Seen at the Library

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Short lived

"Most dreams die a slow death. They're conceived in a moment of passion, with the prospect of endless possibility, but often languish and are not pursued with the same heartfelt intensity as when first born. Slowly, subtly, a dream becomes elusive and ephemeral. People who've let their own dreams die become pessimists and cynics." -Dean Karnazes, Ultramarathon Man.
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Literary

"I start every day by reading a little something." -Rosellen Brown
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Jealousy

"Jealousy is a terrible thing. It keeps you up at night, it demands tremendous energy in order to remain alive, and so you have to want to feed it, nurture it -- and by so wanting, you have to acknowledge that you are a bitter, petty person. It changes you. It changes the way you view the world; minor irritations become major catastrophes; celebrations become trials." -The Aviator's Wife
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Ghosts

"But when we are searching for an example of what we no longer have, we see it everywhere." -The Cat's Table.
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Eh

"It's just a run-of-the-mill book, and the awful thing is that it is absolutely the best I can do." -John Steinbeck on The Grapes of Wrath.
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Change

"Well, that was life. Gladness and pain...hope and fear...and change. Always change! You could not help it. You had to let the old go and take the new to your heart...learn to love it and then let it go in turn. Spring, lovely as it was, must yield to summer and summer lose itself in autumn. -Anne of Ingleside.
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Cross Country

"...and the golden time in the West was one dream." -John Steinbeck
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Read

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Let Me Be

"Let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry...have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere -- be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost." -Francie Nolan, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
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Asexual

"All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would appear proper and becoming for a man." -Anne Bronte
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Intolerance

"Intolerance...is a thing that causes war, pogroms, crucifixions,  lynchings, and makes people cruel to little children and to each other. It is responsible for most of the viciousness, violence, terror and heart and soul breaking of the world." -Francie, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
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Outdoors

"There is a limit to the number of lands of shore line on the lakes; there is a limit to the number of lakes in existence; there is a limit to the mountainous areas of the world, and in each one of these situations there are portions of natural scenic beauty which are God-made, and the beauties of which of a right should be the property of all people." -Forest Service architect Arthur Carhart
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Solitude

"I want to lengthen, not shorten, my attention span, and most of the material splendors of the twenty-first century bully me in the opposite direction. The fault is mine, I'll admit. I'm too slow-witted, reluctant to evolve, constitutionally unable to get with the program. I can't afford the newest gadgets and I'm not a natural multitasker." -Philip Connors in Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout.
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Friends and Enemies

"I believe that people should write biographies only about people they love, or understand, or both. Novels, on the other hand, are often better if they're about people the writer doesn't like very much." -Penelope Fitzgerald
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Woods vs. Sea

"The woods are never solitary -- they are full of whispering, beckoning, friendly life. But the sea is a mighty soul, forever moaning of some great, unshareable sorrow, which shuts it up into itself for all eternity. We can never pierce its infinite mystery -- we may only wander, awed and spell-bound, on the outer fringe of it. The woods call to us with a hundred voices, but the sea has one only -- a mighty voice that drowns our souls in its majestic music. The woods are human, but the sea is of the company of archangels." -another one from Anne's House of Dreams by L.M. Montgomery
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Dark and Dreary

"In November I sometimes feel as if spring could never come again." -Anne, in Anne's House of Dreams.
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Joy

"Let us read and let us dance -- two amusements that will never do any harm to the world." -Voltaire
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Limitless

"I'm an ordinary girl... marked out by, if anything, an appetite for adventure and a will for self-improvement. These are qualities available to anyone who is of a mind to acquire them." -Ironman world champ Chrissie Wellington. Just finished her book, A Life Without Limits.
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Books

"A book is like a man -- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun." -John Steinbeck
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