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"What novels did you read when you were young, dear? I'm convinced it all turns on that."
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"Rain's pouring and it's too cold. All people bored and I even accord What to do but spell a tale told: So once upon a time a land in the shore..."
"The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature."
"Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it."
"Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence, many epic tales are pretty much epic crap."
"Tolkien did admit that, 'As a guide, I had only my own feelings for what is appealing or moving.' In other words ~ he wrote about what interested him ~ and despite his protestation of including anything allegorical into his tale, Catholic history and mystic prophecy obviously received its fair share of attention ..."
"I found it hard to think of leaving my books. They had been my elevators out of the midden, and to whom could I entrust such close friends?"
"I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most."
"I wasn't discriminating in my reading, and I'm still not. I read then primarily to be entertained, as I do now. And I'm not saying that apologetically: I feel that if you remove the initial gut response from reading - the delight or excitement or simply the enjoyment of being told a story - and try to concentrate on the meaning or the shape of the "message" first, you might as well give up, it's too much like all work and no play."
"In describing a fairy story which they think adults might possibly read for their own entertainment, reviewers frequently indulge in such waggeries as: 'this book is for children from the ages of six to sixty'. But I have never yet seen the puff of a new motor-model that begun thus: 'this toy will amuse infants from seventeen to seventy'; though that to my mind would be much more appropriate."
Explore more quotes by Edith Wharton
"Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue."
"Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before."
"She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted." Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: "She never asked me."
"A sense of having been decoyed by some world-old conspiracy into this bondage of body and soul filled her with despair. If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature."
"There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe."
"Some men," Flamel irresistibly added, "think of books merely as tools, others as tooling. I'm between the two; there are days when I use them as scenery, other days when I want them as society; so that, as you see, my library represents a makeshift compromise between looks and brains, and the collectors look down on me almost as much as the students."
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