Book Snippets Quotes

Her brother really was devastatingly handsome in a disheveled, wise-ass sort of way. Females followed him around like he was the Pied Piper of sex. Sydney constantly cautioned him about his choice in women and using protection. After all, he came from wealth. That made him ripe pickings to be some money hungry girl's sugar daddy. Especially since he went through those women like toilet paper. ~ Jenny Lyn

She's a big girl, Syd, and Deke is not an ogre. He doesn't eat little pixies for breakfast and pick his teeth with their bones. ~ Jenny Lyn

For me, language and how I use it are very important. I held back on doing a poetry book, walking the fine line between trying to be helpful and just putting more junk out there. ~ Sakyong Mipham

In Russia, the person who put Sevastopol on the literary map was Leo Tolstoy, a veteran of the siege. His fictionalized memoir The Sebastopol Sketches made him a national celebrity. Already with the first installment of the work published, Tsar Alexander II saw the propaganda value of the piece and ordered it translated into French for dissemination abroad. That made the young author very happy. Compared with Tolstoy's later novels, The Sebastopol Sketches hasn't aged well, possibly because this is not a heartfelt book. As the twenty-six-year-old Tolstoy's Sevastopol diaries reveal, not heartache but ambition drove him at the time. Making a name as an author was just an alternative to two other grand plans - founding a new religion and creating a mathematical model for winning in cards (his losses during the siege were massive even for a rich person). ~ Constantine Pleshakov

In them, she saw the sham of her life laid out like a book, the foolish belief that she, that anyone, could escape the consequences of this world, could flee from death. That was the deceit. The true serpent in the garden. ~ Libba Bray

The Guinness book is a very elitist organization. There's nothing scientific about what they do. They just have an office full of people who decide what is a record and what isn't. ~ Jack White

I've heard of a guy in Chicago who advertises in the phone book under "Wizard",though that's probably a urban legend. ~ Benedict Jacka

I am a total geek. I'm not even a closet comic book geek. I am the comic book geek. ~ Matthew Settle

I became interested in librarians while researching my first book, about obituaries. With the exception of a few showy eccentrics, like the former soldier in Hitler's army who had a sex change and took up professional whistling, the most engaging obit subjects were librarians. An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her aging patrons read as children - and was also, incidentally, the best sailor on her stretch of the Maine coast - or a man obsessed with maps, who helped automate the Library of Congress's map catalog and paved the way for wonders like Google Maps. ~ Marilyn Johnson

Because when, previously, they had wrenched a book out of his hands, he had stared into space so disconcertingly it made the rest of us feel like putting a bag over his head. Sometimes, if he didn't have a book, to occupy Joseph's eyes I would plant a cereal-box side panel in front of him, and his eyes would slide over and attach to the words, as if they could not do anything but roam and float in the air until words and numbers anchored them back into our world. ~ Aimee Bender

Seek not the power to create things under your control. Seek rather to manifest that which is beyond your control. ~ Ross Hostetter

I was fifteen then, too young to fall in-love. Or maybe it is only then, with dew of childhood still in my eyes, that I was capable of such love. I will never know, of course. ~ Danielle Trussoni

No matter what the shrinks, or the pundits, or the self-help books tell you, when it comes to love, it's luck. ~ Woody Allen

A book can change the world ... Every book a child reads creates new neurons in that child's brain. ~ Jackie French

I forget a book as soon as I finish writing it, which is not always a good thing. ~ Anne Tyler

Reading is a dialog with oneself; it is self-reflection, which cultivates profound humanity. Reading is therefore essential to our development. It expands and enriches the personality like a seed that germinates after a long time and sends forth many blossom-laden branches.
People who can say of a book, 'this changed my life' truly understand the meaning of happiness. Reading that sparks inner revolution is desperately needed to escape drowning in the rapidly advancing information society. Reading is more than intellectual ornamentation; it is a battle for the establishment for the self, a ceaseless challenge that keeps us young and vigorous. ~ Daisaku Ikeda

I never really had a childhood. I was around adults all the time. My favorite book when I was eight was "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex - But Were Afraid to Ask". I was not afraid to ask. ~ Drew Barrymore

J. E. Littlewood, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote about the law of truly large numbers in his 1986 book, "Littlewood's Miscellany." He said the average person is alert for about eight hours every day, and something happens to the average person about once a second. At this rate, you will experience 1 million events every thirty-five days. This means when you say the chances of something happening are one in a million, it also means about once a month. The monthly miracle is called Littlewood's Law. ~ David McRaney

It's funny - for a long time, I didn't know I was writing a book. I was writing stories. For me, each story took so long and took so much out of me, that when I finished it, I was like, Oh my gosh, I feel like I've poured everything from myself into this, and then I'd get depressed for a week. And then once I was ready to write a new story, I would want to write about something that was completely different, so I would search for a totally different character with a different set of circumstances. ~ Molly Antopol

But I'm not one to read a book backwards. ~ Barbra Annino

I thought and spoke much of the soul. I knew many learned words for her, I had judged her and turned her into a scientific object. I I did not consider that my soul cannot be the object of my judgment and knowledge; much more are my judgment and knowledge the objects of my soul. Therefore the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. I had to become aware that I had lost my soul.

From this we learn how the spirit of the depths considers the soul: he sees her as a living and self-existing being, and with this he contradicts the spirit of this time for whom the soul is a thing dependent on man, which lets herself be judged and arranged, and whose circumference we can grasp. I had to accept that what I had previously called my soul was not at all my soul, but a dead system. Hence I had to speak to my soul as to something far off and unknown, which did not exist through me, but through whom I existed. ~ C.G. Jung

In books I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I foresee things to come; in books warlike affairs are set forth; from books come forth the laws of peace.
All things are corrupted and decay in time; Saturn ceases not to devour the children that he generates; all the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books. ~ Richard De Bury

Always carry a book on a date so that when you get bored you can slip into the Ladies for a read. ~ Sharon Stone

When I start on a book, I have been thinking about it and making occasional notes for some time ... So I have lots of theme, locale, subjects and technical ideas ... I don't worry about long periods of not doing anything. I know my subconscious is busy. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

Do you know a book that you are willing to put under your head for a pillow when you lie dying? Very well; that is the book you want to study while you are living. There is but one such book in the world. ~ Joseph Cook

I Missed His Book, But I Read His Name"

Though authors are a dreadful clan
To be avoided if you can,
I'd like to meet the Indian,
M. Anantanarayanan.

I picture him as short and tan.
We'd meet, perhaps, in Hindustan.
I'd say, with admirable elan ,
"Ah, Anantanarayanan --

I've heard of you. The Times once ran
A notice on your novel, an
Unusual tale of God and Man."
And Anantanarayanan

Would seat me on a lush divan
And read his name -- that sumptuous span
Of 'a's and 'n's more lovely than
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan" --

Aloud to me all day. I plan
Henceforth to be an ardent fan
of Anantanarayanan --
M. Anantanarayanan. ~ John Updike

And you know, when you take on something like this, you read a book like this, you know that it's going to be an adventure. That's part of what draws you to it. ~ Lawrence Kasdan

It will be awesome audiobooks to go like films, but more longer! ~ Deyth Banger

As I got older, I discovered that nothing within me cried out for a baby. My womb did not seem to have come equipped with that famously ticking clock. Unlike so many of my friends, I did not ache with longing whenever I saw an infant. (Though I did ache with longing, it is true, whenever I saw a good used-book shop) ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub-meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around ~ Douglas Adams

As the writer of a pseudonymous book, I gave up my own accumulated history as a novelist and became what I had been as a child: unnamed, unidentified, unacknowledged. Invisible. In a very real sense, what I hope for in the process of imagining a book is to disappear. ~ Susan Shreve

If writing is the ultimate act of self-pleasure, then mine certainly qualifies as masturbatory.
Still, if you gave me a box of pens and a box of tissues, and then locked me in a room with nothing else but skin mags and blank notebooks, I'd be lying if I told you I'd run out of pens before tissues.
The nice thing about writing is that you actually get to share it with other people when you're done, which usually doesn't go over so well with spent bodily fluids, but ideally you don't want readers walking away from your book with the sneaking suspicion that they've just spent hours of their precious lives watching you masturbate.
Unless of course it's that type of publication. ~ Arthur Graham

But what was between them went further than a mating ceremony or a back carving or a witnessed exchange of commitment. He couldn't put his finger on the why of it ... but she was his missing puzzle piece, the twelfth in his dozen, the first and the last pages of his book. And at some level that was all he needed. ~ J.R. Ward

I think I wrote 'The Trysting Place' in about three weeks. But it was inexperience that made me have to do that. I didn't feel good about the book all the time I was writing it. It felt a bit like wading through molasses. ~ Mary Balogh

Holy sea turtles!" - Arabella Valli, The Equinox (Book Two of the Summer Solstice Series) ~ K.K. Allen

I would never put the words 'rape ' and 'play ' in the same sentence. I there's rape, there's no play, " he says. ~ Mya Robarts

As a guide I had only my own feelings for what is appealing or moving, and for many the guide was inevitably often at fault. Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer. But ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it's based on is whether it's good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and try to rewrite it. ~ Chuck Klosterman

The way to stop feeling guilty is to read stuff - I'm not saying my book, but works by Bertrand Russell or Oscar Wilde, people who weren't losers but who didn't believe in the work ethic, and argued this thing about guilt or wrote philosophy about idleness. ~ Tom Hodgkinson

Blue Book was now under direct orders to debunk ... I remember the conversations around the conference table in which it was suggested that Walt Disney or some educational cartoon producer be enlisted in [the] debunking process. ~ J. Allen Hynek

He recognized her deft hand and eye for detail immediately. He flipped through the pages, past vignettes of the dairymaid and her vague-featured gentleman engaged in a courtship of sorts: a kiss on the hand, a whisper in the ear. By the book's midpoint, the chit's voluminous petticoats were up around her ears, and the illustrations comprised a sequence of quite similar poses in varying locales. Not just the dairy, but a carriage, the larder, in a hayloft lit with candles and strewn with…were those rose petals?
I'll be damned.
Gray was fast divining the true source of the French painting master's mythic exploits. More unsettling by far, however, as he perused the book, he noted a subtle alteration in the gentleman lover's features. With each successive illustration, the hero appeared taller, broader in the shoulders, and his hair went from a cropped style to collar length in the space of two pages.
The more pages Gray turned, the more he recognized himself.
It was unmistakable. She'd used him as the model for these bawdy illustrations. She'd sketched him in secret; not once, but many times. And here he'd nearly gone mad with envy over each scrap of foolscap she'd inked for once crewman or another. His emotions underwent a dizzying progression-from surprised, to flattered, to (with the benefit of one especially inventive situation in an orchard) undeniably aroused.
But as he lingered over a nude study of this amalgam of the real him and some picaresque ~ Tessa Dare

It's not that I liked lunacy for the sake of lunacy, but if a writer can truly surprise me without throwing logic completely out the window, then that writer has me for good. Most book surprises aren't surprising at all but follow a formula, like the dead body that's certain to lurch out of a wreck being explored by deep-sea divers in just about every book that involves wrecks and divers. ~ Will Schwalbe

We don't ask why God chose as his prophet a stutterer with a public speaking phobia. But we should. The book of Exodus is short on explication, but its stories suggest that introversion plays yin to the yang of extroversion; that the medium is not always the message; and that people followed Moses because his words were thoughtful, not because he spoke them well. ~ Susan Cain