Meaningful Quotes and Passages from Books

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“We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”

― Shakespeare, The Tempest

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

I feel similarly about sheet music although it only goes back hundreds of years.

You have your way. I have my way, As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

Friedrich Nietzche

This quote and the inverse of it often comes to mind when I’m thinking about relationships, not just marriage. It’s so true.

“There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.” — Dickens, David Copperfield

It’s one of my favorite books, too. It was the first Dickens novel I ever read.

“It would be wonderful to say you regretted it. It would be easy. But what does it mean? What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. There it is. No-one's going to forgive me. It was death. I chose life.”

— Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“What is the meaning of life? That was all - a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”

— Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

“[A]ll the lives we ever lived
And all the lives to be,
are full of trees and changing leaves”

— Charles Elton, “Luriana Lurilee”

“Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent.”

“I think sometimes I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn.”

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Hablemos por un momento de ti, que lees estas líneas. Ahora mismo, con el libro abierto entre las manos, te dedicas a una actividad misteriosa e inquietante, aunque la costumbre te impide asombrarte por lo que haces. Piénsalo bien. Estás en silencio, recorriendo con la vista hileras de letras que tienen sentido para ti y te comunican ideas independientes del mundo que te rodea ahora mismo. Te has retirado, por decirlo así, a una habitación interior donde te hablan personas ausentes, es decir, fantasmas visibles solo para ti (en este caso, mi yo espectral) y donde el tiempo pasa al compás de tu interés o tu aburrimiento. Has creado una realidad paralela parecida a la ilusión cinematográfica, una realidad que depende solo de ti. Tú puedes, en cualquier momento, apartar los ojos de estos párrafos y volver a participar en la acción y el movimiento del mundo exterior. Pero mientras tanto permaneces al margen, donde tú has elegido estar. Hay un aura casi mágica en todo esto.”

“El caos de las librerías se parece mucho al caos de los recuerdos. Sus pasillos, sus anaqueles, sus umbrales son espacios habitados por la memoria colectiva y por las memorias individuales. Allí tropezamos con biografías, con testimonios y con largos estantes de ficciones donde los escritores desnudan la verdad de muchas vidas. Los lomos gruesos de los libros de historia, como camellos de una lenta caravana, nos ofrecen guiarnos en la ruta hacia el pasado. Investigaciones, sueños, mitos y crónicas dormitan juntos en la misma penumbra. El azar de un encuentro o de un rescate es siempre posible.“

― Irene Vallejo, El infinito en un junco: La invención de los libros en el mundo antiguo

“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars”

“I will sleep no more but arise, You oceans that have been calm within me! how I feel you, fathomless, stirring, preparing unprecedented waves and storms.”

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”

“I am large, I contain multitudes.”

— Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.”

― Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry”

“For my part I had rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon, than go to Heaven with Paley and Malthus.”

— Shelley, “Preface to Prometheus Unbound”

“To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy power which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.”

“Life may change, but it may fly not;
Hope may vanish, but can die not;
Truth be veiled, but still it burneth;
Love repulsed - but it returneth.”

— Prometheus Unbound

I need to reread Prometheus Unbound one of these days. I read it at a pivotal moment of my life.

“Even broken in spirit as he is, no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions, seems still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth. Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery, and be overwhelmed by disappointments; yet, when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit that has a halo around him, within whose circle no grief or folly ventures.”

― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

In keeping with the Wollstonecraft/Shelley family, here’s some meaningful quotes from Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman:

“My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists - I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.”

“Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.”

“I love man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man.”

“I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.”

“Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience.”

“All the sacred rights of humanity are violated by insisting on blind obedience.”



It was a strange experience reading this treatise in college. The professor tried to emphasis what the times were like in Wollstonecraft’s day so we could relate to the text. Due to my upbringing in a fundamentalist religion, I could relate to it all too well. Pervasive sexism and learned helplessness were something I had continuously observed from early childhood on up. Anyway this work was a major source of inspiration to me, and I still think about it often.