Aly > Aly's Quotes

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“That was one of the virtues of being a pessimist: nothing was ever as bad as you thought it would be.”
― James Jones, From Here to Eternity

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“What I'm looking for is not out there, it is in me.”
― Hellen Keller

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

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“You cannot open a book without learning something.”
― Confucius

“It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

“I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Of course I loved books more than people.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished, or the luster of it will never appear.”
― Daniel Defoe

“She wanted to say 'I love you like a thunderstorm, like a lion, like a helpless rage'...”
― Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth

“It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Nothing can last forever. There isn't any memory, no matter how intense, that doesn't fade out at last.”
― Juan Rulfo

“Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while.”
― William Butler Yeats

“There are two ways to live your life, Page. You can live your life swimming against the current, exhausting yourself. Or you can live your life being carried by life itself, sailing with the wind, being pulled toward every new day instead of running from every day that's past. Death-centered or life-centered. You have always been the been the former, but now, I don't know, you sound different.”
― Zoe Klein, Drawing in the Dust

“I realize the dust we return to is not the same dust from which we come. It is not that we come from ashes and nothingness and return to the same ashes and nothingness. The dust we return to has history. The ashes we become were touched, inscribed, detailed, adorned. They glowed.”
― Zoe Klein, Drawing in the Dust

“Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“Sections in the bookstore

- Books You Haven't Read
- Books You Needn't Read
- Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading
- Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written
- Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered
- Books You Mean to Read But There Are Others You Must Read First
- Books Too Expensive Now and You'll Wait 'Til They're Remaindered
- Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback
- Books You Can Borrow from Somebody
- Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too
- Books You've Been Planning to Read for Ages
- Books You've Been Hunting for Years Without Success
- Books Dealing with Something You're Working on at the Moment
- Books You Want to Own So They'll Be Handy Just in Case
- Books You Could Put Aside Maybe to Read This Summer
- Books You Need to Go with Other Books on Your Shelves
- Books That Fill You with Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified
- Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time to Re-read
- Books You've Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It's Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“Race makes class hurt more.”
― Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

“But the truth is that what so often passes for American history is really a record of white priorities or conquests set down as white achievement.”
― Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

“When black folk say “Black Lives Matter,” they are in search of simple recognition. That they are decent human beings, that they aren’t likely to commit crimes, that they’re reasonably smart. That they’re no more evil than the next person, that they’re willing to work hard to get ahead, that they love their kids and want them to do better than they did. That they are loving and kind and compassionate. And that they should be treated with the same respect that the average, nondescript, unexceptional white male routinely receives without fanfare or the expectation of”
― Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

“Nationalism is the uncritical celebration of one’s nation regardless of its moral or political virtue. It is summarized in the saying, “My country right or wrong.” Lump it or leave it. Nationalism is a harmful belief that can lead a country down a dangerous spiral of arrogance, or off a precipice of political narcissism. Nationalism is the belief that no matter what one’s country does—whether racist, homophobic, sexist, xenophobic, or the like—it must be supported and accepted entirely. Patriotism is a bigger, more uplifting virtue. Patriotism is the belief in the best values of one’s country, and the pursuit of the best means to realize those values. If the nation strays, then it must be corrected. The patriot is the person who, spotting the need for change, says so clearly and loudly, without hate or rancor. The nationalist is the person who spurns such correction and would rather take refuge in bigotry than fight it. It is the nationalists who wrap themselves in a flag and loudly proclaim themselves as patriots. That is dangerous, as glimpsed in Trump’s amplification of racist and xenophobic sentiments. In the end, Trump is a nationalist, and Kaepernick is a patriot. Beloved,”
― Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

“When we identify where our privilege intersects with somebody else's oppression, we'll find our opportunities to make real change.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race

“Being privileged doesn't mean that you are always wrong and people without privilege are always right. It means that there is a good chance you are missing a few very important pieces of the puzzle.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race

“If you live in this system of white supremacy, you are either fighting the system of you are complicit. There is no neutrality to be had towards systems of injustice, it is not something you can just opt out of.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race

“1. It is about race if a person of color thinks it is about race. 2. It is about race if it disproportionately or differently affects people of color. 3. It is about race if it fits into a broader pattern of events that disproportionately or differently affect people of color.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race

“When somebody asks you to “check your privilege” they are asking you to pause and consider how the advantages you’ve had in life are contributing to your opinions and actions, and how the lack of disadvantages in certain areas is keeping you from fully understanding the struggles others are facing and may in fact be contributing to those struggles. It is a big ask, to check your privilege. It is hard and often painful, but it’s not nearly as painful as living with the pain caused by the unexamined privilege of others. You may right now be saying “but it’s not my privilege that is hurting someone, it’s their lack of privilege. Don’t blame me, blame the people telling them that what they have isn’t as good as what I have.” And in a way, that is true, but know this, a privilege has to come with somebody else’s disadvantage—otherwise, it’s not a privilege.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race

“Conversations on racism should never be about winning.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race