William Cowper Quotes

I get a lot of moral guidance from reading novels, so I guess I expect my novels to offer some moral guidance, but they're not blueprints for action, ever.

Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisers.

I love running, swimming and riding, sleeping and eating, reading and loving things that everybody likes

To get to where you want to be in the next 5 years, you are either reading the right books or you're not

That best academy, a mother's knee.

For at least twenty minutes she handed out the story. The youngest kids were soothed by her voice, and everyone else saw visions of the whistler running from the scene. Liesel did not. The book thief saw only the mechanics of the words--their bodies stranded on the paper, beaten down for her to walk on. Somewhere, too, in the gaps between a period and the next capital letter, there was also Max. She remembered reading to him when he was sick. It he in the basement? she wondered. Or is he stealing a glimpse of the sky again?

Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

To me, the process of writing is just reading what I've written and - like running your hand over one of those mod glass stovetops to find where the heat is - looking for where the energy is in the prose, then going in the direction of that. It's an exercise in being open to whatever is there.

Kids are a lesson every day, and being married is a lesson every day, but I think having a boutique and running it with my husband and having our careers and raising children was something that was really an eye-opener all the time.

Any book is better than no book. Slowly, surely, one will lead you to another, which will lead you to the best.

Do you know a book that you are willing to put under your head for a pillow when you lie dying? Very well; that is the book you want to study while you are living. There is but one such book in the world.

Adventure is something you seek for pleasure, or even for profit, like a gold rush or invading a country;...but experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.

This, books can do-nor this alone; they give New views to life, and teach us how to live; They soothe the grieved, the stubborn they chastise; Fools they admonish, and confirm the wise. Their aid they yield to all: they never shun The man of sorrow, nor the wretch undone; Unlike the hard, the selfish, and the proud, They fly not sullen from the suppliant crowd; Nor tell to various people various things, But show to subjects, what they show to kings.

A man improves more by reading the story of a person eminent for prudence and virtue, than by the finest rules and precepts of morality.

In reading and writing, you cannot lay down rules until you have learnt to obey them. Much more so in life.

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.

Assuming, as you grow older, that you're the guardian of the world's wisdom, even if you haven't necessarily lived enough to know what's right and wrong.

Reading is a dissuasion from immorality. Reading stands in the place of company.

If ever you get to be my age," said the old woman, "you will know all there is to know about regrets, and you will know that one more, here or there, will make no difference in the long run.

Maybe we could learn a little lesson, maybe this all shine a little light, cause there's no healthy way to mess with the line between wrong and right.

Never run after you own hat - others will be delighted to do it; why spoil their fun?

I never stop running. I'm not one of the weenies who drop out just because the electoral college votes. I'm still in the race. I'm an extremely corrupt candidate and I stress that in case anybody in our reading audience is interested in sending me money.

If to take up books were to take them in, and if to see them were to consider them, and to run through them were to grasp them, I should be wrong to make myself out quite as ignorant as I say I am.

When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book.

Novels may teach us as wholesome a moral as the pulpit. There are "sermons in stones," in healthy books, and "good in everything.