Book Quotes Quotes

“When you trust, you are tender and delicate, but when you doubt, you are dangerous and destructive”
― Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel

“You are that to me, an oasis. You drug me and at the same time you give me strength.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel

“When love dies, the heart's ashes do not leave on the wind—they rest on the mantelpiece of the soul, darkening the sunrise we once saw to be beautiful.”
― A. M. Hudson

“All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“I used to be afraid about what people might say or think after reading what I had written. I am not afraid anymore, because when I write, I am not trying to prove anything to anyone, I am just expressing myself and my opinions. It’s ok if my opinions are different from those of the reader, each of us can have his own opinions. So writing is like talking, if you are afraid of writing, you may end up being afraid of talking”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“Overhyped books are the empty calories of the literary world.”
― Kevin Ansbro

“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?”
― Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel

“So many broken promises, each day an aborted wish, a lost object, a misplaced unread book, cluttering the room like an attic with discarded possessions.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel

“The potion drunk by lovers is prepared by no one but themselves. The potion is the sum of one's whole existence.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel

“The magic beauty of simultaneity, to see the loved one rushing toward you at the same moment you are rushing toward him, the magic power of meeting, exactly at midnight to achieve union, the illusion of one common rhythm achieved by overcoming obstacles, deserting friends, breaking other bonds - all this was soon dissolved by his laziness, by his habit of missing every moment, of never keeping his word, of living perversely in a state of chaos, of swimming more naturally in a sea of failed intentions, broken promises, and aborted wishes”
― Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel

“Every word spoken in the past accumulated forms and colors in the self. What flows through the veins besides blood is the distillation of every act committed, the sediment of all the visions, wishes, dreams and experiences. All the past emotions converge to tint the skin and flavor the lips, to regulate the pulse and produce crystals in the eyes.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel

“Love the great narcotic was the revealer in the alchemist's bottle rendering visible the most untraceable substances.
Love the great narcotic was the agent provocateur exposing all the secret selves to daylight.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel

“In this instant of danger they realized they were each other's reason for living, and into this instant they threw their whole being.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel

“And it is that which draws me to you, too, for you are the tropics, you have the sun in you, and the softness and the clarity...”
― Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel

“The power of a writer is that he is a god of sorts. He can create his own worlds and populate them with his own people, all by the powers of his imagination. It's the closest a man can come close to the gods. No wonder the most successful writers are considered immortals”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“Ability, experience and books have solution for all the problems.”
― Amit Kalantri

“Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“You got shook and shook till there was nothing left. You lost your name and your body and your self and you just didn't care.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.)”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“No man and woman know what will be born in the darkness of their intermingling; so much besides children, so many invisible births, exchanges of soul and character, blossoming of unknown selves, liberation of hidden treasures, buried fantasies...”
― Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel

“I cannot live without books.”
― R. B. Bernstein

“No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“ ‘Paradise Lost’ was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully.”
― Robert Hass

“Get this under control as soon as you can young lady, because no one here gives a damn about your unlimited power-Mason Lerner”
― Natasha Larry

“Emma is just a distraction. A shiny new toy that I can’t have, so I want her. Fuck, do I ever want her." - William Honor (Honor Thy Teacher)”
― Teresa Mummert

“I know, too, why she asked me not to forget her. Naoko herself knew, of course. She knew that my memories of her would fade. Which is precisely why she begged me never to forget her, to remember that she had existed.
The thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow. Because Naoko never loved me.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Everything seems pointless since you left”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“The books [poetry collections] may not sell, but neither are they given away or thrown away. They tend, more than other books, to fall apart in their owners’ hands. Not I suppose good news in a culture and economy built on obsolescence. But for a book to be loved this way and turned to this way for consolation and intense renewable excitement seems to me a marvel.”
― Louise Glück

“You see, long ago I built a wall,
a defense mechanism as I recall.”
― Adiela Akoo, Lost in a Quatrain

“The question ‘Why poetry?’ isn’t asking what makes poetry unique among art forms; poetry may indeed share its origins with other forms of privileged utterance. A somewhat more interesting question would be: “What is the nature of experience, and especially the experience of using language, that calls poetic utterance into existence? What is there about experience that’s unutterable?” You can’t generalize very usefully about poetry; you can’t reduce its nature down to a kernel that underlies all its various incarnations. I guess my internal conversation suggests that if you can’t successfully answer the question of “Why poetry?,” can’t reduce it in the way I think you can’t, then maybe that’s the strongest evidence that poetry’s doing its job; it’s creating an essential need and then satisfying it.”
― Richard Ford