Penguin Random House Canada > Penguin Random House Canada's Quotes

“A word after a word after a word is power.”
― Margaret Atwood

“I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Sitting around miserable all day won't make you any happier.”
― John Boyne, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

“...Despite the mayhem that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel's hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let go.”
― John Boyne , The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

“What exactly was the difference? He wondered to himself. And who decided which people wore the striped pajamas and which people wore the uniforms?”
― John Boyne, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

“He looked down and did something quite out of character for him: he took hold of Shmuel's tiny hand in his and squeezed it tightly.
"You're my best friend, Shmuel," he said. "My best friend for life.”
― John Boyne, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

“The past is always tense, the future perfect.”
― Zadie Smith

“You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.”
― zadie smith

“The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

“Stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about, ideas that matter to you, beliefs you can stand by, tickets you can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful...and decide what you want and need and must do. It’s a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the world. But that’s the deal: you have to live; you can’t live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It’s the easy way out.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

“The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.”
― Zadie Smith

“She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence. ”
― Zadie Smith, The Autograph Man

“Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything.”
― Ali Smith

“Always be reading something, he said. Even when we're not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.”
― Ali Smith, How to be Both

“She likes to read, she reads all the time, and she prefers to be reading several things at once, she says it gives endless perspective and dimension.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in everything, everywhere we look.”
― Ali Smith, Hotel World

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice