Phrase Books Quotes

#1. Phrase books seem to be a universal and eternal source of hilarity and I think I know why. Their authors go mad in the course of compiling them.

Alice Thomas Ellis

#2. I definitely subscribe to the idea that 9/11, to use an overused phrase, was a wake-up call. There was a year-long national teach-in on Islam - everyone read books and suddenly talked about Islam, and that was very productive. But there's no doubt that moment has passed.

Bruce Feiler

#3. Talking with friends about books harks back to the original impulse behind storytelling, the forging of human bonds. We have told ourselves stories not just, in Joan Didion's phrase, in order to live, but in order to live with one another.

Brian Hall

#4. I keep drinking the ink from my pen and i'm balancing history books up on my head but it all boils down to one quotable phrase if you love something give it away

Conor Oberst

#5. In the books by Ruy-Sanchez we find again the erotic conviction that allows us to read with all the skin. The erotic, in his narratives is not a subject or a phrase, it is the clay of what they are made. In his novels every experience, trivial or extraordinary, breaths through the erotic.

Alberto Manguel

#6. I am not a fan of the magical quick fix in any fiction, including fantasy, scifi and comic books. Unless Dr. Who is involved, and then only because we get to use the phrase 'Timey-wimey wibbliness' which, I'm sure you'll agree, there are not enough occasions to drop into ordinary adult conversation.

Chris Dee

#7. A writer's high doesn't come from thinking about the end result, only of the moment, one word, one sentence, one phrase at a time.

C.J. Heck

#8. Colonel L., in whose eyes I was a first-rate Riot Acter or, worse, an intellectual - in his phrase, "someone who reads books" - the most damning appraisal that could be made of a junior lieutenant.

Steven Pressfield

#9. Flora had also learned the degraded art of 'tasting' unread books, and now, whenever her skimming eye lit on a phrase about heavy shapes, or sweat, or howls or bedposts, she just put the book back on the shelf, unread.

Stella Gibbons

#10. You don't have to be bitter in life. Focus on the beauty of life.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#11. Some delightful inscriptions are found in second-hand books. One, the most famous of all, may be found in every bookshop in the nation, repeated in a thousand and one volumes with only a single change of phrase in each. It is this: ', with love from Momma.

Vincent Starrett

#12. [On Rachmaninoff:] He was the most Russian of them all, like a cathedral in the snow. Holy, wintry, infinite, he was all the Russias.

Dagmar Godowsky

#13. The minister said, "Music in stone," and truly this phrase, bandied about by authors of art books, described Prague well. The city was, indeed, steeped in music and brought into harmony by it.

Jiri Weil

#14. The technology that threatens to kill off books as we know them - the 'physical book,' a new phrase in our language - is also making the physical book capable of being more beautiful than books have been since the middle ages.

Art Spiegelman

#15. I have to tell you, I'm a happy man. I've lived the life I wanted to live. I've written the books I wanted to write. No publisher has ever even suggested that I change so much as a phrase - commas and periods, yes - and I suspect that I have a lot of serious readers; in fact, I know.

Charles McCarry

#16. In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication.

Alberto Manguel

#17. Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?

Herman Melville

#18. With every line he teaches her, the world grows a little wider. She had never known before how words could sing,how a turn of phrase could unlock a window in her mind.

Rosamund Hodge

#19. For obvious reasons, I never told you about my notebook, with a cover as green as mansions long ago, which I use as a commonplace book, a phrase which here means 'place where I have collected passages from some of the most important books I have read.

Lemony Snicket

#20. All legends have a base in fact.

David Gemmell

#21. Whose fault is it, then? Dennis Compton's (Basil Fawlty)

John Cleese

#22. Logical reasoning is an argument which we have with ourselves and which reproduces internally the features of a real argument.

Jean Piaget

#23. It's in the history books, the Holocaust. It's just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.

Gene Simmons

#24. At first everything went according to plan and they called it ka. When things began going wrong and the dying started, they called that ka, too. Ka, the gunslinger could have told them, was often the last thing you had to rise above.

Stephen King

#25. Blessed is he who submits to the will of God; he can never be unhappy.

Martin Luther

#26. When you hear the phrase "rescue the financial system," translate it in your mind into "keep the debts on the books." They are trying to find a way for you (and debtor nations too) to keep paying and for the debt to keep growing.

Charles Eisenstein

#27. If not us, who? If not now, when?

John F. Kennedy

#28. The expression Jake saw on all the faces, oldest to youngest, was the same: pure joy. Not just that, he thought, and remembered a phrase his English teacher had used about how some books make us feel: the ecstasy of perfect recognition.

Stephen King