Quotes by American Authors - Page 204

One appreciates that daily life is really good when one wakes from a horrible dream or when one takes the first outing after a sickness. Why not realize it now?
William Lyon Phelps
He says a thousand pleasant things - But never says "Adieu"
J. G. Saxe
Bore: a person who talks when you wish him to listen.
Ambrose Bierce
Boredom turns a man to sex a woman to shopping and it drives newscasters berserk.
Bruce Herschensohn
When people are bored it is primarily with their own selves.
Eric Hoffer
His shortcoming is his long staying.
Lewis L. Lewisohn
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy but that it is a bore.
H.L. Mencken
The most costly disease is not cancer or coronaries. The most costly disease is boredom - costly for both individual and society.
Norman Cousins
O wad some power the giftie gie us to see some people before they see us.
Ethel Watts Mumford
The man who suspects his own tediousness has yet to be born.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
A bore is a man who when you ask him how he is tells you.
Bert Leston Taylor
Some people can stay longer in an hour than others can in a week.
William Dean Howells
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
John Updike
A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.
Logan P. Smith
A book is the only immortality.
Rufus Choate
The walls of books around him dense with the past formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.
Ross Macdonald
Camerado this is no book. Who touches this touches a man.
Walt Whitman
Reading like prayer remains one of our few private acts.
William Jovanovich
A good title is the title of a successful book.
Raymond Chandler
A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well simply because it was selling well.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Reading is the work of the alert mind is demanding and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.
E B White
I am a part of all I have read.
John Kieran
Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
Henry Ward Beecher
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
Mark Twain
Does it afflict you to find your books wearing out? I mean literally .. . the mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me but that of books most of all.
William Dean Howells
In the case of good books the point is not to see how many of them you can get through but rather how many can get through to you.
Mortimer J. Adler
The telephone book is full of facts but it doesn't contain a single idea.
Mortimer J. Adler
Tis the good reader that makes the good book.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us!
James Russell Lowell
First publication is a pure carnal leap into that dark which one dreams is life.
Hortense Calisher
I read part of it all the way through.
Sam Goldwyn
It circulated for five years through the halls of fifteen publishers and finally ended up with Vanguard Press which as you can see is rather deep into the alphabet.
Patrick Dennis
A dictionary should be descriptive not prescriptive.
Phillip Babcock Gove
Do give books - religious or otherwise - for Christmas. They're never fattening seldom sinful and permanently personal.
Lenore Hershey
Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.
Kathleen Norris
Literature is news that stays news.
Ezra Pound
Reading after a certain (time) diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Albert Einstein
The central theme of the novel is that they were glad to see each other.
Gertrude Stein
Best-sellerism is the star system of the book world. A (best-seller) is a celebrity among books. It is a book known primarily (sometimes exclusively) for its well-knownness.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Properly we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.
Ezra Pound
When you read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.
Clifton Fadiman
The responsibility of a dictionary is to record a language not set its style.
Phillip Babcock Gove
Some books are undeservedly forgotten none are undeservedly remembered.
W.H. Auden
Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it no excess of explanation and it is full of suggestions the raw material of possible poems and histories.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Books are the most mannerly of companions accessible at all times in all moods frankly declaring the author's mind without offense.
Amos Bronson Alcott
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.
Ernest Hemingway
Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity.
Oprah Winfrey
Luck is the residue of design.
Branch Rickey
You've got to be in a position for luck to happen. Luck doesn't go around looking for a stumblebum.
Darrell Royal
Get as much experience as you can so that you're ready when luck works. That's the luck.
Henry Fonda
You have to be eligible for luck to strike and I think that's a matter of education and preparation and character and all the other solid attributes that sometimes people laugh at.
James A. Michener
If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred.
Walt Whitman
No knowledge can be more satisfactory to a man than that of his own frame its parts their functions and actions.
Thomas Jefferson
My husband and I are either going to buy a dog or have a child. We can't decide whether to ruin our carpet or ruin our lives.
Rita Rudner
Always a godfather - never a god!
Alexander Woollcott
I think of birth as the search for a larger apartment.
Rita Mae Brown
When you're the only pea in the pod your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope diamond.
Russell Baker
Personally I think any more than two or three kids is not a family it's a litter.
Tracey Ullman
I'd like to start a family but you have to have a date first.
Larry David
Men will now get up and walk with the baby in the middle of the night change its diapers and give it a bottle but in their heart of hearts they still think they shouldn't have to.
Rita Rudner