#books

Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head. They’re all the time talkin’ about it, but it’s jus’ in their head. ↗

— John Steinbeck

#heaven #land #men

Was there ever a more horrible blasphemy than the statement that all the knowledge of God is confined to this or that book? How dare men call God infinite, and yet try to compress Him within the covers of a little book! ↗

— Swami Vivekananda

#god #religion #men

But in a private library, you can at any moment converse with Socrates or Shakespeare or Carlyle or Dumas or Dickens or Shaw or Barrie or Galsworthy. And there is no doubt that in these books you see these men at their best. They wrote for you. They "laid themselves out," they did their ultimate best to entertain you, to make a favorable impression. You are necessary to them as an audience is to an actor; only instead of seeing them masked, you look into their innermost heart of heart. ↗

— William Lyon Phelps

#men

Once you fight the demons that live in your heart, the ones that live outside will never knock you door. ↗

— Birdy Fogh

#self-help-books #inspirational

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#inspirational

Time… Once it’s gone, it belongs to the past. We do not hold on to the now, and We do not treasure the future… We keep receiving this present, but we never open and cherish it until it is too late. Until it comes no more. ↗

— Michelle Horst

#books #future #inspirational #life-and-living #present

One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The great Rudyard Kipling is one of a number of people to have suffered from this. I keep wondering to myself what this peculiar contempt towards anything related to childhood is all about. ↗

— Michael Ende

#childhood #children-s #children-s-books #good-sense #literature

People keep asking me, "Where do you get the ideas for your books?" From the worst moments in my life. I call that "literature through disaster." I got the whole Tales from Earth's End Saga that way, as well as Numenon. Don't be afraid of the hard times. ↗

— Sandy Nathan

#inspirational #sandy-nathan #tales-from-earth-s-end #using-hard-timesideas-for-books #where-to-get-inspiration

Any book which inspires us to lead a better life is a good book. ↗

— Fulton J. Sheen

#inspirational

I wrote a book. It sucked. I wrote nine more books. They sucked, too. Meanwhile, I read every single thing I could find on publishing and writing, went to conferences, joined professional organizations, hooked up with fellow writers in critique groups, and didn’t give up. Then I wrote one more book. ↗

— Beth Revis

#debut-author #first-drafts #inspiration #persistence #publishing