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"I want to write such things as compel the admiring acclamation of the world at large, such things as are written but once in years, things subtle but distinctly different from the books written every day."
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"Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away."
"A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat."
"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."
"Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have left me."
"Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens."
"In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you."
"There was no actual person who was James Bond, despite all the books."
Explore more quotes by Mary MacLane
"Genius of a kind has always been with me; an empty heart that has taken on a certain wooden quality; an excellent, strong woman's body and a pitiably starved soul."
"One must always say things that aim to interest, because in the world one must after all pay for one's keep."
"Let me but make a beginning, let me but strike the world in a vulnerable spot, and I can take it by storm."
"I read of the Kalamazoo girl who killed herself after reading the book. I am not at all surprised. She lived in Kalamazoo, for one thing, and then she read the book."
"I am a genius. Then it amused me to keep saying so, but now it does not. I expected to be happy sometime. Now I know I shall never be."
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