Steven > Steven's Quotes

“Who better to recruit than a librarian when you’re dealing with a fledgling dictatorship?”
― Stephen King, Under the Dome

“Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.”
― Stephen Fry

“A world is supported by four things….” She held up four big-knuckled fingers. “…the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing….” She closed her fingers into a fist. “…without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man - with human flesh.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“One of the most terrible moments in a boy’s life,” Paul said, “is when he discovers his father and mother are human beings who share a love that he can never quite taste. It’s a loss, an awakening to the fact that the world is there and here and we are in it alone.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“From me to you. You got to be crazy. You know what I’m talking about? Full goose bozo. ’Cause what is reality? You got to be crazy. You got to! ’Cause madness is the only way I’ve stayed alive. Used to be a comedian. Used to, a long time ago. It’s true. You got to go full-tilt bozo. ’Cause you’re only given a little spark of madness. If you lose that, you’re nothing. Don’t. From me to you. Don’t ever lose that, because it keeps you alive. Because if you lose that, pfft. That’s my only love. Crazy.”
― Dave Itzkoff, Robin

“Robin had more talent in his little finger than Jim Carrey ever had.”
― Dave Itzkoff, Robin

“I used to think the worst thing in life is ending up all alone. It isn’t. The worst thing in life is ending up with people that make you feel all alone.”
― Dave Itzkoff, Robin

“Those who hasten to live are in a hurry to miss,”
― Fredrik Backman, And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer

“Death isn’t fair.” “No, death is a slow drum. It counts every beat. We can’t haggle with it for more time.”
― Fredrik Backman, And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer

“Sometimes people have to be allowed to have something to live for in order to survive everything else.”
― Fredrik Backman, Us Against You

“The best friends of our childhoods are the loves of our lives, and they break our hearts in worse ways.”
― Fredrik Backman, Us Against You

“How can I be lonely when I hate people?”
― David Mack, The Persistence of Memory

“Any success I have had began by my showing up on time, being prepared, and doing the best possible job.”
― William Shatner, Live Long And . . .: What I Learned Along the Way

“Any success I have had began by my showing up on time, being prepared, and doing the best possible job. There is a lot to be said for that. That isn’t wisdom; that’s common sense.”
― William Shatner, Live Long And . . .: What I Learned Along the Way

“I loved the fresh alkaline tang of new ink and paper, a smell that never emanated from a broken-in library book. I loved the crack of a newly flexed spine, and the way the brand-new pages almost felt damp, as if they were wet with creation.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“They formed a human chain, passing the books hand over hand from one person to the next, through the smoky building and out the door. It was as if, in this urgent moment, the people of Los Angeles formed a living library. They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“I have come to believe that books have souls—why else would I be so reluctant to throw one away?”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“There where one burns books, one in the end burns men.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“Destroying a library is a kind of terrorism. People think of libraries as the safest and most open places in society. Setting them on fire is like announcing that nothing, and nowhere, is safe.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“books are the last things that any human being can afford to do without.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“librarians should “read as a drunkard drinks or as a bird sings or a cat sleeps or a dog responds to an invitation to go walking, not from conscience or training, but because they’d rather do it than anything else in the world.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“This is The Land of Christmas, where joy and laughter are spread like wildfire and chlamydia.”
― Adam Millard, The Human Santapede

“Jacob, love does not prosecute. It seeks neither revenge nor dominance. It does not win at the cost of someone else’s loss. Love only accepts, completely and without reservation.”
― R. William Bennett, Jacob T. Marley

“Habitual, comfortable activity is the worst kind of prison, because the bars are concealed.”
― Iain Reid, Foe

“The privilege of being human is that our brains are big enough to decide the fate of other creatures.”
― Iain Reid, Foe

“Ordinary is impossible. It’s more realistic to believe that we are all exceptional, that I, too, am singular, unique, that there has never been nor ever will be another me.”
― Iain Reid, Foe

“To not want to be alive is not the same thing as wanting to be dead.”
― Binnie Kirshenbaum, Rabbits for Food