November 2010
“A great reader seldom recognizes his solitude.”
—Mason Cooley (via libraryland)
“Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves.”
—Jeremy Collier (via reading-is-fun)
“In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood.”
—Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
“There is no time more precious than storytime.”
—Me (via paganmagdalene)
“The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history.”
—Carl T. Rowan (via libraryland) (via booklover) (via wordpainting)
“Whatever relationships you have attracted in your life at this moment, are precisely the ones you need in your life at this moment. There is a hidden meaning behind all events, and this hidden meaning is serving your own evolution.”
—Deepak Chopra (via styleandsubstance)
dusty old book on the shelf
like a sweet fragrance, as a temptation of my tired eyes. they wouldn’t be there for no reason.
“Every room I’ve lived in since I was given my own room at eleven was lined with, and usually overfull of, books. My employment in bookstores was always continuous with my private hours: shelving and alphabetizing, building shelves, and browsing— in my collection and others— in order to understand a small amount about the widest possible number of books. Such numbers of books are constantly acquired that constant culling is necessary; if I slouch in this discipline, the books erupt. I’ve also bricked myself in with music—vinyl records, then compact discs. My homes have been improbably information-dense, like capsules for survival of a nuclear war, or models of the interior of my own skull. That comparison—room as brain— is one I’ve often reached for in describing the rooms of others, but it began with the suspicion that I’d externalized my own brain, for anyone who cared to look.”
—Jonathan Lethem; The Disappointment Artist (via wordpainting)
“The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.”
—J.M. Coetzee (via wordpainting)
“During her life Veronika had noticed that a lot of people she knew would talk about the horrors in other people’s lives as if they were genuinely trying to help them, but the truth was that they took pleasure in the suffering of others, because that made them believe they were happy and that life had been generous with them. She hated that kind of person, and she wasn’t going to give the young man an opportunity to take advantage of her state in order to mask his own frustrations.”
—Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho (via dianarose) (via writingfromlalaland, dianaroseweasley) (via lifeisadreamm) (via booklover)
“Even though you may want to move forward in your life, you may have one foot on the brakes. In order to be free, we must learn how to let go. Release the hurt. Release the fear. Refuse to entertain your old pain. The energy it takes to hang onto the past is holding you back from a new life.”
—Mary Manin Morrissey (via itookadeepbreath)
“In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.”
—Junot Díaz (via wordpainting)
