Epigram Books Quotes

Lim Oh Kee kills himself in the early hours on the 12th day of December, 1921. His last meal is rice and nothing. ~ Evan Adam Ang

Pak Karman hugged his wife's gravestone tightly. "You left without saying farewell!" The whole of the graveyard was ablaze with light. ~ Mohamed Latiff Mohamed

Turn off the light!

Who?

Not me,

but you! ~ Kim Da-Jeong

Look, Cha Cha!" says Bo Bo.

"We're here at our new home!"

Cha Cha shrugs her shoulders as she takes her first look at the Mandai Zoo. ~ Jason Erik Lundberg

She looked at me like I was stupid, the same look the girls in JC used to give me when I hadn't heard of the latest boy band, or turned up at Zouk wearing unfashionable clothes. ~ Jeremy Tiang

Former spider boys came from all walks of life - they ranged from homeless street kids and school dropouts to decent kids, but the best ones were those who had gone anywhere and everywhere to search out and capture their fighting spiders; they even ventured into dangerous bushes infested with black mambas. These boys were risk-takers and crowd-pullers, always on the move, always looking for worthy opponents with which to fight their spiders. ~ Ming Cher

Mongkol, poor Mongkol, shedding tears.

Thinking of his smiling, comical face, and his dreams of sending his son to university, I could only lower my head in silence.

And the night continued, cold and dark, the wind frozen beyond the mountains. ~ You Jin

Many years later, Sophia will think of this night, and how close she was to tears. She will wonder how she could have allowed herself to arrive there, but also feel a twinge of loss for the girl still capable of losing control. ~ Jeremy Tiang

I remember clearly the afternoon that she stood at the corner beside the door of the tourist centre in Gdansk. ~ You Jin

So Artichoke was a restaurant borne out of impulse and recklessness. Four years on, it's also a testament to how an enterprise started on such a fucked up approach can actually succeed. ~ Bjorn Shen

I'd thought there'd be no winter in the desert, but winter arrived anyway - silently, suddenly. ~ You Jin

I was in this on my own - it was make it or break it. ~ Bjorn Shen

In a few years, it is very likely that this series will be considered a milestone in the history of Singapore photography. ~ Raphael Millet

There were three things Gimme Lao did not know about himself. ~ Sebastian Sim

Some things make you immortal, such as the books you have written. ~ Shikha Kaul

My interest in books started as a child. I had a voracious appetite for reading. It's my mom's fault really, because she read to us a lot, and I loved it. ~ Catherine Cruzan

That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying

I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had his hand in this,

as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel,
(brave even among lions),
"It's not the weight you carry

but how you carry it -
books, bricks, grief -
it's all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,
put it down."
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?

Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?

How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe

also troubled -
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply? ~ Mary Oliver

Its emptiness is more than the lack of living, breathing beings. It is the unread pages of the many books that reside on the shelves throughout the room I should hot have thought one could tell when books have gone unread, but after the company of Birchwood's well-loved library it is as if I can hear these books whispering, their pages grasping and reaching for an audience. ~ Michelle Zink

For life is short and the art of writing books is very, very long. ~ James Geary

I do the same things I did when I was 12 years old: I ride bikes, I read books, I walk in the woods. And I listen to music. ~ Charles Frazier

Self-help books are for the birds. Self-help groups are where it's at. ~ Janice Dickinson

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. ~ Italo Calvino

Ah yet, ere I descend to the grave, May I a small house and large garden have; And a few friends, and many books, both true, both wise and both delightful too.
~ Abraham Cowley

The Bible is the best of books, and I wish it were in the hands of every one. It is indispensable to the safety and permanence of our institutions. A free government can not exist without religion and morals, and there cannot be morals without religion. Especially should the Bible be placed in the hands of the young. It is the best school book in the world. I would that all our people were brought up under the influence of that holy book. ~ Zachary Taylor

Life's going to change. You thought it already had? Not nearly as much as it's going to change now.
Everything you disapprove of you'll call "aristocratic." This term can be applied to food, to books and plays, to modes of speech, to hairstyles and to such venerable institutions as prostitution and the Roman Catholic Church.
If "Liberty" was the watchword of the first Revolution, "Equality" is that of the second. "Fraternity" is a less assertive quality, and must creep in where it may. ~ Hilary Mantel

I have written a few children's books. The first book that I wrote was for children. It was called 'The Package', and it was a mystery story in pictures. It had no words. ~ Laurie Anderson

Books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb! ~ George MacDonald

The mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction-so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people's movements-that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission. ~ Howard Zinn

They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there. ~ Marcel Proust

I really love doing nothing. I really love just being at home and taking a couple of days, you know, doing nothing. You know what I mean? Just getting up, being around the house, going outside the back yard, coming back in; I really like to do nothing because I travel a lot. There's a lot of travelling. There's a lot of on the phone all the time. There's a lot of looking at papers and reading things and so you don't want to read magazines and you don't want to do anything; you don't want to read books, you just want to just kind of shut down a little bit. ~ Jennifer Lopez

I'm planting a tree to remind me to be open and kindhearted. ~ Andrea Koehle Jones

She had always thought of it as being rich, having so many books she has yet to read. ~ Laura Lippman

Friends are like books, you learn from every one of them. ~ Debasish Mridha

My default answer to everything is no. As soon as I hear the inflection of inquiry in your voice, the word no forms in my mind, sometimes accompanies by a reason, often not. Can I open the mail? No. Can I wear your necklace? No. When is dinner? No. What you probably wouldn't believe is how much I want to say yes. Yes, you can take two dozen books home from the library. Yes, you can eat the whole roll of SweeTarts. Yes, you can camp out on the deck. But the books will get lost, and SweeTarts will eventually make your tongue bleed, and if you sleep on the deck, the neighborhood racoons will nibble on you. I often wish I could come back to life as your uncle, so I could give you more. But, when you're the mom, your whole life is holding the rope against those wily secret agents who never, ever stop trying to get you to drop your end. ~ Kelly Corrigan

I've learned to look like I'm listening to long confusing plots of cartoons and comic books when I'm actually sound asleep or making grocery shopping lists in my head. ~ Patricia Heaton

I seem to grow more acutely conscious of the swift passage of time as I grow older. When I was small, days and hours were long and spacious, and there was play and acres of leisure, and many children's books to read. I remember that as I was writing a poem on "Snow" when I was eight. I said aloud, "I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now while I'm still little, because when I grow up I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like." And so it is that childlike sensitivity to new experiences and sensations seems to diminish in an inverse proportion to growth of technical ability. As we become polished, so do we become hardened and guilty of accepting eating, sleeping, seeing, and hearing too easily and lazily, without question. We become blunt and callous and blissfully passive as each day adds another drop to the stagnant well of our years. ~ Sylvia Plath

Let's talk about adoration, people love adoration but they should not love it so much, because it can make them turn from the righteousness of God and His Holy Word to receive adoration from sinners who don't believe and want their own way, so it is better to be humble, and obedient to God and suffer persecution of his Holy Word then to seek and long for adoration from men ~ Lydia Thornton

Dream up a book on Monday, publish it on Friday. ~ Jill Novak

Creative writing is your ability to develop your inner tension, your libido, your supply of energy and electric charge, turning the charge into an image or thought, and wording the thought, thus contributing all the activity of your mind to the immortal culture of humankind and subsequently to your own immortality. ~ Lara Biyuts

She closed her eyes and felt everyhting: the warmth of the café, the taste of the muffin, the by now familiar smell of coffee and secondhand books. ~ Liane Moriarty

John had said McKindless would be revealed through his library, but John was a bookseller; he formed his opinion of everyone through their books. ~ Louise Welsh

Bookish people, who are often maladroit people, persist in thinking they can master any subtlety so long as it's been shaped into acceptable expository prose. ~ Carol Shields

So, in effect, my first sale was actually two books. ~ George Stephen

The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me ... by newspapers and the Bible. ~ Van Wyck Brooks

There are books where you can really see the moral question, which I think we answer every day for ourselves, in every interaction we have with people, to a lesser or greater degree. ~ David Bezmozgis

Initially [my favorite books] seem to immerse me in another life, but ultimately they immerse me in me; I am looking through the window into another person's home, but it is my face that I see in the reflection. ~ Derek Thompson

In my opinion, most of us have not been taught how to be responsible for our thoughts and feelings. I see this strongly in the widespread tendency to read books and stories as if they exist to confirm how we are supposed to be, think, and feel. I'm not talking about wacky political correctness, I'm talking mainstream ... Ladies and gentlemen, please. Stop asking, "What am I supposed to feel?" Why would an adult look to me or any other writer to tell him or her what to feel? You're not supposed to feel anything. You feel what you feel. Where you go with it is your responsibility. If a writer chooses to aggressively let you know what he or she feels, where you go with it is still your responsibility. ~ Mary Gaitskill

In the early 1970s, the northern hemisphere appeared to have been cooling at an alarming rate. There was frequent talk of a new ice age. Books and documentaries appeared, hypothesizing a snowblitz or sporting titles such as The Cooling. Even the CIA got into the act, sponsoring several meetings and writing a controversial report warning of threats to American security from the potential collapse of Third World Governments in the wake of climate change. ~ Stephen Schneider

I think, for the rest of my life, I shall refrain from looking up things. It is the most ravenous time-snatcher I know. You pull one book from the shelf, which carries a hint or a reference that sends you posthaste to another book, and that to successive others. It is incredible, the number of books you hopefully open and disappointedly close, only to take down another with the same result. ~ Carolyn Wells

I hadn't gone to Andover, or Horace Mann or Eton. My high school had been the average kind, and I'd been the best student there. Such was not the case at Eli. Here, I was surrounded by geniuses. I'd figured out early in my college career that there were people like Jenny and Brandon and Lydia and Josh - truly brilliant, truly luminous, whose names would appear in history books that my children and grandchildren would read, and there were people like George and Odile - who through beauty and charm and personality would make the cult of celebrity their own. And then there were people like me. People who, through the arbitrary wisdom of the admissions office, might share space with the big shots for four years, might be their friends, their confidantes, their associates, their lovers - but would live a life well below the global radar. I knew it, and over the years, I'd come to accept it.
And I understood that it didn't make them any better than me. ~ Diana Peterfreund