“It was always there. Like a fruit in season. Every season. As permanent as a government job.” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things #BookSky

“[Books] were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually living in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear.” ― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail #BookSky

“We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Friendship) #BookSky

“It’s odd, isn’t it, why farce so often seems to get mixed up with tragedy?” ― Agatha Christie, The Seven Dials Mystery #BookSky

“Thank the heavens above I’m an educated man and know nothing whatever upon any subject at all.” ― Agatha Christie, The Seven Dials Mystery #BookSky

“My mother believed in the logic of the emotions; she did not think they should be tested, still less regulated, by the lessons of experience.” ― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between #BookSky

“I don't hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you.” ― Mordecai Richler, Barney's Version #BookSky

“I got into bed with Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, the book I always travel with because I want them to find it at my bedside should I expire during the night” ― Mordecai Richler, Barney's Version #BookSky

“Words are finite organs of the infinite mind.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature #BookSky

“It is a low benefit to give me something; it is a high benefit to enable me to do somewhat of myself.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Divinity School Address #BookSky

“Authors are sometimes like tomcats : they distrust all the other toms, but they are kind to kittens.” ― Malcolm Cowley, Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews : First Series #BookSky

He was taking language lessons from a White Russian watchmaker whom he had befriended. “How can anybody go through life,” he asked, “not being able to read Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov in the original?” ― Mordecai Richler, Barney's Version #BookSky

“Be kind as a default value but a ferocious honey badger in the defense of the deontological principles that permit truth and freedom to flourish.” ― Gad Saad, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind #BookSky

“Feminism is never too far away from suicidal empathy.” ― Gad Saad, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind #BookSky

“Pathological envy bathing in suicidal empathy fuels socialism.” ― Gad Saad, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind #BookSky

“a public housing tenancy is to psychopaths what tenure is to academics: no better invitation to irresponsibility could possibly be imagined.” ― Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom #BookSky

“It is the mind, not society, that forges the manacles that keep people enchained to their misfortunes.” ― Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom #BookSky

“the efforts of educationists were part of a giant plot by the middle classes to keep power for themselves and to restrict competition, in the process creating sinecures for some of their less able and dynamic members – namely the educationists.” ― Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom #BookSky

“It is only with the heart that one can see clearly, for the most essential things are invisible to the eye.” ― Hans Christian Anderson, The Complete Fairy Tales #BookSky

“It is a regrettable fact that psychological distress expands to meet the supply of publicly-funded services available to reduce it.” ― Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom #BookSky

“Cherchez la femme, Bucky. Remember that.” ― James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia #BookSky

“every psychic defence mechanism known to the modern psychologist makes its appearance somewhere in Shakespeare.” ― Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom #BookSky

“not for nothing did Tolstoy write at the beginning of Anna Karenina that every happy family is happy in the same way, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” ― Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom #BookSky

“I never knew anyone who had a passion for words who had as much difficulty in saying things as I do and I very seldom say them in a manner I like. If I do it's because I don't know I'm trying.” ― Marianne Moore, Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 2nd Series #BookSky

“a sense of cultural, historical, and religious belatedness, inevitable in the Evening Land of America, increases the appetite to know, rather than to believe or to trust.” ― Harold Bloom, The American Religion #BookSky

“The Bible is the most difficult of all difficult books. The general decline in the ability to read nearly anything in the age of television has made the Bible almost impossible to read for all except an elite.” ― Harold Bloom, The American Religion #BookSky

“Mormonism, a religion truly as different from Christianity as Islam is, exposes how contrived and arbitrary all theology is, indeed how strange and unexpected all religion evidently has to be.” ― Harold Bloom, The American Religion #BookSky

“Nothing made me forget the world like reading did. Nothing made me think about the world like reading did. Nothing else filled me up. Nothing else emptied me out. Sentences and paragraphs would drift through my head like clouds.” ― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me #BookSky

“The only thing missing was Micky Roy arriving drunk and demanding the Restoration of Conjugal Rights (which by the way is a real law). For the sake of the children. That would have more or less completed our family portrait.” ― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me #BookSky

“for the first time began to understand the desperate game that we play in life; and how a thing once done is not to be changed or remedied, by any penitence.” ― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Black Arrow #BookSky

“The standard of value in this book is the religious imagination, and the American Religion, in its fullest formulations, is judged to be an imaginative triumph.” ― Harold Bloom, The American Religion #BookSky

“These word-stringers make nothing, grow nothing, kill no enemies, catch no fish, and raise no cattle. They just take silver in exchange for words, which are free anyway. It is a clever trick, but in truth they are about as much use as priests.” ― Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom #BookSky

“My son’s ambitions are very few, merely to hear jokes, solve riddles, get drunk, give rings, lie belly to belly with women, eat well, and go to Odin.” ― Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom #BookSky

“A leader leads,” Ragnar said, “and you can’t ask men to risk death if you’re not willing to risk it yourself.” ― Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom #BookSky

“Marriage is the highest state of friendship. If happy, it lessens our cares by dividing them, at the same time that it doubles our pleasures by mutual participation.” ― Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, Or The History of a Young Lady #BookSky

“The only thing I ever truly made was Americans (Ben Franklin)” ― Orson Scott Card, Seventh Son #BookSky

“Psychopaths are anything but stupid. What we want to do is make the guy think we think he’s stupid. Hit him where it hurts—his goddam pride, which is hooked up with his grandiose notions of his off-the-charts IQ.” ― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem #BookSky

“Nobody phoned, nobody came and there weren’t any letters.” Parsons seemed proud of his empty life, as if it was evidence of respectability.” ― Ruth Rendell, From Doon With Death #BookSky

“this here was the type asshole that subscribed to magazines like the Nation and Atlantic and probably even read them, and that I didn't stand a snowball's chance against him in an argument; but I was too oiled to keep my mouth shut.” ― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion #BookSky

“I wasn’t very good, so I changed my major.” “To what?” “To pre-med, then psychology, then English lit, then history.” “I like a woman who knows what she wants.” Kay smiled. “So do I, but I don’t know any.” ― James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia #BookSky

“It would not be fair to enquire into a young lady’s exact estimate of her own perfections.” ― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park #BookSky

“Some people don’t respond to civility.” ― James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia #BookSky

“she had forced herself to try, sometimes reading the same page over and over, until one sleepy afternoon something clicked, like a lock unlocking, and she saw those printed doors swing open on a vast house of words.” ― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion #BookSky

“The Razor’s Edge is a book about a quest for knowledge. Universal, final, unquestionable knowledge. I was swept up in the book’s glorification of learning and the idea that, like a stage magician, I could have secrets possessed only by a few.” ― Steve Martin, Born Standing Up #BookSky

“one is familiar with Shakespeare in a degree,’ said Edmund, ‘from one’s earliest years. His celebrated passages are quoted by every body, they are in half the books we open, and we all talk Shakespeare, use his similies, and describe with his descriptions.” ― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park #BookSky

“Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is part of an English-man’s constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with him by instinct.” ― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park #BookSky

“Readers make their own personal connections to words, irrespective of the writer's intentions, and each reader gains something unique.” ― Michiko Aoyama, What You Are Looking for Is in the Library #BookSky

“He knew her to be clever, to have a quick apprehension as well as good sense, and a fondness for reading, which, properly directed, must be an education in itself.” ― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park #BookSky

“maybe she couldn’t believe she’d ever have to pay, flashing her devil-may-care grin over her shoulder as she fishtailed on her Big Wheel, leaving me behind in a spray of gravel, me always running, running to catch up” ― Beth Ann Fennelly, The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs #BookSky

“Death is total absence, you said. Yes and no. You are not absent so long as you are in my head. That, of course, is not what you meant; you were thinking of the extinction of the flesh. But it is true; I preserve you, as others will preserve me. For a while.” ― Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger #BookSky