#ok

Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species. ↗

— John Green

#books #fiction #on-fiction #effort

There is a comfort in conformity, a security in control, that is appealing. There is a thrill in domination, and we are all secretly attracted to violence. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#violence #war #violence

Books, books, books! I had found the secret of a garret room Piled high with cases in my father’s name; Piled high, packed large,--where, creeping in and out Among the giant fossils of my past, Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there At this or that box, pulling through the gap, In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, The first book first. And how I felt it beat Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark, An hour before the sun would let me read! My books! ↗

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

#literature #reading #terrorism

The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#magic #universe #magic

Beware the man of a single book. ↗

— St. Thomas Aquinas

#ignorance #illiteracy #limitation #ignorance

[Lighting a cigarette] Well, I'm not here to impinge on anybody else's lifestyle. If I'm in a place where I know I'm going to harm somebody's health or somebody asks me to please not smoke, I just go outside and smoke. But I do resent the way the nonsmoking mentality has been imposed on the smoking minority. Because, first of all, in a democracy, minorities do have rights. And, second, the whole pitch about smoking has gone from being a health issue to a moral issue, and when they reduce something to a moral issue, it has no place in any kind of legislation, as far as I'm concerned. ↗

— Frank Zappa

#morality #rights #smoking #democracy

What an author doesn't know could fill a book. ↗

— Holly Black

#books #knowledge #authority

Reading a book is like having the ability to dip a straw into the author’s soul and sip and slurp without lowering the water table of wisdom.
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#books #reading #soul #wisdom #authority

If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear. ↗

— Roberto Bolaño

#feedback #opinions #outspokenness #responses #responsibility

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#literature #self-discovery #path