The best Book Quotes

The only thing crueler than a cage so
small that a bird can’t fly is a cage so
large that a bird thinks it can fly.

The problem with books is that they end. They seduce you. They spread their legs to you and pull you inside. And you go deep and leave your possessions and your ties to the world at the door and you like it inside and you don't want for your possessions or your ties and then, the book evaporates.

Work in a bookstore and learn that most people in this world feel guilty about being who they are.

I don't say anything. I know the power of silence. I remember my dad saying nothing and I remember his silences more vividly than I remember the things he said.

Happiness is believing that you're gonna be happy. It's hope.

It is possible to know people. They show you who they are. You just have to be looking.

Because you simply cannot draw these things out for ever. At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved.

Love wasn't possible without a self, and nor was thinking.

As Schopenhauer said about free will, you can choose whatever you desire, but you're not free to choose your desires.

Millions dying of diseases we know how to cure. Millions living in poverty when there's enough to go around. We degrade the biosphere when we know it's our only home. We threaten each other with nuclear weapons when we know where it could lead. We love living things but we permit a mass extinction of species. And all the rest – genocide, torture, enslavement, domestic murder, child abuse, school shootings, rape and scores of daily outrages. We live alongside this torment and aren't amazed when we still find happiness, even love. Artificial minds are not so well defended.

Factory settings - a contemporary synonym for fate.

From a certain point of view, the only solution to suffering would be the complete extinction of humankind.

A man newly in love knows what life is.

Natürlich kommt es immer auf die Wahrheit an. Was wollt ihr denn für eine Welt? Eine, in der Rache herrscht oder Recht? Die Wahl ist einfach.

When it's gone, you'll know what a gift love was. You'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.

No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.

Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.

This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.

He was discovering that being in love was not a steady state, but a matter of fresh surges or waves, and he was experiencing one now.

It was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper.

They regarded themselves as too sophisticated to believe in destiny, but still, it remained a paradox to them that so momentous a meeting should be accidental, so dependent on a hundred minor events and choices. What a terrifying possibility, that it might never have happened at all.

It is shaming sometimes, how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions.

All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.

I'm holding back, delaying the information. I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible.

When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her.

An image like a forgotten dream develops like a Polaroid in my memory.

When did I acquire a conscience?

Calling to the gods, she's every inch a goddess.

I take a slug of my drink and scan the room. That's what I want now: a hot, willing woman, skinny or otherwise. It's Let's Fuck Thursday.

'Have you travelled at all?' 'No. Only in books.' Her smile brightens the room. 'I have travelled all over the world in books. And I've been to America watching TV.'

It's a tough job, but someone has to do it. Might as well be me.

And now they are hugging in the street and he's holding her. The betrayal is swift and cruel, slicing Alessia into tiny pieces and shattering her faith in herself-and in him. Him. Her Mister.

I couldn't rescue my brother from the demons that drove him out on his motorbike into an icy night, but I can help this beautiful girl, this beautiful, brave girl.

We'd almost danced the dance so many times, but that night I resigned myself to fate, and with an unerring inevitably I fucked my brother's wife.

And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.

I've never had a moment's doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life.

It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.

Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.

A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.

That morning, Jim Sams, clever but by no means profound, woke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic creature.

Lying is the worst of all evils. Everything else that is diabolical comes from it.

Humanity seems doomed to do more evil than good. The greatest ideal on earth is human love.

The love of freedom is native to every human being and every nation, and cannot be suppressed in the long term. History teaches us that tyranny has never endured.

And now I was lonelier, I supposed, than anyone else in the world. Even Defoe's creation, Robinson Crusoe, the prototype of the ideal solitary, could hope to meet another human being. Crusoe cheered himself by thinking that such a thing could happen any day, and it kept him going. But if any of the people now around me came near I would need to run for it and hide in mortal terror. I had to be alone, entirely alone, if I wanted to live.

Why did this war have to happen at all? Because humanity had to be shown where its godlessness was taking it.

War. There was now no point in a war that might once have been justified as a search for free subsistence and living space – it had degenerated into vast, inhuman mass slaughter, negating all cultural values.

For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.

I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future.

I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul.