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"Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new."
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"Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens."
"I was burning through books every day - stories about people and places I'd never heard of. They were perhaps the only thing that kept me from teetering into utter despair."
"I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it."
"Some books mirror reality while others are entirely fantasy. My favorite are those that manage to weave both into a world."
"When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults."
"All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened."
Explore more quotes by William Temple
"Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they passed."
"Authority is by nothing so much strengthened and confirmed as by custom; for no man easily distrusts the things which he and all men have been always bred up to."
"The first glass is for myself, the second for my friends, the third for good humor, and the forth for my enemies."
"When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humored a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over."
"The only way for a rich man to be healthy is by exercise and abstinence, to live as if he were poor."
"Our present time is indeed a criticizing and critical time, hovering between the wish, and the inability to believe. Our complaints are like arrows shot up into the air at no target: and with no purpose they only fall back upon our own heads and destroy ourselves."
"The problem of evil... Why does God permit it? Or, if God is omnipotent, in which case permission and creation are the same, why did God create it?"
"I have always looked upon alchemy in natural philosophy to be like enthusiasm in divinity, and to have troubled the world much to the same purpose."
"There cannot live a more unhappy creature than an ill-natured old man, who is neither capable of receiving pleasures, nor sensible of conferring them on others."
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