Cathleen > Cathleen's Quotes

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
― George Eliot

“When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.”
― Julian Barnes, A Life with Books

“We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”
― C.S. Lewis

“I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.”
― William Lyon Phelps

“We read to know we're not alone.”
― William Nicholson, Shadowlands: A Play

“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”
― Mortimer J. Adler

“Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Difficile est longum subito deponere amorem. Difficile est, verum hoc qua lubet efficias,” which is Latin for

“It is difficult suddenly to put aside a long-standing love; it is difficult, but somehow you must do it.”
― Catullus, Gaius Valerius

“I have a strange feeling with regard to you. As if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you. And if you were to leave I'm afraid that cord of communion would snap. And I have a notion that I'd take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, you'd forget me.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer. And let faith be the bridge you build to overcome evil and welcome good.”
― Maya Angelou, Celebrations: Rituals of Peace and Prayer

“It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part.”
― Voltaire

“I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.”
― Thomas Carlyle

“He's the best thing that could have happened to us, I said. And that was no lie. It was, instead, the best kind of truth, the one that meant at least two things.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.”
― Isak Dinesen

“A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one's heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.”
― Dinah Maria Craik

“Books are time travel. True readers all know this. But books don’t just take you back to the time in which they were written; they can take you back to different versions of yourself.”
― Peter Swanson, Eight Perfect Murders

“All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.”
― Octavia E. Butler

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”
― E.M. Forster