Books Of Ember Quotes

When someone has been mean to you, why would you want to be good to them?' 'You wouldn't want to. That's what makes it hard. You do it anyway. Being good is hard. Much harder than being bad. ~ Jeanne DuPrau

Now Doon seemed to care for his new friends more than he did for her. Every time she thought about him she felt a thud of pain, like a bruised place inside her. ~ Jeanne DuPrau

Doon was touched. Kenny looked like a tiny little wisp, but there was something strong inside him.
People of Sparks
~ Jeanne DuPrau

...I do write books that are female oriented. In my books, the female characters are always searching for something and they often find it, and what they find is themselves and their own strength. I want girls to understand there has been a long history of strong women... Women have always been oppressed but managed to see their own way, and there is a long tradition of females doing what they want to do, and that's what girls can do. They can have selves of their own, a definition of themselves.'" ~Virginia Hamilton in Shireen Dodson's the Mother-Daughter Book Club ~ Shireen Dodson

The Idiot. I have read it once, and find that I don't remember the events of the book very well--or even all the principal characters. But mostly the 'portrait of a truly beautiful person' that dostoevsky supposedly set out to write in that book. And I remember how Myshkin seemed so simple when I began the book, but by the end, I realized how I didn't understand him at all. the things he did. Maybe when I read it again it will be different. But the plot of these dostoevsky books can hold such twists and turns for the first-time reader-- I guess that's b/c he was writing most of these books as serials that had to have cliffhangers and such.
But I make marks in my books, mostly at parts where I see the author's philosophical points standing in the most stark relief. My copy of Moby Dick is positively full of these marks. The Idiot, I find has a few...
Part 3, Section 5. The sickly Ippolit is reading from his 'Explanation' or whatever its called. He says his convictions are not tied to him being condemned to death. It's important for him to describe, of happiness: "you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it." That it's the process of life--not the end or accomplished goals in it--that matter. Well. Easier said than lived!
Part 3, Section 6. more of Ippolit talking--about a christian mindset. He references Jesus's parable of The Word as seeds that grow in men, couched in a description of how people ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It seems to me that I have always wanted to say the same thing in my books: that life is one, that mystery is all around us, that yeterday, today and tomorrow are all spread out in the pattern of eternity, together, and that although love may wear many faces in the incomprehensible panorama of time, in the heart that loves, it is always the same. ~ Robert Nathan

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload h ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dear and most respected bookcase! I welcome your existence, which has for over one hundred years been devoted to the radiant ideals of goodness and justice. ~ Anton Chekhov

Libraries should be open to all - except the censor.
[Response to questionnaire in Saturday Review, October 29 1960] ~ John F. Kennedy

I always have some way of putting the stories together that works for the book. I've always switched points of view in my books. I'm a Gemini. ~ Louise Erdrich

Lehman Brothers' Repo 105 program - which temporarily moved billions of dollars of liability off the bank's books at the end of each quarter and replaced them a few days later at the start of the next quarter - was intentionally designed to hide the firm's financial weaknesses. This was a carefully crafted fraud, detailed by a court-appointed Lehman examiner. But no former Lehman executive ever faced criminal prosecution for it. Contrast this with the fact that a teenager who sells an ounce of marijuana can be put away for years. ~ Robert B. Reich

I think in terms of educating a group of readers, MFA programs are very good. I just think the model of MFA programs in which a young poet goes through the program, publishes a series of books, gets teaching jobs, that's a bit at risk. ~ Edward Hirsch

My first job out of college was as an editorial assistant in a New York publishing house. Being an editorial assistant is the purgatory would-be editors must endure before they can ascend the ladder and begin acquiring books on their own. I spent a year filing paperwork, writing copy, and typing rejection letters. ~ Lincoln Child

Americans like fat books and thin women. ~ Russell Baker

That old if you 'need anything, let me know,' is a total crock. You hear people say it all the time, but you never see anyone actually call up the person who said it and say, "Hey, remember when you said to let you know if i needed anything? Well, I'm feeling really overwhelmed. Could you please come clean my kitchen, I'd feel like I had a bit of a head start." You will never hear someone say that, because then the person asking the other person to clean their kitchen is seen as a helpless, incompetent dick. -Diana Rowland (My life as a white trash zombie) ~ Diana Rowland

Remember picture books are the closest form of writing to a poem. Even though they don't have to rhyme, they must be poetic. They must be written so the worst actress can read with comfort and expression. ~ Kirby Larson

I think imagination is one of the greatest blessings of life, and while one can lose oneself in a book one can never be thoroughly unhappy. ~ Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt

There are certain songs, and books, and films that are like points of high ground in the memory. Like they are even larger than your own experiences. They never go away. ~ Graham Joyce

[Books] were devices as crassly practical for storing or transmitting language, as the latest Silicon Valley miracles. But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our mind and souls, in a spiritual adventure. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Would it not be wiser, then, to remit this part of reading and to allow the critics, the gowned and furred authorities of the library, to decide the question of the book's absolute value for us? Yet how impossible! We may stress the value of sympathy; we may try to sink our identity as we read. But we know that we cannot sympathise wholly or immerse ourselves wholly; there is always a demon in us who whispers, "I hate, I love", and we cannot silence him. Indeed, it is precisely because we hate and we love that our relation with the poets and novelists is so intimate that we find the presence of another person intolerable. And even if the results are abhorrent and our judgments are wrong, still our taste, the nerve of sensation that sends shocks through us, is our chief illuminant; we learn through feeling; we cannot suppress our own idiosyncrasy without impoverishing it. ~ Virginia Woolf

I guess if there's one thing I can say about the 21st century, it's that the 21st century is all flash and no substance… everything is digital, nothing but files of invisible electronic data on computers and mindless zombies on their cellular phones… it's sad how because of the digital age, society is ultimately doomed. Nothing in the digital age is real anymore, and you know, they say celluloid film and ray tube televisions and maybe even paper might become obsolete in this century? …What's most annoying is that nobody cares, they've just learned to accept the digital age and get addicted to it… none of them are ever going to step up and say to the world, "you're all a bunch of sheep!" and even if they did say anything, I doubt anyone would listen… they're all too obsessed and attached to their cellular phones and overly big televisions and whatever other moronic things they've got these days… it almost makes me want an apocalypse to happen, to erase digital technology and force the world to start over again. ~ Rebecca McNutt

I think it's a fallacy to say that a good book sells itself. It doesn't happen. I'm a voracious reader and I can give you a long list of books which should have been best sellers but they aren't. How can you buy a book if you haven't heard of it? ~ Amish Tripathi

One can think of a secretary actively operating a filing system, of a librarian actively cataloguing books, of a computer actively sorting out information. The mind however does not actively sort out information. The information sorts itself out and organises itself into patterns. The mind is passive. The mind only provides an opportunity for the information to behave in this way. The mind provides a special environment in which information can become self-organising. This special environment is a memory surface with special characteristics. ~ Edward De Bono

I write at a desk. I have a room of my own where I can have my computer. I write in there, usually directly onto my computer. It used to be the room where my two sons used to sleep with the dog and the cat, but now it's all mine. It has pictures of art from my books on the walls. ~ Eve Bunting

Books leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of leaving, hesitations. Books leave certain sounds, a certain pacing; mostly they leave the elusive, which is all the story. They leave much more than the words. ~ Dionne Brand

I'm a geophysicist and all my earth science books when I was a student, I had to give the wrong answer to get an A. We used to ridicule continental drift. It was something we laughed at. We learned of Marshall Kay's geosynclinal cycle, which is a bunch of crap. ~ Robert Ballard

Is not he? I had him along for his books and potions, and kept him for his character. Profundities of disgruntled sentiments, injured spirits, wounded affection, bitterness, marginality, disdain of establishment - I knew we should get on famously. ~ Michelle Franklin

He pretended to stretch his arms, in order to shift even closer to her. (This isn't in the history books, of course, but we'd like to point out that this was the first time a young man had ever tried that particular arm-stretch move on a young woman. Edward was the inventor of the arm stretch, a tactic that teenage boys have been using for centuries.) ~ Cynthia Hand

Judge not the value of a friend by the number of boy- or girlfriends they helped you get. But by the number of books they've recommended to you. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

It is an accurate statement that the followers of Witchcraft do not usually proselytize, which means you aren't going to find us standing on your local street corner thumping our Books of Shadows. Nor do you have to worry about jumping out of the shower to answer our serene and smiling faces at the door with your clothes stuck to various uncomfortable places on your wet body. But just because we (hopefully) aren't the forcible type doesn't mean we don't exist. ~ Silver RavenWolf

He does manage the bookstore, which is currently my favorite place on earth." Her eyes glazed over. "All those books. If I married him, I could probably work there the rest of my life. Nothing would make me happier."
"What about love?" Ve asked.
"Oh," Harper said solemnly. "I love books. ~ Heather Blake

There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count - leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries ~ Italo Calvino

You don't go to other books and take little pieces because although say a romantic scene may have been many times before all the details of who it is, where it is, are so intertwined in that text that it's easier to write it from scratch. ~ Bill Gates

MAY it please your Honors: I was desired by one of the court to look into the books, and consider the question now before them concerning Writs of Assistance. ~ James Otis

Why, there's the air, the sky, the morning, the evening, moonlight, my friends, women, the beautiful architecture of Paris to study, three big books to write and all sorts of other things. Anaxagoras used to say that he was in the world in order to admire the sun. And then I have the good fortune to be able to spend my days from morning to night in the company of a man of genius - myself - and it's very pleasant. ~ Victor Hugo

Auguste preferred women. He told me I would grow into it. I told him that he could get heirs and I would read books. I was ... nine? Ten? I thought I was already grown up. The hazards of overconfidence. ~ C.S. Pacat

It had a crisp paper jacket, unlike the paper-covered library books I was used to, and the way the pages parted, I could tell I was the first to open it ... I valued that half-dream state of being lost in a book so much that I limited the number of pages I let myself read each day in order to put off the inevitable end, my banishment from that world. I still do this. ~ Allison Hoover Bartlett

By nature's law, every man has a right to seize and retake by force his own property taken from him by another, by force of fraud. Nor is this natural right among the first which is taken into the hands of regular government after it is instituted. It was long retained by our ancestors. It was a part of their common law, laid down in their books, recognized by all the authorities, and regulated as to circumstances of practice. ~ Thomas Jefferson

If all shy, soulful young women who dreamed of becoming writers for a living actually could do that, imagine the library we would have. ~ Sarah Elwell

I've had a lot of books rejected in my time. My first novel, which didn't get published, was, with hindsight, crashingly dull. ~ Helen Fielding

People wandered in for books and conversation. They brought their stories to her, some bound, and some known by heart. She recognized some of the stories as real, and some as fiction. But she honored them all, though she didn't buy every one. ~ Louise Penny

As for what concerns me in particular I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what's more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you. Look into it more carefully! Why, we don't even know what living means now, what it is, and what it is called? Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men--men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalised man. We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Men saw the stars at the edge of the sea They thought great thoughts about liberty Poets wrote down words that did fit Writers wrote books Thinkers thought about it. ~ Van Morrison

In the way of bookish children, she carried her books into trees and along the banks of chuckling creeks, weaving her way along their slippery shores with the sort of grace that belongs only to bibliophiles protecting their treasures. ~ Seanan McGuire

Two things can make life meaningful: books and love ... I already have books. Now I am setting off in search of love. ~ Joel Dicker

Lao Tzu's first paragraph in the book "Tao Te Ching" is that the Tao that can be told is not the absolute Tao.

Lao Tzu has his own logic, the logic of paradoxes, the logic of life.

To understand Tao, you will have to create eyes.

Lao Tzu believes in the unity of opposites, because that is how life is.

The Tao can be communicated, but it can only be communicated from heart to heart, from being to being, from love to love, from silence to silence.

Truth is always realized in silence. In silence, the truth is realized.

You reach to truth through silence.

All spiritual books tries to say something that can not be said in the hope that a thirst, a longing, is created in your heart to know the truth.

Tao is totality. Life exists through the tension of the opposites, the meeting of the opposites.

Lao Tzu says that the opposite poles of life are not really opposites, but complementaries.

Thinking is always of opposites. Lao Tzu says: drop the split attitude. Be simple.

And when you are simple, you do not choose. Lao Tzu says: be choiceless, let life flow.

Enjoy both poles in life, and then your life becomes a symphony of opposites.

How to drop the mind: do not choose. If you do not choose, the mind drops.

Live life as it comes - float. Float with life. Enjoy the moment in its totality,

It is to live as part of the whole, ~ Swami Dhyan Giten