Betty Smith Quotes

I have sought for happiness everywhere, but I have found it nowhere except in a little corner with a little book.

I didn't have much to say to anybody but kept to myself and my books. With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw it's fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.

There is nothing like being left alone again, to walk peacefully with oneself in the woods. To boil one's coffee and fill one's pipe, and to think idly and slowly as one does it.

I enjoy the quiet life.

Wherever I am, if I've got a book with me, I have a place I can go and be happy

Nothing makes me feel better - calmer, clearer and happier - than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It's actually something deeper than mere happiness: it's joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as 'that kind of happiness that doesn't depend on what happens.

A large, still book is a piece of quietness, succulent and nourishing in a noisy world, which I approach and imbibe with "a sort of greedy enjoyment," as Marcel Proust said of those rooms of his old home whose air was "saturated with the bouquet of silence."

I just increasingly enjoy the quiet moments when I can be on my own with my friends and family, or with a book, having a live experience. That's really what I crave, and I always have done.

Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.

Heaven, Kiwi thought, would be the reading room of a great library. But it would be private. Cozy. You wouldn't have to worry about some squeaky-shoed librarian turning the lights off on you or gauging your literacy by reading the names on your book spines, and there wouldn't be a single other patron. The whole place would hum with a library's peace, filtering softly over you like white bars of light.

I'd leave all the hurry, the noise, and the fray, for a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.

She liked the life she had. She loved habits. She craved a day with nothing in it, a long, quiet stretch of hours in the studio.

May I a small house and large garden have; And a few friends, And many books, both true.

To have her meals, and her daily walk, and her fill of novels, and to be left alone, was all that she asked of the gods.

Mistake not. Those pleasures are not pleasures that trouble the quiet and tranquillity of thy life.

Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear.

Me and a book is a party. Me and a book and a cup of coffee is an orgy.

This is what makes me happy: ...Any music-free restaurant ... A grandson who offers to clean the snow off my driveway and also fix my computer ... An evening in bed with a good book. ... A good night's sleep ... As you can see, it doesn't take much to make me happy.

I am a practical girl, and a life is only so long. It should be spent in as much peace and good eating and good reading as possible and no undue excitement. That is all I am after.

He would go somewhere no one knew him, and he would sit in a library all day and read books and listen to people breathing.

The River... It's my world, and I don't want any other. What it hasn't got is not worth having, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing. Lord! the times we've had together!

What peaceful hours I once enjoy'd! How sweet their memory still! But they have left an aching void The world can never fill.

If I'm alone at home, I get increasingly restless, bothered by the idea that I'm missing some crucial encounter out there somewhere. But if I'm left by myself in someone else's place, I often find myself a nice sense of peace engulfing me. I love sinking into an unfamiliar sofa with whatever book happens to be lying nearby.

All mankind's unhappiness derives from one thing: his inability to know how to remain in repose in one room.

I also like a lot of silence, and when you're touring, it's constantly noise, all the time, you're surrounded with 15 or 20 people the entire time. I find that tough.