Barbara > Barbara's Quotes

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“It is likely I will die next to a pile of things I was meaning to read.”
― Lemony Snicket

“They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two: the passion of their pretense created the actuality. Here, finally, was the quintessence of self-expression-- yet it was probable that for the most part their love expressed Gloria rather than Anthony. He felt often like a scarecly tolerated guest at a party she was giving.”
― Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
― T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“One can't love humanity. One can only love people.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”
― Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

“That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“Do your bit to save humanity from lapsing back into barbarity by reading all the novels you can.”
― Richard Hughes

“I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.”
― Agatha Christie

“Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.”
― Jane Yolen, Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie & Folklore in the Literature of Childhood

“In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.”
― Isaac Asimov

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

“He’s sick.” “What with?” “Sitzenlust. Chronic. The opposite of wanderlust.”
― Rex Stout, The Silent Speaker

“If we would give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks’ vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.”
― Dorothy Canfield Fisher

“If you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.”
― Clive James

“I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.”
― Isaac Bashevis Singer

“Time goes, you say? Ah, no! Alas, Time stays, we go.”
― Henry Austin Dobson

“The human heart will never wrinkle.”
― Madame de Sévigné, Letters of Madame de Sévigné to her Daughter and her Friends, Volume 2

“I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.”
― H.L. Mencken

“How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.”
― Gore Vidal, Julian

“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.”
― Annie Dillard, The Living

“It seemed such a brief while ago that they were all laughing at Professor Nikolayev's definition of a musicologist. Imagine we are eating scrambled eggs, the Professor used to say. My cook, Pasha, has prepared them, and you and I are eating them. Along comes a man who has not prepared them and is not eating them, but he talks about them as if he knows everything about them - that is a musicologist.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“No, give me the past. It doesn’t change; it’s all there in black and white, and you can get to know about it comfortably and decorously and, above all, privately - by reading. … As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“Listen, and you will realize that we are made not from cells or from atoms. We are made from stories.”
― Mia Couto

“Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.”
― Alphonse de Lamartine