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A man with a mouth like a mastiff, a brow like a mountain and eyes like burning anthracite — that was Dan'l Webster in his prime. And the biggest case he argued never got written down in the books, for he argued it against the devil, nip and tuck and no holds barred. And this is the way I used to hear it told.
Stephen Vincent Benét
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The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.
Katherine Mansfield
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You cannot write for children... They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.
Maurice Sendak
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The habit of breaking up one's colour to make it brilliant dates from further back than Impressionism—Couture advocates it in a little book called 'Causeries d'Atelier' written about 1860—it is part of the technique of Impressionism but used for quite a different reason.
John Singer Sargent
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A copy of Dante's Purgatorio excited his especial disgust. "French, eh?" he said. "I guessed as much, and pretty dirty too, I shouldn't wonder. Now just you wait while I look up these here books"—how he said it!—"in my list. Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside."
Evelyn Waugh
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When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.
John Berger
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From the Desert I come to thee
On a stallion shod with fire;
And the winds are left behind
In the speed of my desire.
Under thy window I stand,
And the midnight hears my cry:
I love thee, I love but thee,
With a love that shall not die
Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars are old,
And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold!
Bayard Taylor
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To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves: such a prohibition ought to fill them with disdain.
Claude Adrien Helvétius
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The experience of the race shows that we get our most important education not through books but through our work. We are developed by our daily task, or else demoralized by it, as by nothing else.
Anna Garlin Spencer
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That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.
Amos Bronson Alcott
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I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.
Carlos Fuentes
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There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
Joseph Brodsky
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Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts—the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but of the three, the only quite trustworthy one is the last. The acts of a nation may be triumphant by its good fortune; and its words mighty by the genius of a few of its children: but its art, only by the general gifts and common sympathies of the race.
John Ruskin
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Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
W. H. Auden
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Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.
Walt Whitman
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The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books.
Stéphane Mallarmé
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There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.
Carson McCullers
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It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass.
Eudora Welty
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I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human face looking at me.
Martin Buber
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The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away. In this book we are concerned with how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people; to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace, cooperation, equal and full opportunities for education, full and useful employment, health, and the creation of those circumstances in which man can have the chance to live by values that give meaning to life.
Saul Alinsky
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Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.
Stephen Vizinczey
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I profess both to learn and to teach anatomy, not from books but from dissections; not from positions of philosophers but from the fabric of nature.
William Harvey
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God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.
William Ellery Channing
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The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.
Max Lerner
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No furniture so charming as books, even if you never open them or read a single word.
Sydney Smith
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Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.
Martin Luther
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