"Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers." -Charles Eliot
"The books that make you think the most are those that help you the most." -Theodore Parker
"I am part of all I have read." -John Kieran
"One who knows books has four eyes." -Bulgarian proverb
"Books may well be the only true magic." -Alice Hoffman
"So they told me how he read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right." -Winston Churchill
"People who don't read are brutes." -Eugene Ionesco
"Never judge a book by its movie." -Anonymous
"I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train." -Oscar Wilde
"I cannot live without books." -Thomas Jefferson
"A book is meant not only to be read, but haunt you, to importune you like a lover or a parent, to stick in your teeth like a piece of gristle." -Anatole Broyard
"I mean your borrowers of books-those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes." -Charles Lamb
"Friends can betray you but books are always loyal." -Wang Ghozhen
"My best friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read." -Abraham Lincoln
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
"The greatest conviction that we are loved, loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves."
"There are marvelous relations between beings and things; in this inexhaustible whole, from sun to grub, there is no scorn; all need each other."
"Sometimes things which you see, clutch you and hold you."
"It had been written with the foot in the grave and the finger in Heaven. These lines, fallen one by one upon the paper, were what might be called drops of soul."
"How was it that their lips met? How is it that the birds sing, that the snow melts, that the rose opens, that May blooms, that the dawn whitens behind the black trees on the shivering summit of the hills? One kiss, and that was all."
"At a certain depth of distress, the poor, in their stupor, groan no longer over evil, and are no longer thankful for good."
"When you know and when you love you shall suffer still."
"If there is anything more poignant than a body agonizing for want of bread, it is a soul which is dying of hunger for light."
"Love has no middle term; either it destroys, or it saves."
"To see so much misery everywhere, I suspect that God is not rich."
"We desire progress with a gentle slope."
"Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing instruction for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness."
"I did not believe that it could be so monstrous. It is wrong to be so absorbed in the divine law as not to perceive the human law. Death belongs to God alone. By what right do men touch the unknown thing?"
"Be careful of the way in which you think of the dead. Think not of what might have been. Look steadfastly and you shall see the living glory of your well-beloved dead in the depths of heaven."
"We should fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murderers. The great dangers are within us. What matters it what threatens our heads or our purses? Let us think only of what threatens our souls."
"There are neither little facts in humanity nor little leaves in vegetation."
"I have just met a woman in the street, who was crying as if her heart would break."
"Are you afraid of the good you can do?"
"My friends remember this, that there are no bad herbs, and no bad men, there are only bad cultivators."
"Animals are nothing but the forms of our virtues and vices walking before our eyes, the visible phantoms of our souls. God shows them to us to make us reflect."
"The soul helps the body and at certain moments uplifts it. It is the only bird which sustains its cage."
"Were it given to our eye of flesh to see into the consciences of others, we should judge a man much more surely from what he dreams than from what he thinks."
"But those are rare who fall without becoming degraded; there is a point,moreover, at which the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confounded in a single word, a fatal word, Les Miserables, whose fault it is? And then, is it not when the fall is lowest that charity ought to be greatest?"
"Whatever may be our selfishness and our prejudices, a mysterious respect springs from events in which we feel the intervention of a hand higher than that of man."
"One no longer goes out of the house except to walk and dream."
"As for us, if we were compelled to choose between the barbarians of civilization, and the civilizes of barbarism, we would choose the barbarians."
"In all its most repulsive and most furious development, a social deformity perhaps still more hideous than the evil rich man: The evil poor."
"It is certain that we talk with ourselves; there is not a thinking being who has not experienced that. We may say even that the word is never a more magnificent mystery than when it goes , interior of a man from his thought to his conscience, and returns from his conscience to his thought. It is in this sense only that the words must be understood, so often employed in this chapter, he said, he exclaimed; we say to ourselves, we speak to ourselves, we exclaim within ourselves, the external silence not being broken. There is a great tumult within; everything within us speaks, except the tongue. The realities of the soul, because they are not visible and palpable are not the less realities."
"What a sweet and sublime thing is hope to a child who has never known anything but despair."
"If anything is frightful, if there be a reality. Which surpasses dreams, it is this: To live, to see the sun, to be in full possession of manly vigor, to have health and joy, to laugh sturdily to rush towards a glory, which dazzlingly invites you on, to feel a very pleasure in respiration, to feel yourself a reasoning being, to speak, to think, to hope, to love; to have mother to have wife, to have children ,to have sunlight and suddenly in a moment, in less than a minute, to feel yourself buried in an abyss to fall, to roll, to crush, to be crushed, to see the grain, the flowers,the leaves, the branches, to be able to seize upon nothing, to feel your sword useless, men under you, horses over you, to strike about you in vain, your bones broken by some kick in the darkness, to feel a heel which makes your eyes leap from their sockets, to grind the horseshoes with rage in your teeth, to stifle, to howl, to twist, to be under all this and to say: Just now I was a living man!"
"Nothing is as charming as the ruddy tints that happiness can shed around a garret room. We all in the course of our lives, have had our rose-coloured sky-parlour."
"Children have their morning song, like birds."
"Oh, divine and unfathomable mystery of the compensations of destiny."
"Superstitions, bigotry's, hypocrisies, prejudices, these phantoms, phantoms though they may be, are tenacious of life; they have teeth and nails in their shadowy substance and we must grapple with them, body to body, and make war upon them and that too, without cessation for it is one of the fatalities of humanity to be condemned to eternal struggle with phantoms a shadow is hard to seize by the throat and dash upon the ground."
"Laughter is sunshine it chases winter form the human face.'
"The most divine of all human generosity, expiation for others."
"To dare; progress is at this price."
"The onward march of the human race requires that the heights around it should be ablaze with noble and enduring acts of courage."
"He was one of those children so deserving of pity from all, who have mothers and fathers, and yet are orphans."
"What a spectacle is night! We hear dull sounds, not knowing whence they come, we see Jupiter, twelve hundred times larger than the earth, glistening like an ember, the welkin is black, the stars sparkle, it is terror-inspiring."
"Not seeing people permits us to imagine in them every perfection."
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
"If men no longer know what they are looking at, there may well be unicorns in the world yet, unknown and glad of it."
Death takes what man would keep, and leaves what man would lose."
"It's a rare man who is taken for what he truly is."
"We are not always what we seem and hardly ever what we dream."
"I have been mortal, and some part of me is mortal yet. I am full of tears and hunger and the fear of death, though I can not weep, and I want nothing, and I cannot die. I am not like the others now, for no unicorn was ever born who could regret, but I do. I regret."
Roald Dahl
"There was a crunch. And then there was silence. The peach rolled on. And behind it, Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker lay ironed out upon the grass as flat and thin and lifeless as a couple of paper dolls cut out of a picture book." -Roald Dahl ~ James and the Giant Peach
"Should her looks sometimes alarm you then I don't think it would harm you to repeat at least a hundred times a day: 'I must never kill a spider, I must only help and guide her.'" ~ James and the Giant Peach
"Marvelous things will start happening to you. . .And you will never be miserable again in your life." -James and the Giant Peach
"One right is not making two lefts." ~The BFG
"If everyone is making whizzpoppers, then why not talk about it?" ~The BFG
"Dreams, he said, is a very mysterious things. They is floating around in the air like little wispy misty bubbles. And all the time they is searching for sleeping people." ~The BFG
"Sometimes on a very clear night the BFG said, and if I is swiggling my ears in the right direction- and here he swivelled his great ears upwards so they were facing the ceiling- if I is swiggling them like this and the night is very clear, I is sometimes hearing faraway music coming from the stars in the sky." ~The BFG
"Just because we happen not to have actually seen something with our own little winkles we think it is not existing." ~The BFG
"Words he said, is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life. So you must simply try to be patient and stop squibbling. As I am telling you before. I know exactly which words I am wanting to say, but somehow or other they is getting squiff-squiddled around." ~The BFG
"Human beans is killing each other much quicker than the giants is doing it. . . Nor is giants killing each other. Nor is crockadowndillies killing other crockadowndillies. Nor is pussy-cats killing pussy cats. . . Human beans is the only animals that is killing their own kind. . . But human beans is squishing each other all the time. They is hooting guns and going up in aerioplanes to drop bombs on each others heads every week. Human beans is always killing other human beans."
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
"Look well- look well, O wolves."
"Better he should be bruised from head to foot by me who love him than he should come to harm through ignorance."
"One of the beauties of Jungle law us that punishment settles all scores. There is no nagging afterward."
"Well, if I am a man, a man I must become."
"'The pity of the Monkey People!' Baloo snorted. 'The stillness of the mountain stream! The cool of the summer sun! And then, man-cub?'"
"To each his own fear."
"Sorrow never stays punishment."
"His name is not wild dog anymore, but the first friend because he will be our friend for always and always and always."
"Ahae! My heart is heavy with things I do not understand."
"Now don't be angry after you've been afraid. That's the worst kind of cowardice, anybody can be forgiven for being scared in the night, I think if they see things they don't understand."
"But it is not easy to change one's life all in a minute- particularly in the Jungle."
"We of the Jungle know that Man is wisest of all. If we trusted our ears we should know that of all things he is most foolish."
"Men must always be making traps for men, or they are not content."
"Ah yes, the stuff [money] that passes from hand to hand and never grows warmer."
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
"Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing." -Scout
"If you can learn a simple trick Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view." -Atticus
"Sometimes the bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand of [another]. -Miss Maudie
"Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy they don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do o one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why its a sin to kill a mockingbird." -Miss Maudie
"People in their right minds never take pride in their talents." -Miss Maudie
"It's never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is it doesn't hurt you." -Atticus
"Fine Folks were people who did the best they could with the sense they had."
"Atticus says you can choose your friends but you sho' can't choose your family an' they're still kin to you no matter whether you acknowledge em or not and it makes you look right silly when you don't." -Scout
"I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks." -Scout
"Jem figured that Mr. Radley kept him chained to the bed most of the time. Atticus said no, it wasn't that sort of thing, that there were other ways of making people into ghosts." -Scout
"Yo' folks might be better than the Cunninghams but it don't count for nothing the way you're disgracin' 'em." -Calpurnia
"Simply we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win." -Atticus
"As I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Macomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me." -Scout
"The one thing that doesn't abide by a majority rule is a person's conscience."-Atticus
"Cry about the simple hell people give other people- without even thinking. Cry about the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they're people too." -Mr. Dolphus Raymond
"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. Its when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win but sometimes you do." -Atticus
"A mob's always made up of people, no matter what Mr. Cunningham was part of a mob last night, but he was still a man. Every mob in every little Southern town is always made up of people you know- doesn't say much for them, does it?" -Atticus
"I don't know, but they did it. They've done it before and they did it tonight and they'll do it again and when they do it -seems that only children weep. Goodnight." -Atticus
"If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time. . . its because he wants to stay inside." -Jem
"Jem how can you hate Hitler so bad an' then turn around and be ugly about folks right at home--" -Scout
The Man In the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas
"It is not tomorrow just yet, Monseigneur. Who can ever answer for the morrow?"
"What can we do with those splendors when we are no more splendid? What's the use of our possessions? They will merely disgust us, by their very splendor with everything which does not equal their splendor. Vuax! Well, what? What shall I do with this marvel? If I am ruined, how shall I fill the urns which my Naiads bear in their arms, or force the air into the lungs of my Tritons? To be rich enough Monsieur d'Artagnan, a man must be too rich."
"A friends word is the truth itself."
The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
"But who shall dwell in these worlds? If they be inhabited?. . . Are we or they Lords of the World. . . and how are all things made for man?" -Kepler
". . . And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by the European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of Mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?"
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