Address Book Quotes

The church was stuffed with mourners, of course. No one from work - I tried to keep my life and my magazine separate - but otherwise everybody Andrew and I knew was there. It was disorientating, like having the entire contents of one's address book dressed in black and exported into pews in non alphabetical order. ~ Chris Cleave

She rose from her bed full of new resolutions. 'We must get out and about more,' she told her startled mother. 'We must try different things. We are getting groovy.' She drew up a list of events and activities: concerts, day trips, public meetings. She went in a fit through her address book, writing letters to old friends. She borrowed novels from the library by authors who had never interested her before. She began to teach herself Esperanto, reciting phrases as she polished and swept. ~ Sarah Waters

The Social Register is a nice address book for some people, but that's about it. ~ Dina Merrill

Old age is - a lot of crossed off names in an address book. ~ Ronald Blythe

The women you've slept with, the ones you never did but primed for a future encounter, the ones who seemed interested but then suddenly stopped texting: Unless you do something horribly wrong, they never completely disappear. A lonely night, a cheating boyfriend, a sudden breakup, an attack of low self-esteem, an attack of high self-esteem - anything can, out of the blue, send them scrolling through their address book looking for validation, for security, for conversation, for adoration, for the fantasy of you filling some empty space in her life. ~ Neil Strauss

People have no memory of phone numbers now because of the cell phone - their address book is in a cell phone. ~ Gordon Bell

I have a beautiful address book a friend gave me in 1966. I literally cannot open it again. Ever. It sits on the shelf with over a hundred names crossed out. What is there to say? There are no words. I'll never understand why it happened to us. ~ Jerry Herman

I felt suffocated. And alone. More alone than ever. Every year, I ostentatiously crossed out of my address book any friend who'd made a racist remark, neglected those whose only ambition was a new car and a Club Med vacation, and forgot all those who played the Lottery. I loved fishing and silence. Walking the hills. Drinking cold Cassis, Lagavulin, or Oban late into the night. I didn't talk much. Had opinions about everything. Life and death. Good and evil. I was a film buff. Loved music. I'd stopped reading contemporary novels. More than anything, I loathed half-hearted, spineless people. ~ Jean-Claude Izzo

There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book. ~ Carson McCullers

A terrorist doesn't let strangers into her flat because they might be undercover police or intelligence agents, but her children bring their mates home and they run all over the place The terrorist doesn't know that one of these kids has bugged every room in her house, made copies of all her computer files and stolen her address book. The kid works for CHERUB CHERUB agents are aged between 10 and 17. They live in the real world, slipping under adult radar and getting information that sends criminals and terrorists to jail. ~ Robert Muchamore

On way. He OK? Aeron
Coming. Something wrong? Lucian
Take me out of your address book. William ~ Gena Showalter

Dear Daniel,
How do you break up with your boyfriend in a way that tells him, "I don't want to sleep with you on a regular basis anymore, but please be available for late night booty calls if I run out of other options"?
Lily
Charlotte, NC

Dear Lily,
The story's so old you can't tell it anymore without everyone groaning, even your oldest friends with the last of their drinks shivering around the ice in their dirty glasses. The music playing is the same album everyone has. Those shoes, everybody has the same shoes on. It looked a little like rain so on person brought an umbrella, useless now in the starstruck clouded sky, forgotten on the way home, which is how the umbrella ended up in her place anyway. Everyone gets older on nights like this.

And still it's a fresh slap in the face of everything you had going, that precarious shelf in the shallow closet that will certainly, certainly fall someday. Photographs slipping into a crack to be found by the next tenant, that one squinter third from the left laughing at something your roommate said, the coaster from that place in the city you used to live in, gone now. A letter that seemed important for reasons you can't remember, throw it out, the entry in the address book you won't erase but won't keep when you get a new phone, let it pass and don't worry about it. You don't think about them; "I haven't thought about them in forever," you would say if anybody brought it up, and nobody does." ~ Daniel Handler

Death is hacking away at my address book and party lists. ~ Mason Cooley

We've patented the idea ... of using the address book as a place to declare that you like a brand. By so doing, the brand has now got your permission to send you personal messages - it could be money off offers, coupons, promotions, just information, whatever is appropriate. ~ Keith Teare

This address book was a snapshot of her world in 1951: layers of friends and acquaintances accumulated over the years, and a few new ones, surely. But who really mattered in this list? Who telephoned her? What numbers did she dial? If someone found our smartphone contacts today, wouldn't they see our favorites, reconstruct the history of our calls, read our texts and emails, listen to our messages? They would know our entires lives. This book of hers was silent as the grave. ~ Brigitte Benkemoun

I frantically opened my address book and searched it for someone, anyone, who'd moved me, who'd been good in both bed and brain. No. A slew of the so-so. ~ Maria Dahvana Headley

One graduate student told me, "When the Apocalypse comes, you want to know an archaeologist, because we know how to make fire, catch food, and create hill forts," and I promptly added her to my address book. Knows how to make hill forts - who can say when that will come in handy? ~ Marilyn Johnson

My address book of dealers and private collectors, smugglers and fixers, agents, runners and the peculiar assortment of art hangers-on was longer than anyone else's in the field. ~ Thomas Hoving

Men love watches with multiple functions. My husband has one that is a combination address book, telescope and piano. ~ Rita Rudner

Don't add people to your subscriber list just because they once wrote you a note. Or once answered a note you wrote to them. Don't put your address book into your newsletter database. Let your readers sign up. ~ M.J. Rose

I can get my voicemail transcribed and sent to me as e-mail. I want to be able to have my address book and all my life come up on my TV and video chat. The whole telecommunications experience through a wire is still very relevant. ~ Brian L. Roberts

One of the most oft-quoted records of the siege, scribbled in pencil over the pages of a pocket address book, is that kept by twelve-year-old Tanya Savicheva:

28 December 1941 at 12.30 a.m. – Zhenya died. 25 January 1942 at 3 p.m. – Granny died. 17 March at 5 a.m. – Lyoka died. 13 April at 2 a.m. – Uncle Vasya died. 10 May at 4 p.m. – Uncle Lyosha died. 13 May at 7.30 a.m. – Mama died. The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Only Tanya is left. ~ Anna Reid

You worry about your parents, siblings, spouses dying, yet no one prepares you for your friends dying. Every time you flip through your address book, you are reminded of it---she's gone, he's gone, they're both gone. Names and numbers and addresses scratched out. Page after page of gone, gone, gone. The sense of loss that you feel isn't just for the person. It is the death of your youth, the death of fun, of warm conversations and too many drinks, of long weekends, of shared pains and victories and jealousies, of secrets that you couldn't tell anyone else, of memories that only you two shared. ~ Michael Zadoorian

Her address book confirmed it, the pages inhabited equally by the living and the dead ... Each name called up raucous dinner parties and gin-and-tonics on sunny patios, lazy Saturday afternoons at the swim club, station wagons filled with noisy boys in polyester baseball uniforms. ~ Stewart O'Nan

The knife hit deep, suddenly: "Jean Louise, your brother worried about your thoughtlessness until the day he died!" It was raining softly on his grave now, in the hot evening. You never said it, you never even thought it; if you'd thought it you'd have said it. You were like that. Rest well, Jem. She rubbed salt into it: I'm thoughtless, all right. Selfish, self-willed, I eat too much, and I feel like the Book of Common Prayer. Lord forgive me for not doing what I should have done and for doing what I shouldn't have done - oh hell. ~ Harper Lee

There can be no be no better instruction ... than that every man who is to deal with his neighbor to follow these commandments. 'Whatsoever ye would that others should do unto you, do ye also unto them,' and 'Love thy neighbor as thyself.' If these were always followed, then everything would instruct and arrange itself; then no law books nor courts nor judicial actions would be required. All things would quietly and simply be set to rights, for everyone's heart and conscience would guide them. ~ Martin Luther

Where I have seen good I shall speak of it with pleasure, and where I have seen the reverse, I shall try to be silent; for a book is meant to give pleasure, and pain that is inflicted in black and white lasts for ever. ~ Isabel Burton

Those who first introduced compulsory education into American life knew exactly why children should go to school and learn to read: to save their souls ... Consistent with this goal, the first book written and printed for children in America was titled Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes in either England, drawn from the Breasts of both Testaments for their Souls' Nourishment. ~ Dorothy H Cohen

You know, I think some people fear that if they like the wrong kind of book, it will reflect poorly on them. It can go with genre, too. Somebody will say, "I won't read science fiction, or I won't read young adult novels" - all of those genres can become prisons. I always find it funny when the serious literary world will make a little crack in its wall and allow in one pet genre writer and crown them and say, "Well Elmore Leonard is actually a real writer." Or "Stephen King is actually a really good writer." Generally speaking, you know you're being patronized when somebody uses the word "actually ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

In his book, Knowing God, J.I. Packer paints a brilliant picture of the value of Scripture stating, "As it would be cruel to an Amazonian tribesman to fly him to London, put him down without explanation in Trafalgar Square and leave him, as one who knew nothing of English or England, to fend for himself, so we are cruel to ourselves if we try to live in this world without knowing about the God whose world it is and who runs it."3 ~ Jed Jurchenko

Along this particular stretch of line no express had ever passed. All the trains
the few that there were
stopped at all the stations. Denis knew the names of those stations by heart. Bole, Tritton, Spavin Delawarr, Knipswich for Timpany, West Bowlby, and, finally, Camlet-on-the-Water. ~ Aldous Huxley

He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know. ~ Lao-Tzu

Superheroes are also about immigrants. Superman, the prototype of all superheroes, is a prototypical immigrant. His homeland was in crisis, so his parents sent him to America in search of a better life. He has two names, one American, Clark Kent, and the other foreign, Kal-El. He wears two sets of clothes and lives in between two cultures. He loves his new country, but a part of him still longs for his old one. ~ Gene Luen Yang

Sometimes funny is all you've got. ~ Amy Harmon

Predictability is boring! I want a book to take me someplace I haven't been before, show me sights I haven't seen, make me ponder questions I may not have pondered before. ~ Therese Fowler

I like marriage, family life and I wish to get married again. But opting out of an unhappy marriage was a duty toward myself & my future. ~ Rossana Condoleo

But there's also the fact that in my experience most of my readers are first and foremost plain old-fashioned readers. Good readers. They're not looking for cozy brand-name output and that means I don't have to give it to 'em. They're not lazy and have little patience with pre-fab beach-bag books or Oprah's opine du jour. They're questers.
They know that every now and then you're gonna get lucky and pure gold like King and Straub's Black House will simply drop into your lap at the local supermarket but after that, if your bent is horror and suspense fiction, you're gonna have to get your hands dirty and root around for more. Find a Ramsey Campbell or an Edward Lee. They expect diversity and search it out. They want what all good readers want - to be taken somewhere in a book or a story that's really worth visiting for a while. Maybe even worth thinking about after.
If that place happens to scare the hell out of you all the better. ~ Jack Ketchum

A day out-of- doors, someone I loved to talk with, a good book and some simple food and music - that would be rest.
- Eleanor Roosevelt ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Instead of working hard to keep their share of a shrinking pie, or working even harder to make sure the industry stays as is, I think the most essential thing legacy book industry players can do is set up independent ventures with great people and little interference and work really hard to put themselves out of business by starting at the bottom, not by reinforcing the top. ~ Seth Godin

Often sugar cravings are linked to emotional needs; when we learn to identify those emotions and when they arise, we can go right to the root and address the trigger rather than reach for a pint of ice cream. (p. 221) ~ Alejandro Junger

Another success is the post-office, with its educating energy augmented by cheapness and guarded by a certain religious sentimentin mankind; so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea over land and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look upon as a fine meter of civilization. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice. ~ Edmund Wilson

Books are the depositary of everything that is most honourable to man. ~ William Godwin

Books can teach you many nice comebacks. ~ Tamuna Tsertsvadze

You realize I had half my guard out searching for you?" Eddard Stark said when they were alone. "Septa Mordane is beside herself with fear. She's in the sept praying for your safe return. Arya, you know you are never to go beyond the castle gates without my leave."
"I didn't go out the gates," she blurted. "Well, I didn't mean to. I was down in the dungeons, only they turned into this tunnel. It was all dark, and I didn't have a torch or a candle to see by, so I had to follow. I couldn't go back the way I came on account of the monsters. Father, they were talking about killing you! Not the monsters, the two men. They didn't see me, I was being still as stone and quiet as a shadow, but I heard them. They said you had a book and a bastard and if one Hand could die, why not a second? Is that the book? Jon's the bastard, I bet. ~ George R R Martin

I don't see myself as experimenting in any conscious way, it's perhaps that certain books require different densities of language. ~ John Scott

I am forced to reexamine. Thomas Merton's words about the Bible in general apply to the Old Testament in particular: There is, in a word, nothing comfortable about the Bible - until we manage to get so used to it that we make it comfortable for ourselves ... Have we ceased to question the book and be questioned by it? Have we ceased to fight it? Then perhaps our reading is no longer serious. For most people, the understanding of the Bible is, and should be, a struggle: not merely to find meanings that can be looked up in books of reference, but to come to terms personally with the stark scandal and contradiction in the Bible itself ... Let us not be too sure we know the Bible just because we have learned not to be astonished at it, just because we have learned not to have problems with it. ~ Philip Yancey

I had an insanely long commute - New York to D.C. - when I worked at 'National Geographic.' I hate to waste time, so I spent my time by writing about my life on the premise that I might be able to pitch those as short essays to magazines. It wasn't until later that I realized that I was writing a book. ~ Charles M. Blow

Guess what, Callie? Love isn't safe. It's messed up and crazy and it hurts like hell. But why would you want anything less than what we had? Jesus, what we had - it was more than love. It was…Dammit. Why do I have to explain this to you? I'm empty without you, and no other woman, no friend or brother - no one can take your place. You're part of me. And I'm sorry but I'm not buying that you've moved on. We messed up, and we got lost, but I will be damned if I accept that you'd rather have some boring, bland, safe relationship than me. ~ Erika Kelly

I couldn't remember the last time I had stayed up into the squeaky hours of the night because I couldn't put a book down, and that was a tragedy. ~ Shannon Hale

A man must be master of his hours and days, not their servant. ~ William Frederick Book

Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today. ~ Herman Wouk

One of the joys of a really good book is that you're so into the world of the book, you forget what you're looking at is words on a page. ~ Rick Yancey

I often lose myself in the Sudoku-like challenges of making a book work. ~ David Mitchell

Because in addition to joining dangerous gangs and having parties, this Noah also goes out with girls, keeps his hair buzzed and tidy, hangs at The Spot, watches sports with Dad. For all other sixteen-year-old boys: fine. For Noah, it signifies one thing: death of the spirit. A book with the wrong story in it. ~ Jandy Nelson

Death makes me realize how deeply I have internalized the agnosticism I preach in all my books. I consider dogmatic belief and dogmatic denial very childish forms of conceit in a world of infinitely whirling complexity. None of us can see enough from one corner of space-time to know "all" about the rest of space-time. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

Every book contains a secret – even the writer doesn't always know what it is. ~ Carla H. Krueger

Bro, it's dark. You can't go to a strange building with a mysterious address in the dark. Haven't you ever seen a horror movie? ~ John Green

His entire body was pleading for reassurance, and if her whole love was not enough what else could she give him to cure his doubt? ~ Anais Nin

The Male Factor is the singularly best business book for women I've read in years. This well-researched yet thoroughly readable book is rich with rare insights into how men really see women in the workplace-and how with a few simple adjustments you can even the playing field. ~ Lois P Frankel

I still have a full-time day job, which is why it took me five years to write An Ear to the Ground, and why I won't have another book finished by next week. ~ Ken Thompson

a digital design engineer, you would spend long hours going through the TTL Data Book familiarizing yourself with the types of TTL chips that were available. Once you knew all your tools, you could actually build the computer I showed in Chapter 17 out of TTL chips. Wiring the chips together is a lot easier than wiring individual transistors ~ Charles Petzold

We've all had the experience of you pick up a book, you can't get into it, you can't concentrate.Then one day you pick up the same book and you don't hear the phone ring. You're totally absorbed. Same thing I have to do every day. When you get into that special place of unconsciousness - you get it listening to great music or seeing a great movie - it just takes you out of yourself, out of this whole world. There's no feeling quite like it. ~ T.C. Boyle

I won't read a new graphic comic novel until the writer has completed the entire series. I got burned a few times when I got turned on to a book, plowed through it only to find out the author was in the middle of writing the next. ~ Nick Offerman

Every book is a new journey. I never felt I was an expert on a subject as I embarked on a project. ~ David McCullough

I held it close to my face and smelled the ink. I have always loved the smell of ink in a new book. ~ Chaim Potok