QUOTES
“You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself.”
— Anne Carson
Penguin Modern Poets 1: If I’m Scared We Can’t Win
“And yet, one Summer, we were Queens But You - were crowned in June”
—Emily Dickinson, Poem 631, Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
“Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.”
— Boris Pasternak
“I disappeared into books when I was young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods.”
— Rebecca Solnit
“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
— Anaïs Nin
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
“Sometimes something that I was having some trouble with falls into place, a word sequence, say, so I’ve written on scraps of paper, in hotels on hotel stationery, in automobiles. If it arrives you know. If you know it really has come, then you have to put it down.”
— Toni Morrison, The Paris Review
“Books are the best means - private, discreet, reliable - of overcoming reality.”
— Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words
“In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.”
— Mary Oliver, Metamorphosque
“…quite simply I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again.”
— Joan Didion
“Stars on our door, stars in our eyes, stars exploding in the bits of our brains where the common sense should have been.”
— Angela Carter, Wise Children
“Think how quiet a book is on a shelf, just sitting there, unopened. Then think what happens when you open it.”
— Ali Smith, There but for the
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
— Anaïs Nin
“In March the earth remembers its own name. Everywhere the plates of snow are cracking. The rivers begin to sing. In the sky the winter stars are sliding away; new stars appear as, later, small blades of grain will shine in the dark fields. And the name of every place is joyful.”
— Mary Oliver
Twelve Moons
“A book is a door, you know. Always and forever. A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world.”
— Catheryne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There
“The unhappy end of many a popular novel is when it is made into a movie.”
— The Daily Times, New Philadelphia, Ohio, July 9, 1924
“No entertainment is so cheap as readings, nor any pleasure so lasting.”
— Mary Wortley Montagn
“The light in the eyes became a glitter.”
— James Baldwin
Giovanni’s Room
“The more I wonder, the more I love.”
— Alice Walker, The Color Purple
“Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.”
— Joan Didion
“Language is wine upon the lips.”
— Virginia Woolf
“Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.”
— Bell Hooks
“The consciousness of the human organism is carried in its grammar.”
— Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer
“Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered.”
— Sidney Howard, Gone with the Wind screenplay
“Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.”
— Mary Oliver
“We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.”
— Tom Robbins
Still Life with Woodpecker
“It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more of less sane.”
— W.G. Sebald, Vertigo
“The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future man.”
— T. S. Eliot
“Memories no matter how small or inconsequential are the pages that define us.”
— Sharah Winman, When God Was a Rabbit
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live…”
— Joan Didion
“I am easy here in a way that I am no easy in other places.”
— Joan Didion, South and West
“He knew everything had gone south when he couldn’t seem to laugh anymore. But then she came along, and said, ‘the south can be quite beautiful.’”
— Gillian F.W
“I’m tired of hearing people say they don’t have time to read. I don’t have time for anything else!”
— George Witman
“I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them – with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.”
— Eudora Welty
“The great enemy of creativity is fear. When we’re fearful, we freeze up – like a nine-year-old who won’t draw pictures, for fear everybody will laugh. Creativity has to do with a willingness to take risks. Think about how children play. They run around the playground, they trip, they fall, they get up and run some more. They believe everything will be all right. They feel capable; they let go.”
— Faith Ringgold
“An Ol’Ma, a grand aunt mabe, told us that all of our dead and missing were resting peacefully in wandering clouds, and when it rains and you listen closely you can hear the things they forgot to tell you before leaving.”
— Wayétu Moore, The Dragons, The Giant, The Women
“It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them.”
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince
“The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”
— James Baldwin
“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”
— Barbara Kingsolver
“I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was the jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.”
— Ta-Nehisi Coates
“I planned to go [to Saigon] to teach and then started writing while I was there. Then, I stayed on, knowing that I wanted to write a novel and I was looking for the story and digging.”
— Violet Kupersmith, from her Belletrist + BookClub interview
“How mad love is - one human being keeping another on tenterhooks and in a state of frantic speculation. Mad, mad. Yet making the world go round of course.”
— Iris Murdoch
Letter to Michael Oakeshott 2nd December 1958
“I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods.”
— Rebecca Solnit
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostovesky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.”
— James Baldwin
“It is the summers of our middle childhood that we remember with an almost impossible clarity. We may forget the summer we were married; we do not forget being twelve years old and lying face down on the deck of a red-sailed Star and trailing one hand in blue Maine water, so cold it seemed to burn the bone…Summer is, after all, the season of escape: the landscape in which to contemplate, alone, our failures and our possibilities; the safety valve, the frontier that none of us wants – or can afford – to see closed.”
— Joan Didion, American Summer (Vogue, 1963)
“Write hard and clear about what hurts.”
— Ernest Hemingway
“I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul.”
— Henry Miller
“Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become a presence, means accepting the risk of absence.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“How are you? How is your wonderful bathroom? How are the books you read and the things you think? Your dogs and their lives? The weather? Your feelings?”
— Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait in Letters
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
— Maya Angelou
“A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.”
— Carl Jung
“Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”
— Roald Dahl
“To begin with, let us take the following motto…Literature is Love. Now we can continue.”
— Vladmimir Nabokov, Despair
“Extremists have shown what frightens them most: a girl with a book.”
— Malala Yousafzai
“I don’t know what my future holds, but I do know I’ve been fortunate enough to be a troublemaker my whole life.”
— Cecile Richards, Make Trouble
“Take it all back. Life is boring, except for flowers, sunshine, your perfect legs. A glass of cold water when you are really thirsty. The way bodies fit together. Fresh and young and sweet. Coffee in the morning. These are just moments. I struggle with the in-betweens. I just want to never stop loving like there is nothing else to do, because what else is there to do?”
— Pablo Neruda
“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”
— William Styron
“She wondered whether the books she loved consoled her precisely because they were the manifestations of their own isolation.”
— Rachel Cusk
“He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.”
— John Green
“A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.”
— Jerry Seinfeld
“A bore is a bore, on the page or off it.”
— Shirley Jackson
“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like literature.”
— Julian Barnes
The Sense of an Ending
“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
— Stephen King
“The best books cause us to dream.”
— Rikki Ducornet
“But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.”
— Daphne du Maurier
“Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”
— Marcel Proust
“I think so often, especially if the work is perceived of as being drawn from life, the woman, not her book, is reviewed.”
— Kate Zambreno
“How do I live in this world in which I cannot read all the books or have all the dogs?”
— Glennon Doyle
“Your past is your shadow. It has form but no substance, except in the places you allow it to touch you.”
— Tananarive Due, Blood Colony
“It’s a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone.”
— Lily King
Writers & Lovers
“I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.”
— Eugenio Montale
“I’m always amazed at how books find us at the time we need them, as if there’s some omniscient, benevolent librarian in the sky.”
— Eve Babitz, Black Swans
“She stood lost in eternity…watching the immense sky.”
— Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop