Inspiring Quotes from Literature: Words to Live By

"Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home."

- Anna Quindlen

"Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful."

- Mary Shelley

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do."

- Harper Lee

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."

- Cicero

"This above all: To thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man."

- William Shakespeare

"Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition, and they’ve got talent, as well as just beauty. I’m so sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for."

- Louisa May Alcott

"A word after a word after a word is power."

- Margaret Atwood

"Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all."

- Toni Morrison

"We accept the love we think we deserve."

- Stephen Chbosky

"Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while."

- Malorie Blackman

"Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings."

- Ann Patchett

"A book is a gift you can open again and again."

- Garrison Keillor

"Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers."

- Charles W. Eliot

"Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from one generation to the next. Books save lives."

- Laurie Anderson

"Once you've read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you."

- Louis L'Amour

"The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us."

- Ray Bradbury

"That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book."

- Mary Ann Shaffer

"There is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for."

- J.R.R. Tolkien

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."

- Emily Brontë

"Books are easily destroyed. But words will live as long as people can remember them."

- Tahereh Mafi

"When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young."

- Maya Angelou

"Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times when one only remembers to turn on the light."

- J.K. Rowling

"Be who you are and say how you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind."

- Dr. Seuss

"A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading."

- William Styron

"Some books leave us free and some books make us free."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat."

- Ralph Ellison

"The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it."

- J.M. Barrie

"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose."

- Dr. Seuss

"The world may be mean, but people don’t have to be, not if they refuse."

- Colson Whitehead

"Get busy living or get busy dying."

- Stephen King

"Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: They feed the soul."

- Anne Lamott

"You pierce my soul. I am half agony. Half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever."

- Jane Austen

"Oh, the places you’ll go! You’ll be on your way up! You’ll be seeing great sights! You’ll join the high fliers who soar to high heights."

- Dr. Seuss

"For you, a thousand times over."

- Khaled Hosseini

"Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere."

- Jean Rhys

"The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places."

- Ernest Hemingway

"Salvation is certainly among the reasons I read. Reading and writing have always pulled me out of the darkest experiences in my life."

- Roxane Gay

"Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering."

- Nicole Krauss

"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."

- J.K. Rowling

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read."

- James Baldwin

"Reading is important. If you know how to read, then the whole world opens up to you."

- Barack Obama

"Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost."

- Milan Kundera

"Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches."

- William Goldman

"There is always something left to love."

- Gabriel García Márquez

"And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it."

- Paulo Coelho

"Brave doesn’t mean you’re not scared. It means you go on even though you’re scared."

- Angie Thomas

"It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you."

- Roald Dahl

"There is only one page left to write on. I will fill it with words of only one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love."

- Dodie Smith

"That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

"One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time."

- Carl Sagan

"Books may well be the only true magic."

- Alice Hoffman

"My life is my message."

- Mahatma Gandhi

"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will."

- Charlotte Brontë

"Books are, let's face it, better than everything else."

- Nick Hornby

"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life."

- W. Somerset Maugham

"We read to know we are not alone."

- C.S. Lewis

"It’s very hard to have ideas. It’s very hard to put yourself out there, it’s very hard to be vulnerable, but those people who do that are the dreamers, the thinkers and the creators. They are the magic people of the world."

- Amy Poehler

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies... The man who never reads lives only one."

- George R.R. Martin

"All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost."

- J.R.R. Tolkien

"Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul."

- Joyce Carol Oates

"A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe."

- Madeleine L'Engle

"Books are a uniquely portable magic."

- Stephen King

"The real courage is in living and suffering for what you believe."

- Christopher Paolini

"Today a reader, tomorrow a leader."

- Margaret Fuller

"Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice."

- Paul Auster

"Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labelled 'This could change your life.'"

- Helen Exley

"There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things."

- Jeffrey Eugenides

"Once you learn to read, you will be forever free."

- Frederick Douglass

"The best moments in reading are when you come across something–a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things–which you had thought special and particular to you."

- Alan Bennett

"Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary."

- Jim Rohn

"The story is truly finished–and meaning is made–not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters."

- Celeste Ng

"One must always be careful of books, and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us."

- Cassandra Clare

"We who have means and a voice must use them to help those who have neither."

- Jennifer Donnelly

"There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor."

- Charles Dickens

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

- Maya Angelou

"I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

"The only way we will survive is by being kind. The only way we can get by in this world is through the help we receive from others. No one can do it alone, no matter how great the machines are."

- Amy Poehler

"People are their most beautiful when they are laughing, crying, dancing, playing, telling the truth, and being chased in a fun way."

- Amy Poehler

"Anything worth dying for is certainly worth living for."

- Joseph Heller

"If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn’t love as much in eighty years as I could in a day."

- Emily Brontë

"But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun."

- William Shakespeare

"Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world."

- Napoleon Bonaparte

"A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors."

- Charles Baudelaire

"Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, a duty. It should be offered as a gift."

- Kate DiCamillo

"Books are mirrors: You only see in them what you already have inside you."

- Carlos Ruiz Zafón

"If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book."

- J.K. Rowling

"I can feel infinitely alive curled up on the sofa reading a book."

- Benedict Cumberbatch

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

- Joan Didion

"Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world."

- Jeanette Winterson

"As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation."

- Ursula K. Le Guin

"Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book."

- Susan Sontag

"A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book on a shelf; and, decades after we have read it even twenty times, it can open us up, by cut or caress, to a new truth."

- Andre Dubus

"Both reading and writing are experiences – lifelong – in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination."

- Eudora Welty

"The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries."

- René Descartes

"I love the way that each book — any book — is its own journey. You open it, and off you go…"

- Sharon Creech

"Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we’re someone else."

- George Saunders

"I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader... imaginative access to other selves."

- David Foster Wallace

"Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up."

- Nora Ephron

"We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: We need books, time, and silence."

- Philip Pullman

"Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know."

- Alberto Manguel

"A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition."

- Henry Miller

"It is known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else."

- Catherynne M. Valente

"I don't read a book; I hold a conversation with the author."

- Elbert Hubbard

"Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again."

- Louisa May Alcott

"Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly."

- Francis Bacon

"Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let's not forget this."

- Dave Eggers

"The best books... are those that tell you what you know already."

- George Orwell

"Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one's own self."

- Franz Kafka

"Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal."

- John Green

"Books should go where they will be most appreciated, and not sit unread, gathering dust on a forgotten shelf, don't you agree?"

- Christopher Paolini

"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you."

- Charlotte Brontë

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair."

- Charles Dickens

"A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well — or ill?"

- John Steinbeck

"The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive."

- John Green

"‘Why did you do all this for me?’ he asked. ‘I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.’ ‘You have been my friend,’ replied Charlotte. ‘That in itself is a tremendous thing.’"

- E.B. White

"I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am."

- Sylvia Plath

"And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship."

- Louisa May Alcott

"It is nothing to die; it is dreadful not to live."

- Victor Hugo

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

- George Orwell

"It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live."

- J.K. Rowling

"When you play the game of thrones you win or you die."

- George R. R. Martin

"From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood."

- Betty Smith

"Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot."

- Truman Capote

"Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?"

- L.M. Montgomery

"I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it."

- Ernest Hemingway

"The same substance composes us — the tree overhead, the stone beneath us, the bird, the beast, the star — we are all one, all moving to the same end."

- P.L. Travers

"Love is holy because it is like grace – the worthiness of its object is never really what matters."

- Marilynne Robinson

"Each time you happen to me all over again."

- Edith Wharton

"Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself."

- Madeleine L'Engle

"Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever."

- Amy Tan

"All human wisdom is summed up in these two words – ‘Wait and hope.’"

- Alexandre Dumas

"Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever."

- Anthony Doerr

"As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once."

- John Green

"‘But man is not made for defeat,’ he said. ‘A man can be destroyed but not defeated.’"

- Ernest Hemingway

"Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything."

- Sally Rooney

"Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant."

- Joan Didion

"Remember, what is given from the heart reaches the heart."

- Patricia C. McKissack

"Tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it … yet."

- Lucy Maud Montgomery

"You may be born into a family, but you walk into friendships. Some you’ll discover you should put behind you. Others are worth every risk."

- Adam Silvera

"I am coming to terms with the fact that loving someone requires a leap of faith, and that a soft landing is never guaranteed."

- Sarah Dessen

"All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts."

- William Shakespeare

"One day I will find the right words, and they all will be simple."

- Jack Kerouac

"You can’t pick out the pieces and leave the rest. Being part of the whole thing, that’s the blessing."

- Natalie Babbitt

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."

- George Orwell

"Don’t waste your energy trying to change opinions. … Do your thing, and don’t care if they like it."

- Tina Fey

"What’s so wrong with effort, anyway? It means you care."

- Mindy Kaling

"Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy."

- William Golding

"All we can know is that we know nothing. And that’s the height of human wisdom."

- Leo Tolstoy

"There are years that ask questions and years that answer."

- Zora Neale Hurston

"Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr. Patel, and none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger."

- Yann Martel

"There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm."

- Willa Cather

"It is dreadful that one cannot tear out the past by the roots. We cannot tear it out but we can hide the memory of it."

- Leo Tolstoy

"And may the odds be ever in your favor."

- Suzanne Collins

"I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe."

- Donna Tartt

"If you have the guts to be yourself, other people’ll pay your price."

- John Updike

"So many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible."

- Norton Juster

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living."

- Jonathan Safran Foer

"Time moves slowly, but passes quickly."

- Alice Walker

"You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget."

- Cormac McCarthy

"Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

- J. D. Salinger

"Why, sometimes, I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

- Lewis Carroll

"It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words."

- Naomi Shihab Nye

"Tomorrow I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day."

- Margaret Mitchell

"Just like a murderer jumps out of nowhere in an alley, love jumped out in front of us and struck us both at once."

- Mikhail Bulgakov

"There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after."

- J.R.R. Tolkien

"A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly."

- Roald Dahl

"It wasn't until I started reading and found books they wouldn't let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else."

- John Waters

"Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart."

- Haruki Murakami

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

- Leo Tolstoy

"A good book should take you out of yourself and then stuff you back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit."

- David Sedaris

"Let’s be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading."

- Lena Dunham

"Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand."

- Margery Williams

"The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there… and still on your feet."

- Stephen King

"My advice is, never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time."

- Charles Dickens

"Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold."

- S. E. Hinton

"Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?"

- Cornelia Funke

"I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them."

- Emma Thompson

"I wish, as well as everybody else, to be perfectly happy; but, like everybody else, it must be in my own way."

- Jane Austen

"If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads."

- François Mauriac

"Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work."

- Khaled Hosseini

"How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined."

- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

"That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet."

- Jhumpa Lahiri

"Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading."

- Kazuo Ishiguro

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep."

- William Shakespeare

"So it goes…"

- Kurt Vonnegut

"Have books ‘happened’ to you? Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk to you."

- Haruki Murakami

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

- Jane Austen

"You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter."

- Mark Twain

"Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing."

- Oscar Wilde

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."

- Daphne du Maurier

"All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts."

- William Shakespeare

"He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart."

- Chinua Achebe

"All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust."

- J.M. Barrie

"Think before you speak. Read before you think."

- Fran Lebowitz

"It’s funny. All one has to do is say something nobody understands and they’ll do practically anything you want them to."

- J.D. Salinger

"Time is the longest distance between two places."

- Tennessee Williams

"The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude."

- Kate Chopin

"We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep."

- Nathaniel Hawthorne

"The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past."

- William Faulkner

"I have a theory that selflessness and bravery aren’t all that different."

- Veronica Roth

"’And now,’ cried Max, ‘let the wild rumpus start!’"

- Maurice Sendak

"You can’t expect everyone to have the same dedication as you."

- Jeff Kinney

"The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42."

- Douglas Adams

"Call me Ishmael."

- Herman Melville

"It was a pleasure to burn."

- Ray Bradbury

"You never really know how far a smile can go."