"Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for."
— Alice Walker
"But at a certain point the memory of her stopped accompanying me wherever I went. She stayed behind, the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station. It’s there, somewhere behind you, and you could go back and make sure of it. But why should you?"
— Bernhard Schlink, The Reader
"Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we’re still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It’s all the same impulse. What do we get from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get? At the very least we want a witness. We can’t stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio winding down."
— Margaret Atwood
"Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist, except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice."
— Paul Auster, Talking to Strangers
"Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us."
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
So often we just live. We take life for granted, and we squander it with selfish wishes and shallow ventures. We think about tomorrow without being thankful for what we have been given today. Life is not a guarantee; it doesn’t last forever. What if we stopped being selfish and started being selfless? What if we lived life with a purpose? What if we lived today like it was our last day?
"I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing."
— Agatha Christie
"There’s always going to be bad stuff out there. But here’s the amazing thing — light trumps darkness, every time. You stick a candle into the dark, but you can’t stick the dark into the light."
— Jodi Picoult
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“The pace of life is different now, and people expect art to happen to them. Music and film do that, a CD will do that, but you have to make a book happen to you. It’s between you and it. People can be changed by books, and that’s scary. When I was working in the school library, I’d sometimes put a book in a kid’s hands and I’d feel excited for them, because I knew that it might be the book that changed their life. And once in a while, you’d see that happen, you’d see a kind of light come on behind their eyes. Even if it’s something like 0.4% of the population that that ever happens to, it’s got to be worth it, hasn’t it?”
The libraries’ most powerful asset is the conversation they provide – between books and readers, between children and parents, between individuals and the collective world. Take them away and those voices turn inwards or vanish. Turns out that libraries have nothing at all to do with silence.
"— The Guardian on The Secret Life of Libraries. (via thebronzemedal)
“that’s the best revenge of all: happiness. nothing drives people crazier than seeing someone have a good fucking life.”
-Chuck Palahniuk
Change starts with you. You can’t change the world until you’re willing to examine who you are first. Allow yourself to be changed. Allow yourself to be transformed. Then the change in the world will come, simply because they see who you are. They’ll want what you have if its worth having. If its not, why would they listen? Why would they care?
