September 2011
79 posts
“A library is infinity under a roof.”
—Gail Carson Levine (via prettybooks)
“Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled “This could change your life.”
—Helen Exley (via book-talk)
“Censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.”
— Henry Steele Commager (via prettybooks)
“The world was a terrible place, cruel, pitiless, dark as a bad dream. Not a good place to live. Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness - and love. Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn’t ask anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly.”
—Cornelia Funke. (via abrandnewsong)
“In the clean brightness of magnesium
Flares, there were seven angels by a tree.
Their hair flashed diamonds, and they made him doubt
They were not really from Elysium.
And his flesh opened like a peony,
Red at the heart, white petals furling out.” —Anthony Hecht, from “A Friend Killed in the War” (via proustitute)
Flares, there were seven angels by a tree.
Their hair flashed diamonds, and they made him doubt
They were not really from Elysium.
And his flesh opened like a peony,
Red at the heart, white petals furling out.” —Anthony Hecht, from “A Friend Killed in the War” (via proustitute)
“September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.”
—Alexander Theroux (via suzywire)
“A traveller without observation is a bird without wings.”
—Unknown (via carolinetravels)
“Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
—Virgina Woolf (A Room of One’s Own)
“What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?”
—Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale (via bookoasis)
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
—Oscar Wilde (via inspiredbylit)
“The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create.”
—Chuck Palahniuk (via theseaofgreen)
