#Words

"The books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill!"

"But suppose it was truth double strong, it were no truth to me if I couldna take it in. I daresay there's truth in yon Latin book on your shelves; but it's gibberish and no truth to me, unless I know the meaning o' the words."

"The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive."

"Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning."

"His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore."

"Those who don't value their words, will never value your wishes."

"A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say."

"I hope that I will be the last victim in China's long record of treating words as crimes."

"I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I even simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant...I AM HAUNTED BY HUMANS."

"Beneath my eyes opens -- a book; I see to the bottom; the heart -- I see to the depths. I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart. I have been knotted; I have been torn apart."

"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."

"The two most misused words in the entire English vocabulary are love and friendship. A true friend would die for you, so when you start trying to count them on one hand, you don't need any fingers."

"Since there is no real silence, Silence will contain all the sounds, All the words, all the languages, All knowledge, all memory."

"A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language."

"With words at your disposal, you can see more clearly. Finding the words is another step in learning to see."

"The word long is short, and so is the word short, but why is the word love as long as long? Shouldn’t it be longer?"

"A precious, mouldering pleasure ’t is To meet an antique book, In just the dress his century wore; A privilege, I think."

"The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters."

"Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behavior, attire, grace, learning and all their words azimuth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them."

"Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words - and never stops at all."