#literature

"You not only are hunted by others, you unknowingly hunt yourself."

"Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?"asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends,"says I, "how much you used the dictionary before you read it."

"Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm."

"When she was a child, my love carried a road-map in her hand the way other girls carried handkerchiefs. She always knew the way. Her feet were little wings. And her beautiful head was a compass."

"Words rich in meaning can be cheap in sound effects."

"If my favorite three letters are X, Z, and Q, then my favorite word is Xazaqazax. It means “a lover of love."

"He knows he will be born again, And start fresh anew."

"People may think of Southern humor in terms of missing teeth and outhouse accidents, but the best of it is a rich vein running through the best of Southern literature."

"Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them."

"Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination."

"You never know who you're inspiring or uninspiring. People notice more than you think."

"Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment."

"There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book."

"He ate and drank the precious words,His spirit grew robust;He knew no more that he was poor,Nor that his frame was dust.He danced along the dingy days,And this bequest of wingsWas but a book. What libertyA loosened spirit brings!"

"The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering."

"Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one."

"At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel."

"We don’t know anything about silent sages, buried knowledge, the eye of the mute poet, serene seers, yet how many talkative destroyers, prophets and ideologues, teachers and beautifiers there are on the other side."

"So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what."

"Literature is the real life of imaginary people."