“I love the Duchess of York. In 1988, she is very fat but married to a prince. She gives me hope for the future.”
Caitlin Moran in How to Be a Woman
“Children don’t read ‘genres’; they read stories. Below a certain age, they don’t distinguish between ‘true’ and ‘not true,’ because they see no reason that a white rabbit shouldn’t possess a pocket watch, that whales shouldn’t talk, or that sentient beings shouldn’t live on other planets and travel in spaceships. Science-fiction tropes aren’t read as ‘science fiction’; they’re read as fiction. And fiction is read as reality. And sometimes reality lives under the bed and has very large teeth, and it’s no use pretending otherwise.”
Margaret Atwood, The New Yorker, June 4 & 11, 2012 (via electronicsquid)
Love this.
Truth.
Happy Birthday to Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket! The way he turns a phrase has brought us countless hours of enjoyment! Here are a few Lemony Snicket quotes from today’s birthday boy…
- Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don’t always like.
- Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.
- One of the remarkable things about love is that, despite very irritating people writing poems and songs about how pleasant it is, it really is quite pleasant.
- If writers wrote as carelessly as some people talk, then adhasdh asdglaseuyt[bn[ pasdlgkhasdfasdf.
- People aren’t either wicked or noble. They’re like chef’s salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.
- There are some who say that sitting at home reading is the equivalent of travel, because the experiences described in the book are more or less the same as the experiences one might have on a voyage, and there are those who say that there is no substitute for venturing out into the world. My own opinion is that it is best to travel extensively but to read the entire time, hardly glancing up to look out of the window of the airplane, train, or hired camel.
- Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another.
- There are many, many types of books in the world, which makes good sense, because there are many, many types of people, and everybody wants to read something different.
- All the secrets of the world are contained in books. Read at your own risk.
- No matter who you are, no matter where you live, and no matter how many people are chasing you, what you don’t read is often as important as what you do read.
- Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily.
- It is useless for me to describe to you how terrible Violet, Klaus, and even Sunny felt in the time that followed. If you have ever lost someone very important to you, then you already know how it feels, and if you haven’t, you cannot possibly imagine it.
“Libraries make readers. They don’t starve authors.”
Neil Gaiman
“If you take a book with you on a journey…an odd thing happens: the book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it…yes, books are like flypaper—memories cling to the printed page better than to anything else.”
Cornelia Funke, Inkheart (via kijakazibibi)
“The real punishment was not the raid swiftly inflicted by the villgers, but the family’s deliberately forgetting her.”
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
(Source: thegirlwanderer)
“This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.”
Terre Tempest Williams (via amandaonwriting, storytellingquotes) (via teachingliteracy)
“As a general rule, librarians are a kick in the pants socially, often full of good humor, progressive, and naturally, well read. They tend to be generalists who know so much about so many things that they are quite the opposite of the boring old poops they have been made out to be. Most of them are full of life, some even full of the devil.”
Bill Hall, editorial page editor, Lewiston (Idaho) Tribune, Sept. 9, 2001. (via libraryaccounts)
We’re modest, too.
(via missrumphiusproject)
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