I could read the great books but the great books don’t interest me.

When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true too . . . she was as tyrannical and...

É clássico aquilo que persiste como rumor mesmo onde predomina a atualidade mais incompatível.

Anger was buried far too early in a young heart, which perhaps contained much good.

It is in the elements that we found ourselves; even though the elements are not the same today.

nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose

Ricordatevi, signore: la rivoluzione francese ha avuto le sue ragioni. […] Sì, le brutalità del progresso si chiamano rivoluzioni. Quando sono finite, si riconosce questo: che il genere umano è stato maltrattato, ma ha camminato.

Freedom is a need of the soul, and nothing else. It is in striving toward God that the soul strives continually after a condition of freedom. God alone is the inciter and guarantor of freedom....

Got on! Got on! It’s not a question of getting on. That’s the wrong view altogether. The Classics aren’t a ladder leading to quick success.

…but there they lay, sprawled across the field, craved far more by the vultures than by wives.

Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race; for it is remarkable...

What do you know of my heart? What do you know of anything but your own suffering. For weeks, Marianne, I’ve had this pressing on me without being at liberty to speak of it to...

Then said he, ’I am going to my Father’s; and though with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive...

He might wish and wish and never get it – the beauty and the loving in the world!

The town knew about darkness. It knew about the darkness that comes on the land when rotation hides the land from the sun, and about the darkness of the human soul. The town is an...

Once upon a time there was a little prince who lived on a planet scarcely bigger than himself and who had need for a friend.

Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.

Like a girl, a baby running after her mother, begging to be picked up, and she tugs on her skirts, holding her back as she tries to hurry off—all tears, fawning up at her, till...

Maybe he doesn’t have anywhere to run off to…

What happened to the classics?” you may ask. “Don’t you believe in reading great literature to children?”Nothing happened to the classics-but something happened to children: their imaginations went to sleep in front of the television...

Well, Betsy,” he said, “your mother tells me that you are going to use Uncle Keith’s trunk for a desk. That’s fine. You need a desk. I’ve often noticed how much you like to write....

We, men, who work hard to get somewhere in life, to make something of ourselves in life, to mean something to someone, to have what our ancestors never had…..We, men, who toil for a name,...

O teach me how I should forget to think (1.1.224)

I often stood in front of the mirror alone, wondering how ugly a person could get.

Many scholars forget, it seems to me, that our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than upon our understanding. The trouble is that very few of...

A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.

Bezrazložan i besciljan nemir u sadašnjosti, a u budućnosti tek neprekidne žrtve kojima neće ništa postići – eto što ga čeka na ovome svijetu. I što vrijedi što će mu za osam godina biti tek...

The Question is actually the answer

I felt emotions of gentleness and pleasure, that had long appeared dead, revive within me. Half surprised by the novelty of these sensations, I allowed myself to be borne away by them, and forgetting my...

Sia detto alla sfuggita, il successo è una cosa piuttosto lurida; la sua falsa somiglianza col merito inganna gli uomini. Per la folla, la riuscita ha quasi lo stesso profilo della supremazia. Il successo, sosia...

Either I’m changing very quickly, and everything is standing still, or I’m the one standing still and everything is changing around me. Either way, I’m out of joint with the world.

You, why are you so afraid of war and slaughter? Even if all the rest of us drop and die around you, grappling for the ships, you’d run no risk of death: you lack the...

And here, I believe, the wit is generally misunderstood. In reality, it lies in desiring another to kiss your a– for having just before threatened to kick his; for I have observed very accurately, that...

I have a feeling that you’re riding for some kind of terrible, terrible fall. . . . The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for...

It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written.

,Os dais cuenta cabal de la cadena de crímenes tramados por la nena? Crimen número uno: la acusada comete allanamiento de morada. Crimen número dos: el personaje se queda con tres platos de potaje. Crimen...

There is no life here but the slow death of days, and so when the evil falls on the town, its coming seems almost preordained, sweet and morphic. It is almost as though the town...

Mega biblion, mega kakon (Big book, big evil)

In the eighties, when she chiefly flourished, husbands were taken seriously, as the only real obstacles to sin. Beds too, if they had to be mentioned, were approached with caution; and a decent reserve prevented...

The Biblical language was so deeply embedded in the great man’s mind that it became his normal way of speaking.

The thing is, what I’m tryin‘ to say is—they do get on a lot better without me, I can’t help them any. They ain’t mean. They buy me everything I want, but it’s now—you’ve-got-it-go-play-with-it. You’ve...

I recognized it instantly. It was a made-up story, a fantasy, the tale of four kids who went through a magic wardrobe and found themselves in a strange new world. I’d read it more times...

Read books. As often as you can. Mostly classics.

Alexander the Great slept with ‘The Iliad’ beneath his pillow. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ as if it were the sweet body of a woman.

I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony. I would go to the local library and take out as many...

and love is a word usedtoo much andmuchtoo soon.

Ask not the elves for advice, because they will tell you both ‘yes’ and ‘no’.

1 )Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.2)A classic is a work which constantly generates...

What cannot be borne in reality, becomes a source of pleasure when it is transposed into the visual and somatic fiction of the dramatic spectacle.

When you walk,go different roads that take you nowhere,and see your world.