirs of drug addicts, the histories of salt, the biographies of porn stars? Why must we continue to read about the travails of divorced people or mildly depressed Canadians when we could be contemplating the shopping habits of zombies, or the difficulties that ensue when living and dead people marry each other? We should be demanding more stories about faery handbags and pyjamas inscribed with the diaries of strange women. We should not rest until someone writes about a television show that features the Free People's World-Tree Library, with its elaborate waterfalls and Forbidden Books and Pirate-Magicians. We should be pining for a house haunted by rabbits.

(from the review of Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners in The Guardian)”
― Audrey Niffenegger

“Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow.”
― Lawrence Clark Powell

“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

“There’s nothing as cozy as a piece of candy and a book.”
― Betty MacDonald, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Magic

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.”
― Dr. Seuss

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

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

“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
― Albert Einstein

“If everyone was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.”
― Mark Twain

“In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.”
― Mark Twain

“No narrative that tells the facts of a man's life in the man's own words can be uninteresting.”
― Mark Twain

“Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.”
― Mark Twain

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

“I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained”
― Walt Disney