wallflower’s Loved Quotes

I take quite a lot of pride in not knowing what's cool.

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have ---the only way of learning how to write a story.

Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.

I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.

There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered and all of this will have been for naught.

I fear oblivion. I fear it like the proverbial blind man who's afraid of the dark.

Saying ‘I notice you’re a nerd’ is like saying, ‘Hey, I notice that you’d rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you’d rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that?’

He liked all books because he liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

Nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff... Nerds are allowed to LOVE stuff. Like, jump up and down in your chair, can’t control yourself LOVE IT. Hank, when people call people nerds, mostly what they’re saying is ‘you like stuff’. Which is just not a good insult at all. Like, ‘you are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness.’

Thomas Edison's last words were 'It's very beautiful over there'. I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful.

Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we’re quoting.

You have to know what you stand for, not just what you stand against.

I should like to know which is worse: to be raped a hundred times by negro pirates, and have a buttock cut off, and run the gauntlet of the Bulgars, and be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fé, and be dissected, and have to row in a galley -in short to undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered- or simply to sit here and do nothing?

When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he shall make the face of Heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun.

Writing a novel is a tiny candle in a dark, swirling world. It brings light and warmth and hope to the lucky few who, against insufferable odds and despite a juggernaut of irritations, find themselves in the right place to hold it.

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?

There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.

Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just those in power; to contemplate--with the best teachers--the insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history. They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads.

Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.

I know that the stories in books don't ever end; the writer just never wrote the whole story. Like how you can't write out all of life. It just keeps going. For better or worse.