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Famous literary quotes with a biography of each quoted person.

BookBrowse's Favorite Literary Quotes

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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

Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.

If every country had to write a book about elephants...

If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins

If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas...

If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people... but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea

In war there are no unwounded soldiers

In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant

In youth we run into difficulties. In old age difficulties run into us

Information is the currency of democracy

It is a fact of life that any discourse...will always please if it is five minutes shorter than people expect

It is always darkest just before the day dawneth

It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means.

It was one of the worst speeches I ever heard ... when a simple apology was all that was required.

Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.

BookBrowse Book Club

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    When No One Else Will
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    1940s Chicago nurse risks everything at an illegal women’s clinic during a high-profile trial of courage and sisterhood.
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    A Pair of Aces
    by Marie Benedict, Victoria Christopher Murray
    Two women on opposite sides of the law team up to bring down gangster Lucky Luciano in this gripping novel.

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    The Reimagining of Thornwood House
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    A witch and her ward discover a magical walking house and find the true meaning of home.
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    Summer's Never Over
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    A woman revisits a Southern summer camp where a counselor's death may not have been an accident.
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    The Jellyfish Problem
    by Tessa Yang
    A marine biologist rescues a Maine island menaced by a giant glowing jellyfish in this inventive debut.
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    Feast
    by Catherine Kurtz
    In 19th-century France, a girl with a magical taste becomes a duc’s poison taster amid nobility and danger.
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Who Said...

When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

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