Ever since we were children, our imagination has been shaped by tales of adventure and magic, and the books that held those universes. We grew up hoping a Hogwarts letter would arrive to our mailbox or that our closets hid the entrance to another world where animals could speak. Eventually, as childhood innocence melted away, magic lost its throne in our minds and we knew there was no such thing. Nevertheless it did happen inside our magic-filled imaginations, “but why on Earth should that mean that it is not real?” (J. K. Rowling). Books are our kind of magic, where bewitching writers provoke dreams of worlds never before seen and present amazing characters, and where some words stay with us forever.
“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost.
That old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
âWords have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.â –Edgar Allan Poe
âWe live and we die and anything else is just a delusion.â Chuck Palahniuk, “The Art of Getting By”
“Say yes, even if you are dying of fear, even if you regret it later, because whatever yo do, you will be sorry the rest of your lfie is you say no.” Gabriel GarcĂa MĂĄrquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
âWhenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.â From Mark Twain’s notebooks
“Because a life without meaning, without drive, without focus, without goals or dreams isn’t a life worth living.” Chris Colfer, Struck by Lightning
âThere are years that ask questions and years that answer” – Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
âThe books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
âLife is so damned hard, so damned hard… It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can’t be hurt ever any more. That’s the last and worst thing it does” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned
From The Handmaidâs Tale, by Margaret Atwood:
“I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.” Raymond Carver, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”
âDid you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete? Proving nature’s laws wrong it learned to walk without having feet. Funny it seems, but by keeping it’s dreams it learned to breathe fresh air Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else even cared.â -Tupac Amaru Shakur, “The Rose That Grew From Concrete”
âI took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.” âSylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
âSometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives Iâm not living.â – Jonathan Safrar Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
âThere are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights.â – Bram Stoker, Dracula
âWe cross our bridges as we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and the presumption that once our eyes watered.â – Tom Stoppard, Rosencratz and Guildenstern are Dead
By Antoine de Saint Exupery:
“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing 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, Pride and Prejudice