Book Quotes
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To whom do I give my new elegant little book? Cui dono lepidum novum libellum?
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I don't necessarily read everything. I read what I need to read to inspire the book I'm trying to finish.
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Happiness is not something that happens to people but something that they make happen.” His research shows that people are happiest in a state he has named “flow.” In a state of flow, you are one with what you are doing. Children know flow well. They call it play. Play is one of the childhood roots of adult happiness. But there are others—four others, to be exact—in the schema I outline in this book.
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I'm a bit of a book worm, so a lot of the songs I write are inspired by books.
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It's nice when critics say 'Emperor of the Air' is an important book of stories.
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Lady stand on line before me, speak English so good, like genius, in America only four years, I ashamed tell twenty-two years; I tell twenty!” To class she went only once. “I don’t go back,” she said emphatically. “Too foolish book, Dick and Jane.” She shrugged disdainfully. “Not Tolstoi!"
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One of the things I enjoy most is to be left alone with a book.
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As a child, my number one best friend was the librarian in my grade school. I actually believed all those books belonged to her.
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Beware of a man of one book.
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Books are all right, but dead men's brains are no good unless you mix a live one's with them.
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We can all learn from every text. Reading the work that disgusts you can only strengthen your core beliefs. I could teach a semester-long course based only on reading the local telephone book. All stories can be taught in valuable ways.
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You've read half the books in this house? This whole house?" "Well, approximately half." Sticky said. "To be more accurate, I suppose I've read more like" - his eyes went up as he calculated - "three sevenths? Yes, three sevenths." "Only three sevenths?" said Kate, pretending to look disappointed. "And here I was prepared to be impressed.
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It is not for nothing that Skaldin in one part of his book quotes Adam Smith: we have seen that both his views and the character of his arguments in many respects repeat the theses of that great ideologist of the progressive bourgeoisie.
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I stop and think before I start a new book and ask myself do I really want to spend the next year or two or three with these characters because if I don't, then I shouldn't be writing about them.
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That's all you have to ask from yourself writing a book. That it's the best you can do and that you did it without any ego involved and that you did it for somebody else. That's the best you can do.
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..holding a book but reading the empty spaces.
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For me, writing is more a process of discovering the book than planning it.
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You're all alone when you're a writer. Sometimes you just feel you need a humanity bath. Even a ride on the subway will do that. But it's much more interesting to talk about books. After all, that's what life used to be for writers: they talk books, politics, history, America. Nothing has replaced that.
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A book is judged, not by its reference to life, but by its reference to other books.
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There's no book that absolutely everyone loves.
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The illustrators work so much harder on the books than the writers do. I mean, that's so much work doing what they do, and it's terrible for them.
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This is a book about getting naked—not physically, but spiritually. It’s about stripping away the symbols and status of public religion—the Sunday-dress version people often call “organized religion.” And it’s about attending to the well-being of the soul clothed only in naked human skin.
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One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons.
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You take a book, and what can you do with a book? Can you cook an egg on a book? No. Can you dig a hole? No. Is it a good weapon? No. The fact that it's good for nothing kind of makes it almost all-important.
