Mary Schmich Quotes

Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if not many years, of one man’s solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude

We use books like mirrors, gazing into them only to discover ourselves.

But today when I am 17 and warm and well fed, I'm keeping this journal for myself so I can always remember life as we knew it, life as we know it, for a time when I am no longer in the sunroom.

A lot of times, when I go back to books I loved when I was young, I don't quite understand what it was that I loved about them. Rereading 'The Secret Garden,' I felt a lot like Mary feels when she visits her garden.

It Might As Well Be Spring... I used to sing that as a young girl in my voice lessons. Then I picked it up again and it spoke to me in a whole new way.

When she died, Mom left me her letters and journals. Windows into things I would have been too young to understand when she was alive, or too busy, or too much of a know-it-all.

For me, 'Room' is an opportunity to relive an aspect of my childhood that I hadn't put a ton of thought into.

Indeed, every book on my shelves is a key to a little vault of memories.

There is something wonderful about a book. We can pick it up. We can heft it. We can read it. We can set it down. We can think of what we have read. It does something for us. We can share great minds, great actions, and great undertakings in the pages of a book.

A true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.

There's an old saying that if you come back to the place where you became a man, you will remember all those things you need to be happy... That saying never made sense to me, but I thought it was worth a try.

When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.

It’s a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what’s changed, is you.

When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself.

The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else’s life. And when we do that, we learn to sympathize with other people. But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own lives, that somehow we hadn’t been able to see before.

I never thought I could write this much and now that it's coming to an end, I feel sad that I have to stop, sort of the way you feel at the end of a really good book and you know you're going to miss the main character. But in this case, the main character is me! Myself. Joe (formerly JoDan) Bunch. —Joe Bunch

What one knows best is ... what one has learned not from books but as a result of books, through the reflections to which they have given rise.

No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books.

Looking back in front of me, in the mirror a grin. Through eyes of love I see, I'm only looking at a friend.

Books are never out of humour; never envious or jealous, they answer all questions with readiness; ... they teach us how to live and how to die; they dispel melancholy by their mirth, and amuse by their wit; they prepare the soul to suffer everything and desire nothing; they introduce us to ourselves.

Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?" Mo had said..."As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells...and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower...both strange and familiar.

We read books to find out who we are.

I didn't truly understand the depth of my roots until I was old enough to wonder and care.

You can revisit - the wonderful thing about my job is you can revisit your 22-year-old self or your 24-year-old self any particular night you want. The songs pick up some extra resonance, I hope, but they're still - they're there, and I can revisit that period of my life when I choose. So it's quite a nice experience.

Life…we understand it differently at different stages. It’s what is interesting about getting older, you realize your relationship with the past is always negotiable. There is a lot of freedom in that, because you realize you can go back to what you did such a long time ago. You can talk with the dead, talk with your lost self, your disappeared self, and you can visit those places again, and understand it differently. That makes a huge difference.