K > K's Quotes

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.”
― Anne Tyler

“Even today, I hunt for the fabulous books that will change me utterly. I find myself happiest in the middle of a book which I forget that I am reading, but am instead immersed in a made-up life lived at the highest pitch.”
― Pat Conroy, My Reading Life

“Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Sometimes you read a book so special that you want to carry it around with you for months after you've finished just to stay near it.”
― Markus Zusak

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn't use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like "What about lunch?”
― A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“Well," said Pooh, "what I like best," and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called.”
― A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.”
― Stephen King

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King

“Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you'll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.”
― Stephen King

“Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature's profligate generosity.”
― Pat Conroy, My Reading Life

“I can't pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me.”
― Pat Conroy, My Reading Life

“The world was hers for the reading.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Forgiveness is a gift of high value. Yet its cost is nothing.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“It's come at last", she thought, "the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Because,' she said, 'when you're scared but you still do it anyway, that's brave.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“Yesterday's gone on down the river and you can't get it back.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk—and feisty gentlemen.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“It ain’t dying I’m talking about, it’s living. I doubt it matters where you die, but it matters where you live.” ~spoken by Augustus McCrae”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.”
― Sinclair Lewis

“My books already threatened to take over my part of the room and keep on going . . . whatever cargoes of words I could lay my hands on I gave safe harbor.”
― Ivan Doig, The Whistling Season

“Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.”
― Pearl S. Buck

“But what I hope for in a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer.”
― Anne Tyler

“Library books were, I suddenly realized, promiscuous, ready to lie down in the arms of anyone who asked. Not like bookstore books, which married their purchasers, or were brokered for marriages to others.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“We are none of us born into Eden," Doc said reasonably. "world's plenty evil when we get here. Question is, what's the best way to play a bad hand?"...”
― Mary Doria Russell, Doc

“Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.”
― Raymond Carver

“Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it. ”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay