May 2013
16 posts
3 tags
“You have a grand gift for silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a...”
– Arthur Conan Doyle
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“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”
– Alexander Pope
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“Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.”
– Honoré de Balzac
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“I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.”
– Gary Paulsen
4 tags
“To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like...”
– Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol
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“‘That proves you are unusual,’ returned the Scarecrow; ‘and I...”
– L. Frank Baum
2 tags
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not...”
– Albert Einstein
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“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
– Winston Churchill
2 tags
“Think before you speak. Read before you think.”
– Fran Lebowitz
3 tags
“All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust.”
– J.M. Barrie
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“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
3 tags
“It is time to turn on the moon.
It is time to live by a different light.”
– Nancy Willard
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“Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with...”
– Lemony Snicket
2 tags
“I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the...”
– John Lennon
3 tags
“Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good...”
– Hilary Mantel
4 tags
“Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how...”
– William Faulkner
April 2013
23 posts
3 tags
“It’s not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much...”
– Terry Pratchett
3 tags
“Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and...”
– Toni Morrison
3 tags
My Latest Review for the Boston Globe: 'Rapture... →
3 tags
“Reading and sauntering and lounging and dozing, which I call thinking, is my...”
– David Hume
2 tags
“You should eat a waffle! You can’t be sad if you eat a waffle!”
– Lauren Myracle, ttfn
3 tags
“We’ve all led raucous lives,
some of them inside, some of them out.
But...”
– Charles Wright
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“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is...”
– Vladimir Nabokov
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“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to...”
– Voltaire
4 tags
“Because paper has more patience than people.”
– Anne Frank
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“The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places. But...”
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
3 tags
“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say...”
– Fred Rogers
5 tags
“For Boston: “The marks humans leave are too often scars.”
– John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
3 tags
“We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our...”
– Henry James,
3 tags
“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”
– Flannery O’Connor
4 tags
“Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know...”
– Paul Theroux
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“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the...”
– Kurt Vonnegut
2 tags
“To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story,...”
– ― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
Matilda at 25: Roald Dahl’s bookish heroine is... →
In which I write about my love for Roald Dahl’s Matilda for Slate.
4 tags
“Two rights don’t equal a left.”
– Roald Dahl, The BFG
1 tag
“I believe in a benevolent God not because He created the Grand Canyon or...”
– Paul Rudnick, I Shudder and Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey
2 tags
“When in doubt, look intelligent.”
– Garrison Keillor
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“Everything you look at can become a fairy tale and you can get a story from...”
– Hans Christian Andersen
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“I’ve always found that the better the book I’m reading, the smarter I feel, or,...”
– Francine Prose
March 2013
20 posts
2 tags
“After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for...”
– Richard Russo
3 tags
“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?”
– Henry Ward Beecher
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“Life’s under no obligation to give us what we expect.”
– Margaret Mitchell
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“I don’t think people read poetry because they’re interested in the...”
– Billy Collins
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“In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.”
– Denise Levertov
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“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will...”
– ― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
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“Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best...”
– Philip Roth
3 tags
“What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.”
– John Updike
“Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are...”
– John Edgar Wideman
4 tags
“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more...”
– Albert Einstein
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“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings...”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald 