#din

Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else. ↗

— Mark Twain

#people

We're actors in our lives, pretendin' to be who we want people to think we are. ↗

— Simone Elkeles

#pretending #think

Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like betrayal ↗

— John Green

#john-green #reading #the-fault-in-our-stars #people

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive. ↗

— James Baldwin

#empathy #pain #reading #people

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#literacy #reading #person

All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it. ↗

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

#remember

All the secrets of the world are contained in books. Read at your own risk. ↗

— Lemony Snicket

#secret

There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy ↗

— Henry Miller

#crazy

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head. ↗

— John Green

#literature #reading #words #acting

If other people do not understand our behavior—so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being "asocial" or "irrational" in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them. How many lives have been ruined by this need to "explain," which usually implies that the explanation be "understood," i.e. approved. Let your deeds be judged, and from your deeds, your real intentions, but know that a free person owes an explanation only to himself—to his reason and his conscience—and to the few who may have a justified claim for explanation. ↗

— Erich Fromm

#freedom #life #understanding #art