#literature

"I’ll be your Dostoevsky, if you’ll be my Tolstoy. Our life together will be so full of despair that death will be like a gulag full of joy."

"Puns are the highest form of literature."

"How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book."

"I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised."

"Being a Dream Girl is never going to be about what you look like or how much you weigh. After all, our physical appearances are just reflections of our inner worlds. What makes you a Dream Girl is your emotional sensitivity, your self-awareness, and your ability to communicate who you are effectively and compassionately in the world."

"The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy."

"Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything."

"To risk life to save a smile on a face of a woman or a child is the secret of chivalry."

"Words his soul danced to."

"Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces."

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

"Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination."

"What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness."

"There is another alphabet, whispering from every leaf, singing from every river, shimmering from every sky."

"It is beautiful to express love and even more beautiful to feel it."

"I'm not ashamed of heroic ambitions. If man and woman can only dance upon this earth for a few countable turns of the sun... let each of us be an Artemis, Odysseus, or Zeus... Aphrodite to the extent of the will of each one."

"From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood."

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

"This is your life – not your parents’, teachers’ or significant other’s. If you ever find yourself on a path that just doesn’t feel safe anymore, you have every right to stop the car, get out – change your shoes and start walking."

"Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head."