Thoughtfully Quotes (page 20)
The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
Alan Bennett
Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.
Virginia Woolf
There are surely other worlds than this - other thoughts than the thoughts of the multitude - other speculations than the speculations of the sophist. Who then shall call thy conduct into question? who blame thee for thy visionary hours, or denounce those occupations as a wasting away of life, which were but the overflowings of thine everlasting energies?
Edgar Allan Poe
People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life. I have my iron desk that I hauled up three flights of stairs, with ropes and wedges. I have my pencils that I sharpen with a paring knife. There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?
Don DeLillo
Of all I saw and learned this past half year, one thing stands out. What goes
on in the class is not what teachers think-- certainly not what I had always
thought. For years now I have worked with a picture in mind of what my
class was like. This reality, which I felt I knew, was partly physical, partly
mental or spiritual. In other words, I thought I knew, in general, what the
students were doing, and also what they were thinking and feeling. I see now
that my picture of reality was almost...
John Holt
The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know — the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be…. The thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever.
Thomas Wolfe
The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamily self-aware, the submicroscopic moments. Hesaid this more than once, Elster did, in more than one way. His life happened, he said, when he sat staring at a blank wall, thinking about dinner...He said we do this all the time, all of us, we become ourselves beneath the running thoughts and dim images, wondering idly when we'll...
Don DeLillo
But as you age, you lose other, even more important things, like friends-hopefully only bad friends, who maybe weren't as good for you as you once thought. With luck, you'll be able to hang on to your true friends, the ones who were always there for you.... even when you thought they weren't. Because friends like that are more precious then all the tiaras in the world
Meg Cabot