Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Reading can be dangerous.
Tragedy alters everything.
For it must be very lonely being dead.
Of course I loved books more than people.
What better place to kill time than a library?
I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.
When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.
In this cruel world kindness should always be repaid.
For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.
As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living.
But there can be no secrets in a house where there are children.
A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.
I read *old* novels. The reason is simple. I prefer proper endings.
People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think of them.
She could not read a book for fear of the feelings she might find in it.
Though my appetite for food grew frail, my hunger for books was constant.
Sometimes when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny.
Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly?
Boys do not leave their boyhood behind when they leave off their school uniform.
One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.
What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?
opening the book, i inhaled. the smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it.
She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.
My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.
Our clients' faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover.
Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember.
There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner.
I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.
I shall start at the beginning. Though of coarse, the beginning is never where you think it is.
What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney?
My liking for Scandinavian crime fiction led me into exploring literary writers from the same countries.
There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.
I have kept a reading diary since I was 18. I am jealous of my friend who has kept hers since she was ten.
Emmeline didn't call me anything. She didn't need, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent.
Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negotiation, ends up by exacting a cruel revenge for happiness.
Prescription: 'Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, til end of course.
People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal integrity.
One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.
A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.
Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.
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
Excessively narrow reading is unhelpful, certainly. Reading only Serious Literature is no better than reading only trash in this respect.
A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.
To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see.
There was no single moment when I thought, Aha! What a great idea! Rather there was a slow and gradual accumulation of numerous small ideas.
But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.
I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.
The funeral was over, at last I could cry. Except that I couldn't. My tears, kept in too long, had fossilized. They would have to stay in forever now.
I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Books are for me, it must be said, the most important thing.
But she had that laugh, and the sound of it was so beautiful that when you heard it, it was as if your eyes saw her through your ears and she was transformed.