The book itself is a curious artefact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades; even centuries. It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were 15, it will tell it to you again when you’re 50, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.

Ursula K. Le Guin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin

(from Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading, published in Harper’s Magazine February, 2008.)

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

Charles Péguy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_P%C3%A9guy

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the paper patterns at the right moment.

Hart Crane

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hart_Crane

There are stars whose radiance is visible on Earth though they have long been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world though they are no longer among the living. These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark. They light the way for humankind.

Hannah Senesh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Szenes

People are like stained-glass windows: they sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there’s light within.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_K%C3%BCbler-Ross

I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can’t make it through one door, I’ll go through another door – or make another door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.

Rabindranath Tagore

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabindranath_Tagore

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

Jean Cocteau

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Cocteau

Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.

Margaret Atwood

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Atwood

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.

Robert Louis Stevenson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Louis_Stevenson

Writers are like fleas, they get very little nourishment from one another.

John Dos Passos

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dos_Passos