Annie > Annie's Quotes

“I'm just letting the day be what it is:
a place for a large number of things
to gather and interact --
not even a place but an occasion
a reality for real things.”
― David Berman

“Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”
― Francis Bacon, The Essays

“Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.”
― Franz Kafka

“I shall continue to reshuffle, as well as reject and replace tomes from my own library as my memories of reading reconstitute themselves and settle down into the rhythms of constant re-classification which my life prescribes – like pebbles on a beach being shaped by the surge and pull of the tide. As time permeates and accrues through all the thoughts and feelings which I’ve derived from (or invested in) all those many pages which have so quietly accumulated in my left hand, so too my library is both the mirror of me and the world I have travelled. Indeed, this is why – for me at least – a life without books would be no life at all.”
― Tim Chamberlain, Waymarks

“Whatever you eye falls on - for it will fall on what you love - will lead you to the questions of your life, the questions that are incumbent upon you to answer, because that is how the mind works in concert with the eye. The things of this world draw us where we need to go.”
― Mary Rose O'Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd

“Isn't that a kind of prayer? The care and maintenance of the web of our noticing, the paying heed?”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“Instead of more consumerism – the buying of experiences, the accumulation of things, of eating the ‘other’ – perhaps writers should name their own environment. What is the shape of your watershed? How is your electricity produced? Where is your water treated? Where is your food produced and by whom and how does it travel to your local market? What are the names of the rocks under your feet and around you? What formed those geological features? Who were the first humans here? What flora and fauna live upon it and what are their habits and interfaces? What stars whirl above you and what names have they been given, what lore? How can one trace the relations, find the slippages between histories, the linkages, to find the complexities in naming and of the named? Travel as one’s carbon footprint; travel as a footstep, travel as a naming in a landscape in all its complexity. Homing as a way to place oneself in a constellation of process and being.”
― Hạo Nguyên

“I still buy books faster than I can read them. But again, this feels completely normal: how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life.”
― Julian Barnes, A Life with Books

“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
― Anais Nin

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
― Bertrand Russell

“To be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”
― E.E. Cummings

“Having had this kind of binge reading relationship with online content for 15 years we're starting to think 'Hang on, we only have finite time and there is infinite content'.”
― Seb Emina

“I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days.”
― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

“There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.”
― Robert Lynd, The Blue Lion; And Other Essays

“The shed of leaves became a cascade of red and gold and after a time the trees stood skeletal against a sky of weathered tin. The land lay bled of its colors. The nights lengthened, went darker, brightened in their clustered stars. The chilled air smelled of woodsmoke, of distances and passing time. Frost glimmered on the morning fields. Crows called across the pewter afternoons.”
― JC Blake

“I realise there's something incredibly honest about trees in winter, how they're experts at letting things go.”
― Jeffrey McDaniel

“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.”
― Charles Dickens

“The trouble with most photographers, and for that matter also with painters, and other people, is, that they are always trying to do something which is outside of themselves. In consequence they produce nothing that means anything to those who have the gift or intuition for truth: all else is really not worth a tinker's damn.”
― Alfred Stieglitz

“May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

“To sin by silence, when they should protest, makes cowards of men.”
― Ella Wheeler Wilcox

“Poetry is a hook for memory”
― Gillian Clarke, At the Source: A Writer's Year

“While my library contains the works of travel writers, I have mostly searched for those who speak about their own place in the world. But the world is changing and many people have no place to call home. Some of the most important kinds of travel writing now are stories of flight, written by people who belong to the millions of asylum seekers in the world. These are stories that are almost too hard to tell, but which, once read, will never be forgotten. Some of these stories had to be smuggled out of detention centres, or were caught covertly on smuggled mobiles in snatches of calls on weak connections from remote and distant prisons. Why is this writing important? Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish journalist and human rights campaigner who has been detained on Manus Island for over three years with no hope for release yet in sight, puts it plainly in a message to the world in the anthology Behind the Wire. It is, he wrote, ‘because we need to change our imagination’.”
― Alexis Wright

“There's a side to all writers that loves nothing better than a book, a big chair, a window.”
― Gillian Clarke, At the Source: A Writer's Year

“Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate."

(Los Angeles Times, July 20, 2003)”
― Edward W. Said

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

“I am not a teacher, but an awakener.”
― Robert Frost

“The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

“It is curious how, at every crisis, some phrase which does not fit insists upon coming to the rescue--the penalty of living in an old civilisation with a notebook.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves