| Abbott, Lyman | A broad interest in books usually means a broad interest in life. |
| Arab proverb | A book is like a garden carried in the pocket. |
| Aristotle | To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man. |
| Arnold, Matthew | Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things. |
| Auden, W. H. | A real book is not one that we read but on that reads us. |
| Bachelard, Gaston | The great function of poetry is to give us back the situations of our dreams. |
| Bacon, Francis | Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. |
| Beethoven, Ludwig van | A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation. |
| Bellow, Saul | You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write. |
| Benchley, Robert Charles | It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous. |
| Brown, Dana | There’s a rhythm to good writing, the way words and punctuation work together, the way sentences are structured. Those words you see on the page, as you’re reading them, you’re saying them in your head. When the right words hit the right notes, when there’s just enough but not too much punctuation, occasionally slowing things down, it creates a beat, or a rhythm, in your head. Good writing has a beat. Great writing sounds like jazz. |
| Browning, Robert | All poetry is putting the infinite within the finite. |
| Broyard, Anatole | A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall. |
| Buckley, Christopher | Well, any English major can quote all sorts of people and talk a good game. |
| Burroughs, John | You cannot find what the poets find in the woods until you take the poet’s heart to the woods. |
| Butler, Samuel | A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words. |
| Butler, Samuel | The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them. |
| Churchill, Winston | Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him about to the public. |
| Clancy, Tom | The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense. |
| Cowley, Abraham | May I a small house and large garden have! And a few friends, and many books, both true, both wise, and both delightful too! |
| Darrow, Clarence | Someday I hope to write a book where the royalties will pay for the copies I give away. |
| Davies, Robertson | A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen my morning light, at noon and by moonlight. |
| Davies, Robertson | I do not trust any advice which is given in bad prose. |
| DeLillo, Don | I think fiction rescues history from its confusions. |
| Descartes, Rene | The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest men of past centuries. |
| Dickinson, Emily | A letter always seemed to me like Immortality. |
| Dickinson, Emily | A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day. |
| Dickinson, Emily | If it makes my whole body so cold not fire can warm me, I know it is poetry. |
| Dickinson, Emily | To see the summer sky is poetry, though never in a book it lie-true poems flee. |
| Disraeli, Benjamin | The delight of opening a new pursuit, or a new course of reading, imparts the vivacity and novelty of youth even to old age. |
| Dove, Rita | Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. |
| Edelman, Marian Wright | Read. Not just what you have to read for class or work, but to learn from the wisdom and joys and mistakes of others. No time is ever wasted if you have a book along as a companion. |
| Einstein, Albert | The only thing that you absolutely have to know is the location of the library. |
| Elder, Eric | The best books read you. |
| Eliot, T. S. | Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. |
| Eliot, T. S. | Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. |
| Eliot, T. S. | Poetry is not the assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us. |
| Emerson, Ralph Waldo | Give me a book, health, and a summer day, and I will make the pomp of kings look ridiculous. |
| Epictetus | Do not write so that you can be understood, write so that you cannot be misunderstood. |
| Epictetus | If you wish to be a writer, write. |
| Faulkner, William | I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it. |
| Faulkner, William | The past is never dead. It is not even past. |
| Fermor, Patrick Leigh | This was the moment I longed for every day. Settling at a heavy inn-table, thawing and tingling, with wine, bread, and cheese handy and my papers, books and diary all laid out, writing up the day’s doings. |
| Flaubert, Gustave | Do not read as children do, to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do, to educate themselves. No, read to live. |
| Freud, Sigmund | Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me. |
| Frost, Robert | A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. |
| Frost, Robert | A poem…begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness…It finds the thought and the thought finds the words. |
| Frost, Robert | It is only a moment here and a moment there that the greatest writer has. |
| Frost, Robert | No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. |
| Frost, Robert | People who read me seem to be divided into four groups: 25% like me for the right reasons; 25% like me for the wrong reasons; 25% hate me for the wrong reasons; 25% hate me for the right reasons. It’s the last 25% that worries me. |
| Frost, Robert | Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat. |
| Frost, Robert | Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. |
| Gauss, Karl | You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length. |
| Ginn, Mike | We get it, poets: Things are like other things. |
| Ginsburg, Ruth Bader | Vladimir Nabokov taught me the importance of choosing the right word and presenting it in the right word order. |
| Glaspey, Terry | Books have played an important part in the lives of almost every great leader in history, and it is no surprise to find that they played such a significant role in the life of C. S. Lewis. |
| Glaspey, Terry | C. S. Lewis approached his reading as an adventure of discovery. He did not content himself with a cursory scanning of the pages, but instead carefully studied the books he read, marking significant passages and pausing to thoroughly understand their arguments. This was especially helpful with a more difficult book. |
| Glaspey, Terry | One of Lewis’s passionate convictions about books was that the very best books need to be read and reread throughout one’s life. It won’t do to make your way through a book such as Dante’s Divine Comedy and then check it off your list as an accomplishment on the way to being “well-read.” Lewis believed that we lose a great deal by only reading a book once. We must revisit the great books again and again throughout our lives, for they will alway have something new to teach us. As he wrote, “The sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers ‘I’ve read it already’ to be a conclusive argument against reading a work…Those who read great works, on the other hand, will read the same work ten, twenty, or thirty times during the course of their life.” |
| Glaspey, Terry | The reading of good books will make us wiser, broaden our horizons, challenge our thinking, give flight to our imaginations, and provide hours of enjoyment. |
| Graves, Robert | Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them. |
| Greene, Graham | Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear witch is inherent in the human situation. |
| Ha-Levi, Judah | My pen is my harp and my lyre; my library is my garden and my orchard. |
| Hamill, Pete | I began writing as never before, studying the craft with a professional’s forever unsatisfied standards. |
| Hasidim, Sefer | If you drop gold and books, pick up first the books and then the gold. |
| Hellman, Lillian | Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped. |
| Holmes, Sherlock | It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own. |
| Howe, Edgar W. | A man who will look into his heart and honestly write what he sees there will find plenty of readers. |
| Hugo, Victor | A poet is a world enclosed in a man. |
| Irving, John | I always begin with a character or characters, and then try to think up as much action for them as possible. |
| Irving, John | If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product. |
| Jimenez, Juan Ramon | If they give you ruled paper, write the other way. |
| Joseph, Akiba ben | The paper burns but the words fly free. |
| Joubert, Joseph | The great inconvenience of new books is that they prevent us from reading old books. |
| Kafka, Franz | A good book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. |
| Kerouac, Jack | I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion. |
| Kick, Russ | The right quotation can change your life. That compressed idea—expressed in just a few words, a sentence or two—can shift your thinking, trigger an epiphany, alter your way of seeing the world. The wisest, most experienced, and most thoughtful people in history have left us these little thought-bombs. |
| Kierkegaard, Soren | What is a poet? A poet is an unhappy being, whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music. |
| Kipling, Rudyard | Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. |
| Lamb, Charles | Borrowers of books—those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes. |
| Lamott, Anne | Even if only the people in your writing group read your memoirs or stories or novel, even if you only wrote your story so that one day your children will know what life was like when you were a child and you knew the name of every dog in town—still, to have written your version is an honorable thing to have done. |
| Lamott, Anne | You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better. |
| Lardner, Ring | A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-address envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor. |
| Latin proverb | Beware of the man of one book. |
| Le Guin, Ursula K. | Words are events, they do things, change things. |
| Lennon, John | I put things down on sheets of paper and stuff them in my pockets. When I have enough, I have a book. |
| Leonard, Elmore | Leave out the parts of a book that people tend to skip. |
| Lewis, C. S. | I’m a product of endless books. |
| Lewis, C. S. | My own eyes are not enough for me. I will see through those of others. Reality even seen through the eyes of many is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Literary experience heals the world, without undermining the privilege of individuality. In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Without this exposure to other views of the world through literature, one may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. |
| Lewis, C. S. | The great thing is to be always reading but not to get bored—treat it not like work, more as a vice! Your book bill ought to be your biggest extravagance. |
| Lewis, C. S. | We read to know we’re not alone. |
| Lewis, C. S. | Writing is like a “lust,” or like “scratching when you itch.” |
| Lewis, C. S. | You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me. |
| Lichtenberg, G. C. | The mark of a really great writer is that he gives expression to what the masses of mankind think or feel without knowing it. The mediocre writer simply writes what everyone would have said. |
| Littauer, Florence | The beauty of the written word is that it can be held close to the heart and read over and over again. |
| Lorca, Federico | The poet is the professor of the five bodily senses. |
| Macaulay, Rose | Only one hour in the normal day is more pleasurable than the hour spent in bed with a book before going to sleep and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning. |
| Mann, Horace | A house without books is like a room without windows. |
| Mann, Thomas | A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. |
| Mansfield, Katherine | I want to so live that I work with my hands and my feelings and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing. |
| McGrath, Alister | The qualities we associate with good poetry—such as an appreciation of the sound of words, rich and suggestive analogies and images, vivid description, and lyrical sense—are found in Lewis’s prose. |
| Meyers, Kayla | Millions of gallons of ink have been spilt since humans started writing, and it is likely that you will at some point write something identical to what someone has written or said before without even realizing it. |
| Miller, Donald | A writer learns more from what he writes than the reader, and often applies the perspective after the book is written. |
| Mizner, Wilson | If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research. |
| Moore, Lorrie | Life is a cornfield, but literature is that shot of whiskey that’s been distilled down. |
| Morley, Christopher | When you sell a man a book, you don’t sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life. |
| Nafisi, Azar | This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing. |
| New England Primer | My book and heartShall never part. |
| Nin, Anais | We write to taste our life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. |
| Norris, Kathleen | Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier. |
| Novalis | Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. |
| O’Connor, Flannery | I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say. |
| Pascal, Blaise | I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short. |
| Patterson, James | In America we urge everyone over the age of eighteen to vote, but only 15 percent of voters read books. Only 15 percent of us perform the life-affirming, sanity-bolstering, empathy-forming act of spending time inside somebody else’s brain. |
| Paul, Jean | To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June. |
| Pearsall, Logan Smith | What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. |
| Peterson, Eugene H. | In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There’s too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all. |
| Phelps, Austin | Wear the old coat and buy the new book. |
| Poncela, Enrique Jardiel | When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing. |
| Porter, Katherine Anne | She sat down and read the letter over again; but there were phrases that insisted on being read many times, they had a life of their own separate from the others. |
| Reed, Shannon | But reading! That I could do. When I read, I felt smart. And in reading, I was never lonely, the way I sometimes felt in real life. Reading did not lead me astray. The words were clear, and if I didn’t understand them, it wasn’t because I didn’t hear them correctly. No one cared if I reread (asked the book to repeat, that is) multiple times. And people mostly left me alone when my nose was buried in a book. Reading was always safe and always good company. |
| Reed, Shannon | Reading a book is quiet, clear, and organized. It’s not hard. It waits until I am ready, pauses when I need a break, and is still happy to repeat. Reading absolutely never says “Just forget it” when I need clarification. It doesn’t care how I pronounce the words in my head (or aloud, for that matter). It never makes me feel worse and rarely makes me feel lonely. Reading gives me the world. |
| Reed, Shannon | The act of reading makes me feel safe. |
| Rousseau, Jean | To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say and to finish without knowing what you have written. |
| Sandburg, Carl | Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work. |
| Seitz, Ron | It is blessed and peaceful this way, with the entire house silent and asleep and the wide clean pages of the notebook ready for the first words to loop and roll along the lines. And I am ready to try again my secret scribble for a few hours—hopefully till dawn lights the small window above my desk and puts its signature to this day. |
| Shaw, George Bernard | Nothing offends children more than to play down to them. All the great children’s books—the Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Gulliver’s Travels—were written for adults. |
| Shelley, Percy Bysshe | Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. |
| Simonides of Ceos | Poetry is vocal painting, just as painting is silent poetry. |
| Skinner, B. F. | We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. |
| Smith, Sydney | As a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style. |
| Smith, Sydney | No furniture so charming as books. |
| Socrates | Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for. |
| Sontag, Susan | Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. |
| Spender, Stephen | When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little. |
| Stephen, Leslie | A dull autobiography has never been written. |
| Stevens, Wallace | A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman. |
| Stoppard, Tom | Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order; you can nudge the world a little. |
| Styron, William | A good book should leave you slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it. |
| Sweeney, Jon M. | Every honest writer will tell you that there is always some ego involved in publishing a book. |
| Thackeray, William Makepeace | The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new. |
| Thoreau, Henry David | A true account of the actual is the purest poetry. |
| Thoreau, Henry David | Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. |
| Thoreau, Henry David | How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book? |
| Thoreau, Henry David | Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them all. |
| Trobisch, Ingrid | Writing forces us to articulate our innermost feelings. |
| Unknown | A classic is a book which people praise and don’t read. |
| Unknown | A five-year-old boy comes to the counter super excited. He’s holding a picture book about beavers. I need to scan the bar-code, but he doesn’t want to give me the book. “I don’t wanna lose my page,” he says. “I’ll put a bookmark in it for you.” “What’s a bookmark?” I put the decorative paper rectangle in his book. “Now you can open right back to your page.” His mind is blown. |
| Unknown | A man who buys a book is not just buying a few ounces of paper, glue and printer’s ink; he may be buying a whole new life. |
| Unknown | A poet is someone who is astonished by everything. |
| Unknown | I take a campus job at the library. I thought I’d hate cataloging books. Turns out, I love it. It’s like straightening out the world. Putting socks in the sock drawer, underwear in the underwear drawer. Everything goes where it belongs and makes it easy for other people to find. |
| Unknown | Less than 1% of books published sell more than 50 thousand copies. |
| Unknown | No more powerful, alluring words have ever been invented by the human race than these four: “Once upon a time…” |
| Unknown | Persistence—Ernest Hemingway often worked for hours to perfect one paragraph. |
| Unknown | Poetry is a working model of a system of ordered patterns, and as such is a fine medium for the promotion of order and the punishment of disorder. |
| Unknown | Poetry is an impish attempt to paint the color of the wind. |
| Unknown | Poetry is the grouping of words, phrases, and ideas that have always loved each other but have never gotten into that combination before. |
| Unknown | Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. |
| Unknown | There’s a bookshop in Tokyo that only stocks one book at a time. |
| Unknown | When you write something down to preserve it, you also absorb it. Each of the quotations in these journals, from sources as diverse as Socrates and the Pennsylvania Dutch, had given him pause—first when he came across it and then when he transcribed it. |
| Unknown | Writing is talking to oneself. |
| Valery, Paul | A poem is never finished, only abandoned. |
| Waits, Tom | The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering. |
| Warren, Robert Penn | The poem is a little myth of man’s capacity of making his life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see—it is, rather, a light by which we may see—and what we see is life. |
| West, Jessamyn | Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. |
| Wharton, William | Not thinking of myself as a writer gives me the freedom to be one. |
| White, E. B. | A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring. |
| Wilson, Edmund | No two persons ever read the same book. |
| Winegar, Bridger | If people say they just love the smell of books, I always want to pull them aside and ask, To be clear, do you know how reading works? |
| Wittgenstein, Ludwig | The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. |
Christian Quotations 