Betsy Lerner Quote: "In discovering books, you became free to explore ..."

Choose a background or upload your own photo, then download a shareable quote image.

Upload background image Your file stays in the browser; nothing is sent to the server.

Quote

In discovering books, you became free to explore the full range of human motives, desires, secrets, and lies. All my life, people have scolded me for having an excess of feeling, saying that I was too sensitive - as if one could be in danger from feeling too much instead of too little. But my outsize emotions were well represented in books. [] there simmered all the feelings no one ever admits to.
Betsy Lerner / Poet
Book
Lying
People
Copy Quote

Only Text Quote

In discovering books, you became free to explore the full range of human motives, desires, secrets, and lies. All my life, people have scolded me for having an excess of feeling, saying that I was too sensitive - as if one could be in danger from feeling too much instead of too little. But my outsize emotions were well represented in books. [] there simmered all the feelings no one ever admits to.
⇛ Betsy Lerner (Poet)

Copy Quote Text

But editors are still the world's readers. And thus the eyes of the world.

Betsy Lerner Poet

Indeed, the great paradox of the writer's life is how much time he spends alone trying to connect with other people.

Betsy Lerner Poet

No matter how many compromises were made along the way, no matter what happens in the future, a book is a thing to behold.

Betsy Lerner Poet

I wondered if I was just the sum of my brain scan, little dots clustered in my frontal lobe. Is that where the poems came from?.

Betsy Lerner Poet

Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.

Oprah Winfrey Media Proprietor

You don’t want a general houseworker, do you? Or a traveling companion, quiet, refined, speaks fluent French entirely in the present tense? Or an assistant billiard-maker? Or a private librarian? Or a lady car-washer? Because if you do, I should appreciate your giving me a trial at the job. Any minute now, I am going to become one of the Great Unemployed. I am about to leave literature flat on its face. I don’t want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.