Quotable Quotes

Maybe it has something to do with my bookishness, but I have always loved to collect quotes. Someday I will get around to organizing this motley collection, but until then, in no particular order, here are some of my favorites.

"You can't always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream." (Frank Zappa)

"I have a message to deliver to the cute people of the world...if you're cute, or maybe you're beautiful... there's MORE OF US UGLY MOTHERFUCKERS OUT THERE THAN YOU ARE!! So watch out." (Frank Zappa)

"Most people wouldn't know good music if it came up and bit them in the ass." (Frank Zappa)

"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid." (Frank Zappa)

"Without deviation from the norm, 'progress' is not possible." (Frank Zappa)

"It's better to have something to remember than nothing to regret." (Frank Zappa)

"If you want to get laid, go to college, but if you want an education, go to the library." (Frank Zappa, quoted in the Pittsburgh Press in the summer of ’67)

"The truth can’t hurt you; it’s just like the dark. It scares you witless, but in time you see things clear and stark." (from "I Want You" by Elvis Costello)

"I don’t want to feel as if my life were a sojourn any longer. It is time now that I begin to live." (Henry David Thoreau, journal entry from 25 December 1841)

"Life is more than sexual combustibility." (John Adams to Thomas Jefferson in the musical 1776)

"Do what you’re afraid to do." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

"Mary Kay is one of the secret masters of the world: a librarian. They control information. Don't ever piss one off." (from The Callahan Touch by Spider Robinson)

"Librarian (like Stewardess, Certified Public Accountant, Used Car Salesman) is one of those occupations that people assume attract a certain deformed personality." (from The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken)

"In 1980, handguns killed

77 people in Japan.

8 in Great Britain.

24 in Switzerland.

8 in Canada.

23 in Israel.

18 in Sweden.

4 in Australia.

11,522 in the United States.

God bless America."

(from a poster by Handgun Control Inc. Now)

"You are anarchists in the realm of thought." (from The Iron Heel by Jack London)

"As for conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I do not think much of that." (Henry David Thoreau)

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking the root." (Henry David Thoreau)

"It takes two to speak the truth – one to speak, and another to hear." (Henry David Thoreau)

"Do not despair of life. Think of the fox, prowling in a winter night to satisfy his hunger. His race survives; I do not believe any of them ever committed suicide." (Henry David Thoreau)

"Things do not change; We change." (Henry David Thoreau)

"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth." (Henry David Thoreau)

"That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest." (Henry David Thoreau)

"Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul." (Henry David Thoreau)

"I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor." (Henry David Thoreau)

"Winter is beautiful, but bed is better." (Toad from Frog and Toad All Year by Arnold Lobel)

"One must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you still have chaos in you." (Friedrich Nietzsche)

"I decided to return to the library and see what I could learn there. Besides, I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows." (from Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny)

"When I start thinking, all is lost." (Paul Cezanne)

"Well, my daddy, he didn't leave me much, you know he was a very simple man, but what he did tell me was this, he did say, son, he said, he say, you know it's possible to become so defiled in this world that your own father and mother will abandon you and if that happens, God will always believe in your ability to mend your ways." (Bob Dylan, accepting Grammy award for Lifetime Achievement, 20 February 1991)

"You can draw a line between what I'm interested in and what I'm not interested in. On one side you can name Dylan and Lennon, who observe the world and have feelings, and write songs directly from those feelings. On the vapid side you have pop groups who need material and write songs to fill the hole, rather than getting somebody else." (Roger Waters)

A body is a body. A woman could be deaf, dumb, crippled, and blind and still have soul and compassion. That’s all that matters to me. You can hear it in the voice. (Bob Dylan)

I ain't sayin' you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don't mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don't think twice, it's all right"

(from "Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright" by Bob Dylan)

"Death isn't on line. If he was, there would be a sudden drop in the death rate. Although it'd be interesting to see if he'd post things like: DON'T YOU THINK I SOUND LIKE JAMES EARL JONES?" (Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett)

"Granddad was superstitious about books. He thought that if you had enough of them around, education leaked out, like radioactivity." (Terry Pratchett, Johnny and the Dead)

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." (Emily Dickinson)

"How did it get so late so soon?

It's night before it's afternoon.

December is here before it's June.

My goodness how the time has flewn.

How did it get so late so soon?'' (Dr. Seuss)

"If a man has come to that point where he is so content that he says; I do not want to know any more, or do any more or be any more, he is in a state of which he ought to be changed into a mummy." (Henry Ward Beecher)

"There is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that." (Oscar Wilde)

"People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, they make them." (George Bernard Shaw)

"Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground." (Theodore Roosevelt)

"You see things and you say Why? But I dream things that never were; and I say Why not?" (George Bernard Shaw)

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; there is where they should be. Now put foundations under them." (Henry David Thoreau)

"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world." (Oscar Wilde)

"No man is a failure who enjoys life." (William Feather)

"I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine." (Fritz Perls)

"The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that me may become robots." (Erich Fromm)

"Dare to be naive." (R. Buckminster Fuller)

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men... re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem." (Walt Whitman)

"Live all you can. It is a mistake not to. It doesn't matter so much what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?" (Henry James)

"Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained." (William Blake)

"When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies." (James M. Barrie)

"Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away." (Carl Sandburg)

"Books to the ceiling, books to the sky.
My piles of books are a mile high.
How I love them!
How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them."

(Arnold Lobel)

"To the uneducated, an A is just three sticks." (A. A. Milne)

"One can't complain. I have my friends. Someone spoke to me only yesterday." (A. A. Milne)

"It's snowing still. And freezing. However, we haven't had an earthquake lately." (A. A. Milne)

"We can't all, and some of us don't. That's all there is to it." (A. A. Milne)

"Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you." (A. A. Milne)

"You can't help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn't spell it right; but spelling isn't everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn't count." (A. A. Milne)

"All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual." (Honore de Balzac)

"I think people who can truly live a life in music are telling the world, ‘You can have my love, you can have my smiles. Forget the bad parts, you don't need them. Just take the music, the goodness, because it's the very best, and it's the part I give most willingly.’ " (George Harrison)

"You are not the boss of my words, Grace... This is a freed country. And if I want to say valentime, I can. And I will not even go to jail." (Barbara Park, Junie B. Jones and the Mushy, Gushy Valentine)

"There have been no dragons in my life, only small spiders and stepping in gum. I could have coped with the dragons." (Anonymous)

"Getting out of bed in the morning is an act of false confidence." (Jules Feiffer)

"What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do." (Bob Dylan)

"One of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they seem to sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain." (James Baldwin)

"We are all born mad. Some remain so." (Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot)

"The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love." (Gabriel García Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera)

"'Know thyself?' If I knew myself, I'd run away." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

"Wherever books will be burned, men also, in the end, are burned." (Heinrich Heine, Almansor)

"Some men are alive simply because it is against the law to kill them." (Ed Howe)

"'I meant,' said Ipslore bitterly, ‘what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?' Death thought about it 'CATS,' he said eventually, ‘CATS ARE NICE.'" (Terry Pratchett, Sourcery)

"Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there." (Will Rogers)

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me." (Hunter S. Thompson)

"We have to distrust each other. It's our only defence against betrayal." (Tennessee Williams, Camino Real)

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know." (Ernest Hemingway)

"There is a magic in some books
That sucks a man into connections
With the spirits hard to touch
That join him to his kind."
(Roger Waters, Chicago Tribune interview, 18 July 1999)

"I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy.... He said it sure as heck beat dying for nothing in the Viet Nam War." (from God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian by Kurt Vonnegut)

"The only completely consistent people are the dead." (Aldous Huxley)

"Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae." (Kurt Vonnegut)

"If Thoreau had been a drinker, Walden would have been a different book. ('Damn birds shrieking like hyenas this morning; I have nailed boards to the windows to keep the sunlight out.')" (from Zod Wallop by William Browning Spencer)

"Peace is always beautiful." (Walt Whitman)

"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." (Robert F. Kennedy)

"Try to be Shakespeare. Leave the rest to fate." (Robert Browning)

"Who cares what it's all about?
I do! Edgar Allen Poe cares! Shelley cares! Beethoven & Dylan care!
Do you care? What are you about
or are you a human being with 10 fingers & two eyes?"

(Allen Ginsberg)

"READ! Books can be as delicious as hot-fudge sundaes, as funny as clowns, as exciting as a baseball game that's tied in the 9th inning, and as beautiful as the best sunset you ever saw." (Judith Viorst)

"When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen." (Ernest Hemingway)

"You may give them (children) your love but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams." (Kahlil Gibran)

"My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn't have any excuse to be stupid. Close to everything a human being needed to know was somewhere in the library." (Joan Bauer)

"I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart." (e. e. cummings)

"Words you say never seem to live up to the ones in your head." (from "The Day I Tried to Live" by Soundgarden)

"And even though you needed me, it was clear that I could not do a thing for you." (Pink Floyd)

"I know someday you'll have a beautiful life
I know you'll be a star
In somebody, else's sky, but why?
Why, why can't it be, why can't it be mine?" (Pearl Jam)

"One of the key pleasures of receiving a letter is the act of holding and entering an envelope – a sort of cross between Christmas and sex." (Nick Bantock)

"There's all sorts of things I was always meaning to get around to -- learning to play the flute, calculating the square root of nought, going mad -- but I just didn't have the time." (from Flying Dutch by Tom Holt)

"There is no such thing as a weird human being. It's just that some people require more understanding than others." (Tom Robbins)

"You risked your life, but what else have you ever risked? Have you ever risked disapproval? Have you ever risked a belief? I see nothing particularly courageous in risking one's life. So you lose it, you go to your hero's heaven and everything is milk and honey 'til the end of time, right? You get your reward and suffer no earthly consequences. That's not courage. Real courage is risking something that you have to keep on living with, real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink your thoughts and suffer change and stretch consciousness. Real courage is risking one's cliches." (Tom Robbins)

"What you think of yourself is much more important than what others think of you." (Seneca)

"We ought to hear at least one little song every day, read a good poem, see a first-rate painting, and if possible speak a few sensible words." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

"The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think." (James McCosh)

"A book is like a garden carried in the pocket." (Chinese proverb)

"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all of the miseries of life." (W. Somerset Maugham)

"He who destroys a good book kills reason itself." (John Milton)

"Don't join the book burners. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book." (Dwight D. Eisenhower)

"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go." (Dr. Seuss)

"There is no Frigate like a Book to take us lands away, nor any Coursers like a Page of prancing poetry." (Emily Dickinson)

"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners." (Virginia Woolf )

"My library was dukedom large enough." (William Shakespeare, The Tempest)

"In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

"When I discovered libraries, it was like having Christmas every day." (Jean Fritz)

"The library, I believe, is the last of our public institutions to which you can go without credentials. You don't even need the sticker on your windshield that you need to get into the public beach. All you need is the willingness to read." (Harry Golden)

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library." (Jorge Luis Borges)

"A library should be like a pair of open arms." (Roger Rosenblatt)

"A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you." (Daniel J. Boorstin)

"All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been--it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books." (Carlyle)

"Books--the children of the brain." (Jonathan Swift)

"Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations." (Henry David Thoreau)

"How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book." (Henry David Thoreau)

"The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn't know how to read." (Benjamin Franklin)

"You're perfect, yes it's true
But without me, you're only you..." (Faith No More)

"There is no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money." (Robert Graves)

"I've always rooted for the underdogs, and usually they lose. You know why? 'Cause they're the underdog." (Randy Newman)

"Some people may contend that there is no image more charming that a child holding a puppy or kitten. But for me that's a distant second. When I see a child clutching a book... to his or her tiny bosom, I'm moved. Children can possess a book in a way they can never possess a video game, a TV show, or a Darth Vader doll. A book comes alive when they read it. They give it life themselves by understanding it." (Chris Van Allsburg)

"We have art so that we may not die of reality." (Nietzsche)

"God bless you all with peace, tranquility and good will." (Bob Dylan)

"Being famous is not the same as being important. A lot of important people aren't famous, and a lot of famous people aren't important." (Arlo Guthrie)

"That’s the story of my life; I always get the fuzzy end of the lollipop.” (Marilyn Monroe in Some Like it Hot)

“The only thing I would want to say is that storytelling is ancient; it’s something that everybody does. Kids mustn’t be in awe of it. Reading should be a joy – fun, fun, fun – not a responsibility, not something you do because society demands it, but something you do because it’s a pleasure.” (Natalie Babbitt)

"America is not like a blanket - one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt - many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread. The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay and the disabled make up the American quilt." (Jesse Jackson, 17 July 1984)

"It isn't how you die. It's what you live for." (Daniel Boone)

"There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring." (Ernest Hemingway)

"Just as iron rusts from disuse, even so does inaction spoil the intellect." (Leonardo Da Vinci)

"Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other." (William Faulkner)

"It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience." (Julius Caesar)

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." (Albert Einstein)

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty or Safety." (Benjamin Franklin)

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come." (Victor Hugo)

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." (Theodore Roosevelt)

"Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat." (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

"To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest." (Mahatma Gandhi)

"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation." (Herman Melville)

"The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone." (Harriet Beecher Stowe)

"Just because a lot of people know something nominal doesn't make it important. A lot of people know what a pencil sharpener is, but that doesn't make it the most important invention of the 20th century." (Ben Affleck)

"An unread book is just a block of paper." (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

"Each of us must have a dream to light our way through this dark world." (from The Seeing Stone by Kevin Crossley-Holland)

"Her anger at him did not make the loss of his company any easier to bear: you always miss the person who breaks your heart." (from "Here's Your Hat, What's Your Hurry" by Elizabeth McCracken)

"We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love." (Tom Robbins)

"I've never gotten over high school, to the extent that I'm still a little surprised that my friends want to hang out with me." (Barbara Kingsolver)

"Dreams are the touchstones of our characters." (HDT)

"For evil to flourish, good people have to do nothing and evil shall flourish." (Edmund Burke)

"Now the darkness only stays at night time
In the morning it will fade away
Daylight is good at arriving at the right time
No it's not always going to be this grey"  (George Harrison)

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."  (Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night)

"If there's any advice I have to give, I would say it's that. If you're looking for a way to get closer to your kids, there ain't no better way than to grab 'em and read. And if you put them in front of a computer or a TV, you are abandoning them. You are abandoning them because they are sitting on a couch or a floor and they may be hugging a dog, but they ain't hugging you. "  (Maurice Sendak)

“I'm weary of the battle. But a tired fighter can still be a fighter.”  (Robert Cormier)

"At the rate we're going, I can imagine next year's headline: "'Goodnight Moon' Banned for Encouraging Children to Communicate With Furniture." And we all know where that can lead, don't we?"  (Judy Blume)

"Oh, what a breath of fresh air a good library is! I know, musty is the usual adjective that is attached to libraries, but not for me. In a free country, one does not just have to "shut up and take it," as my aunt was told by her mother, remaining in ignorance. All that information there, just for the asking! No one slaps your hand at the card catalog, or tells you to shut up about your questions as you browse the stacks."  (from Dream Catcher by Margaret A. Salinger)

"I always knew that sooner or later there would come somebody like Woody (Guthrie) who could make a great song every week. (Dylan) certainly had a social agenda, but he was such a good poet that most of his attempts were head and shoulders above things that I and others were trying to do. ... If I had an address, I'd send him a birthday card saying, 'keep on going.'''  (Pete Seeger, 23 May 2001)

"Don't forget to support your public library."  (Bob Dylan, at the Gorge Amphitheatre in Georgia, 18 June 2000)

"We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever."  (Philip Pullman)

"Hell, there are no rules here -- we're trying to accomplish something."  (Thomas A. Edison)

"(Librarians) are subversive. You think they're just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're, like, plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn't mess with them."  (Michael Moore)

"(My story) has no political significance... I was completely unaware that animals with white fur... were considered blood relatives of white human beings... (My book) was not written for adults who will not understand it, because it is only about a soft, furry love, and it has no hidden messages of hate."  (Garth Williams, on his lovely book, The Rabbits' Wedding)

"No. You are a lunatic."  (J.K. Rowling's response to the frequent question, Does she feel her books encourage satanism)

last updated 19 June 2002

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