Great Book Quotes - Page 3

• No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.

  Mary Wortley Montagu

  Book, Reading, Library

  Mary Wortley Montagu (2015). “Letters”, p.554, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

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• A great book provides escapism for me. The artistry and the creativity in a story are better than any drugs.

  Wentworth Miller

  Inspirational, Book, Creativity

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• There are many little ways to enlarge your child's world. Love of books is the best of all.

  Jackie Kennedy

  Powerful, Children, Book

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• This will never be a civilized country until we spend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Country, Book, Reading

  Elbert Hubbard, Bert Hubbard (1923). “Selected writings of Elbert Hubbard: his mintage of wisdom, coined from a life of love, laughter and work”

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• 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

  Book, Literature, Hawthorne

  "Conversation: Julian Barnes, Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize". "Art Beat" with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. November 8, 2011.

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• The great book for you is the book that has the most to say to you at the moment when you are reading. I do not mean the book that is most instructive, but the book that feeds your spirit. And that depends on your age, your experience, your psychological and spiritual need.

  Robertson Davies

  Spiritual, Reading, Book

  Robertson Davies (2008). “Selected works on the art of writing”, Penguin Group Canada

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• Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn't necessarily say that about poetry.

  Chad Harbach

  Book, Topics, Strive

  Source: therumpus.net

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• To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

  Edmund Burke

  Reading, Book, Thinking

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• There's a great book about John Kennedy and his relationship to civil rights called 'The Bystander.' The title alone suggests that he did as little as possible, any minimal critical effort, to really facilitate civil rights in the White House.

  Michael Eric Dyson

  Book, Rights, White

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• It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

  George Orwell

  Nineteen, April, Cold

  Nineteen Eighty-Four pt. 1, ch. 1 (1949)

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• Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable

  Oscar Wilde

  Book, Men, May

  Oscar Wilde (2015). “The critic as artist (low cost). Limited edition”, p.7, Oscar Wilde

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• There are some awful things in the world, it's true, but there are also some great books.

  Jo Walton

  Book, Awful, World

  Jo Walton (2011). “Among Others”, p.52, Macmillan

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• Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.

  Frederick Douglass

  Reading, Book, Forever

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• If you taught me to read and provided for me the same computer system as someone has provided for Stephen Hawking, I, too, would write great books. And yet you don't teach me to read, and you don't give me a computer stick I can push around with my nose to point at the next letter I wish typed. So whose fault is it that I am what I am?

  Garth Stein

  Book, Writing, Giving

  Garth Stein (2008). “The Art of Racing in the Rain”, Harper

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• One of the purest souls ever to live on this fallen planet was Nicholas Herman, known as Brother Lawrence. He wrote very little, but what he wrote has seemed to several generations of Christians to be so rare and so beautiful as to deserve a place near the top among the world's great books of devotion. The writings of Brother Lawrence are the ultimate in simplicity; ideas woven like costly threads to make a pattern of great beauty.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Beautiful, Christian, Brother

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• You cannot be afraid, Read the book. Smile at it. It's a great book-the greatest book you've ever read.

  Markus Zusak

  Book, Greatest Book

  Markus Zusak (2016). “The Book Thief: 10th Anniversary Edition”, p.117, Random House

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• The truly great books are the few books that are over everybody's head all of the time.

  Mortimer Adler

  Book

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• A great book is a homing device For navigating paradise. A good book somehow makes you care About the comfort of a chair. A bad book owes to many trees A forest of apologies.

  J. Patrick Lewis

  Book, Apology, Tree

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• Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain.

  Clifton Fadiman

  Book, Dark, Ideas

  Clifton Fadiman (1988). “The lifetime reading plan”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Read it. God, whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink. Instead, He set before your eyes the things that He had made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that?

  Saint Augustine

  Book, Eye, Order

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• Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Book, Writing, Written

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• A great book should leave you with many experiences.

  William Styron

  Book, Should, Inspirational Reading

  William Styron, James L. W. West (1985). “Conversations with William Styron”, p.12, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Father, Years, Advice

  Great Gatsby (1925) ch. 1

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• To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Life, Book, Reading

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• Speak of the appetite for drink; or of a bon-vivant's relish for dinner! What are these mere animal throes and ragings compared with those fantasies of taste, of those yearning of the imagination, of those insatiable appetites of intellect, which bewilder a student in a great bookseller's temptation-hall.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Animal, Imagination, Temptation

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