The best quotes on Books

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

The title of the book is A Farewell to Arms and except for three years there has been war of some kind almost ever since it has been written. Some people used to say, why is the man so preoccupied and obsessed with war, and now, since 1933 perhaps it is clear why a writer should be interested in the constant, bullying, murderous, slovenly crime of war. Having been to too many of them, I am sure that I am prejudiced, and I hope that I am very prejudiced. But it is the considered belief of the writer of this book that wars are fought by the finest people that there are, or just say people, although, the closer you are to were they are fighting, the finer people you meet; but they are made, provoked and initiated by straight economic rivalries and by swine that stand to profit from them. I believe that all the people who stand to profit by a war and who help provoke it should be shot on the first day it starts by accredited rappresentatives of loyal citizens of their country who will fight it. The author of this book would be very glad to take charge of this shooting, if legally delegated by those who will fight, and see that it would be performed as humanely and correctly as possible and see that all the bodies were given decent burial. We might even arrange to have them buried in cellophane or any one of the newer plastic materials. If, at the end of the day, there was any evidence that I had in any way provoked the new war or had not performed my delegated duties correctly, I would be willing, if not pleased, to be shot by the same firing squad and be buried either with or without cellophane or be left naked on a hill.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. (from "The Picture of Dorian Gray")

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken:
The crownless again shall be king.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

All the books of the world don't give you happiness, but in secret they refer to you.
There is everything you needin there, sun stars moon.
Because the light that you looked for lives in your chest.
The wisdom that you have looked for a long time in a library sines in every sheet, because now it's yours.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Writing os one of the most solitary activities in the world. Once every two years, I sit in front of my computer, I observe my soul's unknown ocean and I see a few islands - ideas which are developing and that are ready to be explored. And so I take my boat - its name is "Word" - and I choose to sail towards the closest of them. On the journey, I come across currents, winds and storms, but I go on rowing, growing more tired. I am conscious of being off route, of not having on the horizon the island I wanted to reach anymore. All the same there is no way of going back: I have to continue anyway, or I shall find myself lost amidst the ocean. At that moment a series of terrifying images cross my mind: I that spend the rest of my life talking of previous success, or sourly crticizing new writers for the simple fact of not having the courage of publishing any new material. But wasn't my dream that of being a writer? Therefore I must go on creating sentences, paragraphs, chapters and Wrtiting to exhaustion, without letting myself be paralized by success, by defeat, by traps along the way.
Shaken by such absurd thoughts, I find within myself a strength and courage of which I ignored the existence: they help me to adventure to the boundless side of my soul. I let myself be carried by the currents and I end up anchoring my boat in the proximity of the island to where I have been taken. I spend days and nights wrtiting what I see, asking myself why am I acting this way, repeating to myself every moment why this effort has become useless, that I have no nedd to prove anything to anyone, that I have already obtained what I wanted and a lot more of what I could possibly dream of.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

The deeds were monstrous, but the doer--at least, the very effective one now on trial--was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither monstrous nor demonic.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

I had been surrounded with fancied beings, with mere airy nothings conjured up by poetic power, yet which, to me, had all the charm of reality.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

I can't die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwards I'll have a whole lifetime in which to die.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

When we don't seem to think about nothing, acyually we think about what we care. The love is like gravity force: invisible and universal, like the physical one. Inevitably our heart, our eyes, our words, without realizing it end up there, on what we love, like the apple with the gravity.