Literature 038

Books are sharks... because sharks have been around for a very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.
Douglas Adams

Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They're solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books, and no matter what happens, books will survive.
Douglas Adams

People wanted me to do a CD-ROM of Hitchhiker's, and I thought, No, no. I didn't want to just sort of reverse-engineer yet another thing from a book I'd already written. I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.
Douglas Adams

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.
Douglas Adams

A book is simply the container of an idea like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.
Angela Carter

There is a great deal of difference between the eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
G. K. Chesterton

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations ... The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.
Winston Churchill

The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.
Benjamin Disraeli

History books which contain no lies are extremely dull.
Anatole France

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.
Anatole France

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now, they are content with burning my books.
Sigmund Freud

Oh, if only it were possible to find understanding, Joseph exclaimed. If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn't there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?

The master had never heard him speak so fervently. He walked on in silence for a little, then said: There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht - I can see that they already have begun.
The Glass Bead Game
Hermann Hesse

I am a perfect glutton of books.
Leigh Hunt

In regards to this great Book (the Bible), I have but to say it is the best gift God has given to man. All the good the Savior gave to the world was communicated through this Book. But for it we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man's welfare, here and hereafter, are found portrayed in it.
Abraham Lincoln

The world exists to end in a book.
Stéphane Mallarmé

In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
H. L. Mencken

In 1969 I published a small book on Humility. It was a pioneering work which has not, to my knowledge, been superseded.
Francis Pakenham

One of the best ways of enslaving a people is to keep them from education... The second way of enslaving a people is to suppress the sources of information, not only by burning books but by controlling all the other ways in which ideas are transmitted.
Eleanor Roosevelt

Between us, love the buses at the door the long glass street two years, my death to yours my death upon your lips my face becoming glass strong challenged time making me win immortal our street our river a deadly glass to hold. Now they are feeding me into a steel mill furnace O love the stream of glass a stream of living fire.
The Book of the Dead
Muriel Rukeyser

Please return this book; I find that though many of my friends are poor arithmeticians, they are nearly all good bookkeepers.
Walter Scott

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
Mark Twain

There are three infallible ways of pleasing an author, and the three form a rising scale of compliment: 1, to tell him you have read one of his books; 2, to tell him you have read all his books; 3, to ask him to let you read the manuscript of his forthcoming book. No. 1 admits you to his respect; No. 2 admits you to his admiration; No. 3 carries you clear into his heart.
Mark Twain

We learned from everybody else's book and added a few pages of our own.
Sam Walton

In the old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.
Oscar Wilde

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read ...

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
William Butler Yeats

The theme of Death is to Poetry what Mistaken Identity is to Drama.
Dannie Abse

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
Aristotle

Love is the poetry of the senses.
Honoré de Balzac

Once on a yellow piece of paper with green lines
he wrote a poem
And he called it Chops
because that was the name of his dog

And that's what it was all about
And his teacher gave him an A
and a gold star
And his mother hung it on the kitchen door
and read it to his aunts
That was the year Father Tracy
took all the kids to the zoo

And he let them sing on the bus
And his little sister was born
with tiny toenails and no hair
And his mother and father kissed a lot
And the girl around the corner sent him a
Valentine signed with a row of X's

and he had to ask his father what the X's meant
And his father always tucked him in bed at night
And was always there to do it

Once on a piece of white paper with blue lines
he wrote a poem
And he called it Autumn

because that was the name of the season
And that's what it was all about
And his teacher gave him an A
and asked him to write more clearly
And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door
because of its new paint

And the kids told him
that Father Tracy smoked cigars
And left butts on the pews
And sometimes they would burn holes
That was the year his sister got glasses
with thick lenses and black frames
And the girl around the corner laughed

when he asked her to go see Santa Claus
And the kids told him why
his mother and father kissed a lot
And his father never tucked him in bed at night
And his father got mad
when he cried for him to do it.

Once on a paper torn from his notebook
he wrote a poem
And he called it Innocence: A Question
because that was the question about his girl
And that's what it was all about
And his professor gave him an A

and a strange steady look
And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door
because he never showed her
That was the year that Father Tracy died
And he forgot how the end
of the Apostle's Creed went

And he caught his sister
making out on the back porch
And his mother and father never kissed
or even talked
And the girl around the corner
wore too much makeup
That made him cough when he kissed her

but he kissed her anyway
because that was the thing to do
And at three a.m. he tucked himself into bed
his father snoring soundly

That's why on the back of a brown paper bag
he tried another poem
And he called it Absolutely Nothing Because that's what it was really all about
And he gave himself an A
and a slash on each damned wrist
And he hung it on the bathroom door
because this time he didn't think

he could reach the kitchen.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Stephen Chbosky

I would like to have been examined in history, poetry and writing essays. The examiners, on the other hand, were partial to Latin and mathematics. And their will prevailed ... I should have liked to be asked to say what I knew. They always tried to ask what I did not know.
Winston Churchill

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.
Max Eastman

Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets truth.
Jean Giraudoux

When you see the poet laureate saying that every child should have read Ulysses and that you're just giving up on children if you think it's elitist - does that include children with special needs or whose first language isn't English?
Nick Hornby

When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.
John F. Kennedy

Poetry is the ultimate democracy.
Brendan Kennelly

I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.
Philip Larkin

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.
Leonardo da Vinci

If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it; Every arrow that flies feels the attraction of earth.
In the Harbor
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.
Adrian Mitchell

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
Octavio Paz

Forget wars, religions, famines and poems for the moment. This is history's greatest theme: the metastasis of exchange, specialization and the invention it has called forth, the creation of time.
Matt Ridley

John Keats / John Keats / John / Please put your scarf on.
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction
J. D. Salinger

I say again and again that I am a poet, that I am not a fighter by nature. I would give everything to be one with my surroundings. I love my fellow beings and I prize their love.
Rabindranath Tagore

Sir, we poets never succeed so well in writing truth as in fiction.
Edmund Waller

No race can prosper till it learns there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
Booker T. Washington

England never appreciates a poet until he is dead.
Oscar Wilde

Because the Internet is so new, we still don't really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that's what we're used to. So people complain that there's a lot of rubbish online, or that it's dominated by Americans, or that you can't necessarily trust what you read on the Web.
Douglas Adams

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.
Henry Adams

Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.
John Adams

To read the Bible is of itself a laudable occupation and can scarcely fail of being a useful employment of time; but the habit of reflecting upon what you have read is equally essential as than of reading itself, to give it all the efficacy of which it is susceptible.
John Quincy Adams

Who reads much and walks much sees much and knows much.
Cervantes

There is a great deal of difference between the eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
G. K. Chesterton

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.
Anatole France

If you would not be forgotten
As soon as you are dead and rotten,
Either write things worth reading,
Or do things worth the writing.
Benjamin Franklin

What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years?
Graham Greene

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.
Thomas Jefferson

Every glass thermometer has subtle variations in the size and shape of the bulb at the bottom and the capillary tube inside, as well as variations in the width of gradations on the side. The compounded effect of these uncertainties is that each thermometer reads temperature slightly differently.
Sam Kean

No. I can survive well enough on my own-if given the proper reading material.
Throne of Glass
Sarah J. Maas

Throne of Glass readers tend to be passionate, talented, clever, and welcoming - in fact, I'm consistently moved by just how welcoming TOG readers are to new fans.
Sarah J. Maas

In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
H. L. Mencken

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
Octavio Paz

Misquotation is ... the pride and privilege of the learned. A widely-read man never quotes accurately for the rather obvious reason that he has read too widely.
Hesketh Pearson

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
Logan Pearsall Smith

The illiterate of the year 2000 will not be the individual who cannot read and write, but the one who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
Alvin Toffler

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
Mark Twain

In the old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.
Oscar Wilde

When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.
Henny Youngman

I prefer the word homemaker because housewife always implies that there may be a wife someplace else.
Bella Abzug

After ten years of word processing, I can't even do hand writing anymore.
Douglas Adams

I think that growing up in a crowded continent like Europe with an awful lot of competing claims, ideas... cultures... and systems of thought, we have, perforce, developed a more sophisticated notion of what the word freedom means than I see much evidence of in America.
Douglas Adams

Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.
John Adams

I must not write a word to you about politics, because you are a woman.
John Adams

Woe betide the man who dares to pay a woman a compliment today ... Forget the flowers, the chocolates, the soft word - rather woo her with a self-defence manual in one hand and a family planning leaflet in the other.
Alan Ayckbourn

When you apply the word power to a man, it means strong and bold - very positive attributes. When you use it to describe a woman, it suggests bitchy, insensitive, hard.
Jill Barad

Words are so futile, so feeble.
Charlie Chaplin

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

Making and preserving friends. Select some sound hearts. Be careful not to bruise them with unfeeling words. Take of milk of human kindness one heartful. Add to this plenty of tact. Warm the mixture with plenty of sympathy. Do not let it get too hot at first, lest it only ferment mischief. Knead with plenty of oil of unselfishness to make all smooth. Beware of jars (lovely wording). The mixture should be kept in a warm corner of the heart. Years only serve to improve the flavour of friends thus preserved.
Barry Humphries

You're fired! No other words can so easily and succinctly reduce a confident, self-assured executive to an insecure, groveling shred of his former self.
Frank P. Louchheim

Words must surely be counted among the most powerful drugs man ever invented.
Leo Rosten

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter - it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.
Mark Twain

I don't like the word empowerment. I think the word we're really talking about is involvement ... We want everyone to have a say.
Jack Welch

A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.
Dean Acheson

After ten years of word processing, I can't even do hand writing anymore.
Douglas Adams

I remember very little about writing the first series of Hitchhiker's. It's almost as if someone else wrote it.
Douglas Adams

I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don't think they're doing art but are merely practicing a craft and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.
Douglas Adams

Hundreds of people who've never written before send in Dr. Who scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is.
Douglas Adams

There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth.
Douglas Adams

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.
Franklin P. Adams

I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I'm wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.
Henry Adams

I must not write a word to you about politics, because you are a woman.
John Adams

Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.
John Adams

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.
Maya Angelou

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.
Robert Benchley

As a writer, you can't allow yourself the luxury of being discouraged and giving up when you are rejected, either by agents or publishers. You absolutely must plow forward.
Augusten Burroughs

So I haven't written much lately! So what? Neither has Shakespeare.
Angela Carter

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
Anton Chekhov

History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.
Winston Churchill

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
Cyril Connolly

Why I could write as well myself!
Hannah Cowley

The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.
Benjamin Disraeli

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

If you would not be forgotten
As soon as you are dead and rotten,
Either write things worth reading,
Or do things worth the writing.
Benjamin Franklin

I'm a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America above all and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia.
Eduardo Galeano

A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on.
Samuel Goldwyn

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post how it feels about dogs.
Christopher Hampton

Preach! Write! Act! Do any thing, save to lie down and die!
Nathaniel Hawthorne

When I started out, people were afraid of parish priests. Now they're afraid of newspaper editors.
Michael D. Higgins

A writer is not interested in explaining reality; he's interested in capturing it.
Brendan Kennelly

An author is a fool who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on boring future generations.
Montesquieu

Everywhere I go I am asked if university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them.
Flannery O'Connor

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.
Leo Rosten

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.
Leo Rosten

The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.
Leo Rosten

Who am I? I'm just a writer. I write things down. I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure, I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow glass, but that comes later.
Richard Siken

Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure, I think mine is), is but a different name for conversation.
Laurence Sterne

I have no wish at all to be a great writer, let alone a great man. It would just embarrass me and betray a false position. I want to go in nightgown and underwear and be known as a scandal-writer, that wouldn't embarrass me.
August Strindberg

The illiterate of the year 2000 will not be the individual who cannot read and write, but the one who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
Alvin Toffler

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it - namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
Mark Twain

My mother used to have dreams about being a writer and I used to watch her.
John Updike

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
Mary Heaton Vorse

Beware of writing to me. I always answer ... My father spent the last 20 years of his life writing letters. If someone thanked him for a wedding present, he thanked them for thanking him and there was no end to the exchange but death.
Evelyn Waugh

No race can prosper till it learns there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
Booker T. Washington

Don't write - telegraph!
Elmer Wheeler

In the old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.
Oscar Wilde

There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
Oscar Wilde

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IN THE beginning God created the heaven and the earth. ... The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.

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