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Famous literary quotes with a biography of each quoted person.

BookBrowse's Favorite Literary Quotes

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Children are not the people of tomorrow, but people today.

Choose an author as you would a friend

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

Courage - a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it.

Dictators ride to and fro on tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.

Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go into your library and read every book.

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

Every good journalist has a novel in him - which is an excellent place for it.

Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think the university stifles writers...

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim

Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.

Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success

From the moment I picked your book up...

Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.

Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.

Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil...

Great political questions stir the deepest nature of one-half the nation, but they pass far above and over the heads of the other half.

Happiness belongs to the self sufficient

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.

Harvard is the storehouse of knowledge because the freshmen bring so much in and the graduates take so little out.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming

He who opens a door, closes a prison

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.

I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don't.

I am what the librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets

I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking something up and finding something else on the way.

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library

I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now only that place where the books are kept.

I like a thin book because it will steady a table...

I write to add to the beauty that now belongs to me

BookBrowse Book Club

  • Book Jacket
    The Mysterious Bakery on Rue de Paris
    by Evie Woods
    From the million-copy bestselling author of The Lost Bookshop.
  • Book Jacket
    Real Americans
    by Rachel Khong
    From the author of Goodbye, Vitamin, a novel exploring family, identity, and the shaping of destiny.
  • Book Jacket
    The Devil Finds Work
    by James Baldwin
    A book-length essay on racism in American films, by "the best essayist in this country" (The New York Times Book Review).
  • Book Jacket
    The River Knows Your Name
    by Kelly Mustian
    A haunting Southern novel about memory and love, from the author of The Girls in the Stilt House.

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    Happy Land
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    The Fairbanks Four
    by Brian Patrick O’Donoghue

    One murder, four guilty convictions, and a community determined to find justice.

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    The Seven O'Clock Club
    by Amelia Ireland

    Four strangers join an experimental treatment to heal broken hearts in Amelia Ireland's heartfelt debut novel.

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    One Death at a Time
    by Abbi Waxman

    A cranky ex-actress and her Gen Z sobriety sponsor team up to solve a murder that could send her back to prison in this dazzling mystery.

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