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"Literature doesn't exactly have a strong mental-health track record."
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"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."
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Personal Development

"Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."
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Personal Development

"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."
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Personal Development

"The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell."
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Personal Development

"Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind."
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"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
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"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."
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Personal Development

"I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I've always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I've always recognized it at once-and it's the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that...A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters."
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Personal Development

"It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel."
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"The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature."
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"My silence knot is tied up in my hair; as if to keep my love out of my eyes. I cannot speak to one for whom i care. A hatpin serves as part of my disguise. In the play, my role is baticeer; a word which here means "person who trains bats." The audience may feel a prick of fear, as if sharp pins are hidden in thier hats. My co-star lives on what we call a brae. His solitude might not be just an act. A piece of mail fails to arrive one day. This poignant melodrama's based on fact.The curtain falls just as the knot unties; the silence is broken by the one who dies."
Drama


"Yes, I know," Isadora said, and then read her poem, leaning forward so Carmelita Spats would not overhear:"I would rather eat a bowl of vampire batsthan spend an hour with Carmelita Spats."The Baudelaires giggled and then covered their mouths so nobody would know they were laughing at Carmelita."That was great," Klaus said. "I like the part about the bowl of bats."
Humor


"No matter who you are, no matter where you live, and no matter how many people are chasing you, what you don't read is often as important as what you do read."
Learning


"Why does anyone have a lot of rules? So they can boss people around, I guess."
Authority


"Read about things that wouldn't keep you up all night long, weeping and tearing out your hair."
Learning


"Boredom is not black licorice, Snicket," she said. "There's no reason to share it with me."
Humor


"A long time ago, there was no such thing as school, and children spent their days learning a trade, a phrase which here means "standing around doing tedious tasks under the instruction of a bossy adult." In time, however, people realized that the children could be allowed to sit, and the first school was invented."
Education


"If you ask one question, it will lead you to another, and another. It's like peeling an onion."
Curiosity


"One of the most difficult things to think about in life is one's regrets. Something will happen to you, and you will do the wrong thing, and for years afterward you will wish you had done something different."
Regret


"Keep anyone with whom you can read in silence."
Peace
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