“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
---Jane Austen, in Pride and Prejudice
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“Fortunately, I enjoy fooling with letters, moving them around, going back and forth over them, over and over, screaming . . . The terrible thing about writing is also the great thing about it: you can keep on changing it. ‘We say that we perfect diction,’ wrote Wallace Stevens. ‘We simply grow tired.’ But it’s a good tired.”
---Ray Blount, Jr., in the Introduction to Alphabet Juice
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“A powerful agent is the right word . . . Whenever we come upon one of these intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.”
---Mark Twain
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“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.”
---William Faulkner
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“She tried to remember that last time she’d tucked herself in to the pages of a good book or outsmarted a crossword puzzle or patronized the musicians in the park of been mindless in a movie theater or drunk on a poem.”
---Patricia Cornwell, in her latest novel Scarpetta
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From Robert Herrick’s poem “To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time”: (1648)
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.”
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From Ben Jonson’s poem “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare”:
“He was not of an age, but for all time!”
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Happy Reading!
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