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"Macaulay is well for awhile but one wouldn't live under Niagara."
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"I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr."

"Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth."

"This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant."

"I've read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of 'You Can't Go Home Again' and 'Look Homeward, Angel.'"

"In our Impulsive nature to write and repulsive nature to read that has led to a decline in literary genius in our times!"

"You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women."

"I think that [William] Faulkner and I each had to escape certain particulars of our lives, and we found salvation through words. I understand the Bible story of Babel so much better now. I think that moments of extremity, desires of escape, lead us to foreign languages--not those learned in schools, but those plucked from the human heart, the searing conditions of isolation. I did not have to be limited to my biography because of words, and I shared this with Faulkner, who invented new words and punctuation and expression and worlds. He utterly reshaped the world."

"Individuals often turn to poetry, not only to glean strength and perspective from the words of others, but to give birth to their own poetic voices and to hold history accountable for the catastrophes rearranging their lives."

"Fictional people are people, too, otherwise why would we care what happens to them?"

"..holding a book but reading the empty spaces."
Explore more quotes by Thomas Carlyle

"Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will."

"Time is the silent never-resting thing ... rolling rushing on swift silent like an all-embracing oceantide on which we and all the universe swim."

"This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it."

"Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us."

"Ye are most strong, ye Sons of the icy North, of the far East, far marching from your rugged Eastern Wildernesses, hither-ward from the gray Dawn of Time! Ye are Sons of the Jotun-land; the land of Difficulties Conquered. Difficult? You must try this thing. Once try it with the understanding that it will and shall have to be done. Try it as ye try the paltrier thing, making of money! I will bet on you once more, against all Jo'tuns, Tailor-gods, Double-barrelled Law-wards, and Denizens of Chaos whatsoever!"
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