Max Hawthorne Books Quotes

It is good to know one's enemy.
It is better to know one's self. ~ Max Hawthorne

The secret to my success is actually simple: I failed so many times that succeeding eventually became a mathematical certainty. ~ Max Hawthorne

Shakespeare has surface beneath surface to an immeasurable depth, adapted to the plummet-line of every reader; his works present many phases of truth, each with a scope large enough to fill a contemplative mind. Whatever you seek in him you will surely discover, provided you seek truth. There is no exhausting the various interpretations of his symbols, and a thousand years hence a world of new readers will possess a whole library of new books, as we ourselves do, in these volumes old already. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

It will startle you to see what slaves we are to by-gone times-to Death, if we give the matter the right word! ... We read in Dead Men's books! We laugh at Dead Men's jokes, and cry at Dead Men's pathos! ... Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a Dead Man's icy hand obstructs us! ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

To make love last, you've got to treat it like the ultimate poker hand; you've got to go all in. ~ Max Hawthorne

Inspiration is like perspiration. It tends to strike at the most inopportune of times. ~ Max Hawthorne

Take a kid fishing; if nothing else, you'll capture their imagination. ~ Max Hawthorne

There are certain things money can't buy. Chief among these are manners, class, honor and integrity. Oh, and sanity. Let's not forget that one . . . ~ Max Hawthorne

I like big back-stories and I cannot lie. ~ Max Hawthorne

New books feel special," said Hawthorne. "They're like babies born into the skin of old men. ~ Mark Beauregard

Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable. ~ Julian Barnes

I can describe my books as I seem them as American, imaginative, symbolic. My literary ancestors are two other Calvinists, Hawthorne, and Melville. ~ James Purdy

Writer's Block: making authors miserable since the Stone Age. ~ Max Hawthorne

Life's already a gamble. Don't let love be one, too. ~ Max Hawthorne

Take a kid fishing. You'll capture their imagination. ~ Max Hawthorne

A dead man sits on all our judgment seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in dead men's books! We laugh a dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's pathos! ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

I kiss her. I kiss her and kiss her. I try not to bite her lip. She tastes like vodkahoney. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

A writer of story books! What kind of business in life-what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation-may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler! ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hone your writing skills as if they were your finest weapons of war. For in the literary arena, your pen will truly be your sword. ~ Max Hawthorne

I don't believe in your God. And he sure as hell doesn't believe in me. ~ Max Hawthorne

I try to widen the horizons of every child I meet, and part of that is promoting diverse forms, be it graphic novels, stories told in a narrative voice, or more translated books, as well as more diverse writers and more diverse characters. ~ Malorie Blackman

I'm a visual person, so it always starts with a picture, and then I get obsessed with the idea, sometimes too much. I have these blank books in which I take notes, and I add postcards and other physical items. ~ Peter Sis

You take the books, you lie there in the pools of light and you drink life. That is how intensely I have loved libraries. ~ Ray Bradbury

Lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays ... ~ Stephen Fry

Like the librarians of Babel in Borges's story, who are looking for the book that will provide them with the key to all the others, we oscillate between the illusion of perfection and the vertigo of the unattainable. In the name of completeness, we would like to believe that a unique order exists that would enable us to accede in knowledge all in one go; in the name of the unattainable, we would like to think that order and disorder are in fact the same word, denoting pure chance.
It's possible also that both are decoys, illusions intended to disguise the erosion of both books and systems. It is no bad thing in any case that between the two our bookshelves should serve from time to time as joggers of the memory, as cat-rests and as lumber-rooms. ~ Georges Perec

In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. ~ D.T. Max

The grand old Book of God still stands; and this old earth, the more its leaves are turned over and pondered, the more it will sustain and illustrate the Sacred word. ~ James Dwight Dana

Would not the child's heart break in despair when the first cold storm of the world sweeps over it, if the warm sunlight of love from the eyes of mother and father did not shine upon him like the soft reflection of divine light and love? ~ Max Muller

I have always loved animals, and as a child, I read a lot of horse books. I had a particular favorite called 'Silver Snaffles' that my mother gave away. ~ Drew Gilpin Faust

Movie or no, you should never put pictures of the book's characters on the cover. That only cramps the reader's fantasy. You force him to keep seeing the faces of the actors in the movie. For someone who has seen the movie first and then, out of curiosity, goes on to read the whole book, that might not be so bad. But anyone who reads the book first is faced with a dilemma. During the reading he sees the faces of all the characters in his mind's eye. Faces he wants to assemble with his own fantasy. No matter how those faces may be described. Despite your superfluous descriptions of noses, eyes, ears, and hair color, each reader constructs his own faces in his own imagination. Three hundred thousand readers; that's three hundred thousand different faces for each character. Three hundred thousand faces that are destroyed at one fell swoop by that one face in the movie. As a reader, it's pretty tough to remember that imaginary face after seeing the actor on the screen. Two ~ Herman Koch

The very first picture that came up on the camera's little view screen was of him.
What did that mean that she'd kept this picture of him?
Was it because she still cared?
Or had she saved it as a warning? Like, "Never forget how completely screwed up your relationship was with this loser ... "
It wasn't a particularly good picture. In fact, it was pretty embarrassing.
Sitting up in his bed, Max was in his room at Sheffield. It was the photo Gina had taken the day after he'd arrived there. He looked like crap warmed over after his very first physical therapy session, and he was glowering into the camera because he goddamn didn't want his picture taken. ~ Suzanne Brockmann

God's highest desire is not to make us rich, successful or popular. His goal is to make us His ~ Max Lucado

The "to read' list is a place where most good books go to die... ~ Danny L. Deaube

Unfortunately what is little recognized is that the most worthwhile scientific books are those in which the author clearly indicates what he does not know; for an author most hurts his readers by concealing difficulties. ~ Evariste Galois

After I was caught returning at dawn from one such late-night escapade, my worried mother thoroughly interrogated me regarding every drug teenagers take, never suspecting that the most intoxicating thing I'd experienced, by far, was the volume of romantic poetry she'd handed me the previous week. Books became my closest confidants, finely ground lenses providing new views of the world. ~ Paul Kalanithi