Michael T. Bee > Michael's Quotes

“One of the most brilliant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs to the tradition in Russian literature represented by Gogol, Leskov, Bely, Remizov, and, in certain aspects of their work, also by Babel and Bulgakov. It is a tradition, paradoxically, of experimenters and innovators. Perhaps the principal quality that unites them is their approach to reality and its uses in art - the refusal to be bound by literal fact, the interweaving of reality and fantasy, the transmutation of fact into poetry, often grotesque, oblique, playful, but always expressive of the writer's unique vision of life in his own, unique terms.”
― Mirra Ginsburg, The Dragon: Fifteen Stories

“Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation, but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection. When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. The real trap, however, is self-rejection. As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, "Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody." ... [My dark side says,] I am no good... I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the "Beloved." Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

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

“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”
― William Styron, Conversations with William Styron

“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.”
― C.S. Lewis

“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin

“Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.”
― Albert Einstein

“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson

“I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.”
― Woody Allen

“A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”
― C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”
― C.S. Lewis

“I am a part of everything that I have read.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.”
― René Descartes

“A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down."

[Letter to J. Beauchamp Jones, August 8, 1839]”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
― John Locke

“You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“All I have learned, I learned from books.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.”
― Francis Bacon

“I read my eyes out and can't read half enough...the more one reads the more one sees we have to read.”
― John Adams, Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife

“Keep reading. It's one of the most marvelous adventures that anyone can have.”
― Lloyd Alexander

“I love the smell of book ink in the morning.”
― Umberto Eco