Quotes have their appeal. They are short and to the point. They play off of words, beliefs, contemporary fashion, and even our prejudices, fears, and longings. They say something we agree with and usually someone famous is attached to it to give it further validity, even though the words should really speak for themselves.
After you read lots of quotes you begin to feel like they repeat themselves or comment on the same things, as if written by one individual.
Quotes give us a catchy way of capturing an insight we likely pondered on our own. But they usually are incomplete statements, lacking detail, proof, or balance the times when the opposite is true. But quotes aren’t intended to own the truth or be comprehensive – they give us a snapshot – a slogan – of something we can eagerly buy into.
Quotes can be ambiguous or read two different ways, placing you in the odd position of first trying to decipher what was said and then having to determine if you are in agreement.
I’m sure there are plenty of quotes out there about quotes and why we love them. You can quote me on that.
Sometimes we learn that quotes were mis-attributed or incorrectly recorded, translated, or quoted. They may have been taken out of context, or worse, recalled later by the one who crafted it determining he or she no longer agrees with his very words. But it doesn’t matter. We are left to determine what value, if any, a quote or even a book, has.
One of the quotes in life that I’m driven by is the one from Ben Franklin where he tells us to not put off until tomorrow what can be done today. Essentially, don’t delay and never stop working.
Why do we quote other people – in books, speeches, museum displays, and in our conversations? Why do we feel more important to repeat the words of others rather than to originate them? Are we passing something down to the next generation with our quotes – not just their meaning, but their specific identification with a handful of icons, thought-leaders, and history-makers?
Of the thousands of quotes I’ve read about books, writing, reading, publishing free speech and the like, I find that they boil down to really a handful of universal, heartfelt views that cover these topics:
· People love books because they connect us to history and generations past.
· Books allow us to escape our life and live another.
· We get to dream, fantasize, and imagine with a book far more then we could otherwise.
· People value books more than they do other people.
· Books can’t be banned or burned – their story will always be told.
· Books shape our views and both change over time.
· Few bad things come from reading, but many wonderful things happen from it.
We may end up producing more quotes today – and circulating them more readily – due to Twitter and social media. It’s probably getting harder for a handful of quotes to have long staying power. New quotes quickly replace old ones through the power of mass, global communication where everyone can say anything and share it but somehow manage to say very little. We have a pollution of quotes that lack substance because they are too topical and contemporary, too personal and in the moment. Will I remember what Kim Kardashian said five minutes ago? Certainly not, but she’s managed to commandeer too many people’s attention span. There’s a battle for mindshare.
The best quotes are ones that you don’t doubt or question – they just instantly speak to you. They seem real, solid, factual, and permanent. You end up referring to them from time to time, and as the years pass you realize just how true they really are.
It’s hard to set out to try to say something that’s quotable. It just comes about when others find you have perfectly captured an important moment or aspect of life. Many quotes have a time and place attached to them, such as the Revolutionary War cry of Patrick Henry: “Give me liberty or give me death.” FDR told us during WWII that “There is nothing to fear but fear itself.” MLK ‘had a dream” during the Civil Rights Movement, and Reagan told Russia to “Tear down this wall,” during the Cold War.
There are many books published featuring just quotes, whether on a theme such as sports or leadership, or about life overall Bartlett’s Book of Quotations may still be the most popular one, but it has faded from its significance due in part that so many quotes just pop up online.
Books mean so much to so many of us. I scoured the Internet to find some of the best quotes that relate to books, people, and reading. Here are 59 quotes to ponder. Feel free to add in your own.
“No
two persons ever read the same book.”
--Edmund
Wilson
There
comes a time when you have to choose between turning the page and closing the
book.”
--Josh
Jameson
“If
you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what
everyone else is thinking.”
--Haruki
Murakemi
“There
are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best
of all.”
--Jacqueline
Kennedy Onassis
“Great
books help you understand, and they help you feel understood.”
--John
Green
“A
book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without
breaking it.”
--Edward
P. Morgan
“Where
is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?”
--Henry
Ward Beecher
“Men
do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any
rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part
of its contents.”
--Ezra
Pound
“It
is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when
you can’t help it.”
--Oscar
Wilde
“So
many books, so little time.”
--Frank
Zappa
“I
have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
--Jorge
Luis Borges
“There
is no friend as loyal as a book.”
--Ernest
Hemingway
“Classic
– a book which people praise and don’t read.”
--Mark
Twain
“I
cannot live without books.”
--Thomas
Jefferson
“Truth
is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to
possibilities; truth isn’t.”
--Mark
Twain
“In
the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get
through, but rather how many can get through to you.”
--Mortimer
J. Adler
“Books
are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
--Carlos
Ruiz Zafon
“If
a book is well written, I always find it too short.”
--Jane
Austen
“There
is no mistaking a real book when one meets it.
It is like falling in love.”
--Christopher
Morley
“There
are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.”
--Charles
Dickens
“The
world was hers for the reading.”
--Betty
Smith
“My
library is an archive of longings.”
--Susan
Sontag
“Once
you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.”
--Louis
L’Amour
“My
alma mater was books...I could spend the rest of my life reading, just
satisfying my curiosity.”
--Malcom
X
“I
owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.”
--Gary
Paulsen
“Any
book that helps a child to form a habit of reading to make reading one of his
deep and continuing needs, is good for him.”
--Maya
Angelou
“A
literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a
bar.”
--Carolyn
G. Heilbrun
“We
read books to find out who we are.”
--Ursula
K. Le Guin
“Fiction
reveals truth that reality obscures.”
--Jessamyn
West
“If
you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.”
--J.K.
Rowling
“There’s
no reason why the same man should like the same books at 18 and at 48.”
--Ezra
Pound
“People
don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book.”
--Malcom
X
“A
good novels tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the
truth about its author.”
--G.K.
Chesterton
“In
books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.”
--Anna
Quindlen
“Books
are a narcotic.”
--Frank
Kafka
“It
was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.”
--Elizabeth
Kostova
“Where
they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.”
--Heinrich
Heine
“You’re
never alone when reading a book.”
--Susan
Wiggs
“We’re
all strangers connected by what we reveal, what we share what we take away –
our stories. I guess that’s what I love
about books – they are thin strands of humanity that tether us to one another
for a small bit of time, that makes us feel less alone or even more comfortable
with our aloneness, if need be.”
--Libba
Bray
“Most
of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for
us.”
--Alain
de Botton
“What
refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are
a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him
to attempt to read a hundred?”
--Oliver
Wendell Holmes Sr.
“Books
permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.”
--Carl
Sagan
“Writing
fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.”
--Khaled
Hosseini
“Books
may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not
tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield
us from the common fate of the grave.
But books grant us myriad possibilities:
the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.”
--Alberto
Manguel
“You
want to remember that while you’re judging the book, the book is also judging
you.”
--Stephen
King
“Books
cannot be killed by fire. People die,
but books never die.”
--Franklin
D. Roosevelt
“Without
libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.”
--Ray
Bradbury
“Literature
is my Utopia.”
--Helen
Keller
“A
good book should leave you…slightly exhausted at the end. You’ve several lives while reading it.”
--William
Styron
“The
point is it didn’t really matter what the book was about. It was what it meant that was important.”
--Markus
Zusak
“All
books are divisible into two classes:
the books of the hours, and the books of all time.”
--John
Ruskin
“Just
as food is necessary to the life of the body, so good reading is necessary to
the life of the soul.”
--Pope
John XXIII
“Read
not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted…but to weigh
and consider.”
--Francis
Bacon
“Reading
is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”
--Richard
Steele
“I
am a part of all I have read.”
--John
Kieran
“Books
can truly change our lives – the lives of those who read them, the lives of
those who write them. Readers and
writers alike discover things they never knew about the world and about
themselves.”
--Lloyd
Alexander
“We
become the books we read,”
--Matthew
Kelly
“Books
are all the dreams we would most like to have and liked dreams they have the
power to change consciousness.”
--Victor
Nell
To learn more on how to promote books, read my greatest blog posts from the past five years and 2,000 posts:
2016 Book Marketing & Book Publicity Toolkit
2015 Book Marketing & PR Toolkit
2014 Book Marketing & PR Toolkit
Book Marketing & Book PR Toolkit: 2013
Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog 2016.
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