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When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.


W. Somerset Maugham

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OLIVER GOLDSMITH The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I re...
OLIVER GOLDSMITH It is now my favourite book of all time, but then again, I always think that until I read another bo...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY It is now my favorite book of all time, but then again, I always think that until I read another boo...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY A truly good book…teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down and commence living o...
HENRY DAVID THOREAU How lucky I am to have known somebody and something that saying goodbye to is so damned awful.
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JUSTIN CARTWRIGHT I think I'm a born storyteller. Inspiration is all around me. I can read a newspaper article and...
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Elain offered a half smile. "I suppose that war m...
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DAVID THEWLIS For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people deter...
WALTER LIPPMANN For me, any book I'm writing is also a chance to get in and research and read and learn things t...
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JESSYE NORMAN I began writing poems when I was about eight, with a heavy assist from my mother. She read me Arthur...
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GEORGE R.R. MARTIN Hodor," said Hodor.
GEORGE R.R. MARTIN You do what you love, what you need
SARAH J. MAAS I turned.
Rhysand leaned against the archway into the sitting room, arms crossed, wings nowhere...
SARAH J. MAAS I have no idea whether anyone will have any desire to read it. Will people who don't know me at all ...
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HENRY JAMES So, for the most part, I really like when I read a scene that scares me and makes me sweat a little ...
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JOHN IRVING I read everything. When I say everything, I read everything: children's literature, Y.A., scienc...
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IRA GLASS The books I read, if they intrude on my writing, do so as weather will pass through and touch a land...
JULIA GLASS One of the things I miss most is that I can no longer read, due to age-related macular degeneration....
BILLY GRAHAM I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a ...
JOHN LE CARRE Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part...
VOLTAIRE If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
EMILY DICKINSON I guess part of me hoped that you'd come to me because you trusted me to help. And because maybe you...
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CONAN STEVENS I doubt if I shall ever have time to read the book again -- there are too many new ones coming out a...
L.M. MONTGOMERY I used to read five psalms every day - that teaches me how to get along with God. Then I read a chap...
BILLY GRAHAM I write so that people will read what I write. I don't want to write a book that a thousand peop...
ANN HOOD I read less of everything now. With only fond memories of others' work, it will be interesting t...
JONATHAN CARROLL I was born into a profession in which my love of words, chosen with care for their meaning and nuanc...
FRANCESCO QUINN I try to get in quiet time and book time, but really, the only time I ever get that is when I'm ...
KESHA I have only ever read one book in my life, and that is White Fang. It's so frightfully good I...
NANCY MITFORD Let me say again that I have not read your book. And one of the reasons I didn't was because I wante...
KEITH BEAUCHAMP The person that gives you a good book to read is more valuable than the one that gives you money,bec...
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN) - I tak nieźle sobie pożyłem.
- Co to za życie? – powiedział ojciec.- Nic tylko kłamstw...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI My Best Friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN Curran's whore comes to visit us," Jarek said in accented English.

The three men laughed ...
ILONA ANDREWS

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W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in...
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W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM The end of culture is right living.
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W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her...but she can never forgive him for the sacrifice...
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W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM You learn more quickly under the guidance of experienced teachers. You waste a lot of time going dow...
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W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM It's always difficult to make conversation with a drunk, and there's no denying it, the sober are at...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Tao. Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whiskey and some in love. I...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM One cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one's soul.
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W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM The crown of literature is poetry.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering f...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM They were talking more distantly than if they were strangers who had just met, for if they had been ...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM How can I be reasonable? To me our love was everything and you were my whole life. It is not very pl...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all. They are much more entertaining...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Perfection has one grave defect: it is apt to be dull.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequence than to have a really affectionate mo...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know the...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain su...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with i...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Unfortunately sometimes one can't do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM People do tell a writer things that they don't tell others. I don't know why, unless it is that havi...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Perhaps the most important use of money - It saves time. Life is so short, and there's so much to do...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM There are few things so pleasant as a picnic eaten in perfect comfort.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM The dead look so terribly dead when they're dead.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young ju...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM It's a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called, but few are chosen.
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W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persis...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM I like manual labor. Whenever I've got waterlogged with study, I've taken a spell of it and found it...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies a...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM All important persons have about them someone in a subordinate position who has their ear. These dep...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM A man ought to work. That's what he's here for. That's how he contributes to the welfare of the comm...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM To write simply is as difficult as to be good.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM It is funny about life: if you refuse to accept anything but the very best you will very often get i...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM When I was young I had an elderly friend who used often to ask me to stay with him in the country. H...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Love is a dirty trick played on us to achieve the continuation of the species.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM We have long passed the Victorian era, when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a ba...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacri...
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W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large wi...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actuall...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Tolerance is only another name for indifference.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives by make-believe.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the wo...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one's own bat than by doing the right thing...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without ...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM D'you call life a bad job? Never! We've had our ups and downs, we've had our struggles, we've always...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and wo...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self-complacent is er...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM It is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're ...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM The complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity. The beauty o...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the ...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch's statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self-complacent is er...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who has lost it.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Charm and nothing but charm at last grows a little tiresome. It's a relief then to deal with a man w...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Life isn't long enough for love and art.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM When things are at their worst I find something always happens.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM There was an immeasurable distance between the quick and the dead: they did not seem to belong to th...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefo...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Life wouldn't be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesth...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know the...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM You Europeans know nothing about America. Because we amass large fortunes you think we care for noth...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM We didn't think much in the air corps of a fellow who wangled a cushy job out of his C.O. by butteri...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM