Quotes from books, quotes by writers... to inspire, influence, and induce a new way of thinking-5

This was published in the October-November 2013 issue of Books & More magazine:

BOOKMARKS

Quotes from books, quotes by writers... to inspire, influence, and induce a new way of thinking/RESEARCHED AND COMPILED BY RAMESH PRABHU

"People tell me, Don't you care what they've done to your book? I tell them, they haven't done anything to my book. It's right there on the shelf. They paid me and that's the end of it."
— James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and other hard-boiled novels, on why he didn't bother to watch the films based on his books, in an interview with The Paris Review (from The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)

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"Dear Marjane! Never invest in your looks! Invest in your brain."

— Graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis, recalling her mother's advice to her, in the introduction to The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009

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"Why is it that people now spend less time preparing food from scratch and more time reading about cooking or watching cookery programmes on television?"

— The "cooking paradox", as outlined by Michael Pollan in Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, quoted in The Economist

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"A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family — and, often, is all that remains of it."

— Susan Sontag in On Photography, which was first published in 1977

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"I am fully aware that there are those who say the term 'empowerment' is outdated and overdone. I strongly disagree. The people who think it's overdone are those who possess the most power. Easy for them to say."

— Lois P. Frankel, in Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office: 101 Unconscious Mistakes Women Make that Sabotage Their Careers

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"Lots of animals, particularly apes, use objects; but what sets us apart from them is that we make tools before we need them, and once we have used them we keep them to use again."

— Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, in his modern classic, A History of the World in 100 Objects

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Once people start reading books on devices, they find that all the things that they worried about don't turn out to be true, and that they're actually perfectly comfortable with them."

— Publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin, in Vanity Fair's How A Book Is Born: The Making of The Art of Fielding, by Keith Gessen, which is available only as an e-book

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"The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies."

— "Faber" to "Guy Montag", the fireman who burns books, in Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

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“Any life devoted to reading is extraordinarily rich and rewarding, but it can certainly become an unbalanced life. Because of all the time I spend devoted to reading, here are some things that I've, perforce, given up: gardening, cooking, Rollerblading, and cleaning house. But in return I've gotten so much gratification from the life that reading has allowed me to live.”
— Nancy Pearl in the introduction to More Book Lust, the sequel to her massively popular Book Lust, which was first published in 2003

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"People do awful things to each other. But it's worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark."
— "Veteran war photographer George Guthrie", in Night and Day, Tom Stoppard's 1978 play about foreign correspondents

• ALSO READ: Quotes from books, quotes by writers... to inspire, influence, and induce a new way of thinking-4

Quotes from books, quotes by writers... to inspire, influence, and induce a new way of thinking-4

This was published in the August-September 2013 issue of Books & More magazine:

BOOKMARKS

Quotes from books, quotes by writers... to inspire, influence, and induce a new way of thinking/RESEARCHED AND COMPILED BY RAMESH PRABHU 

"We accept the love we think we deserve."
— "Bill" to "Charlie", the main protagonist of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky. "Charlie" had just told "Bill", his teacher, that his sister's boyfriend had hit her but she was still going around with him

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"Inside us there is something that has no name. That something is what we are."
— Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature José Saramago, quoted in Salman Rushdie's memoir, Joseph Anton

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"If you love life enough, it would seem you can force life to be good."
— American journalist Martha Gellhorn, in an article about life in post-war Italy, written in 1949. The article is part of an anthology of Gellhorn's writings, The View from the Ground 

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"An information-rich world is a time-poor world, and a time-poor world is an attention-poor world."
— P.M. Forni, in The Thinking Life: How to Thrive in the Age of Distraction

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"A great distance between you and your enemy is still the best defence."
— Czech refugee "Carl Zlinter" to "Jenny" in Nevil Shute's The Far Country, which is set in small-town Australia

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"Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing."
— Norman Mailer, American novelist whose most popular books are The Naked and the Dead and The Executioner's Song 

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"Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." — Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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"If a problem has no solution, it is not a problem to be solved but a fact to be coped with over time."
— Former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres to Donald Rumsfeld, twice U.S. secretary of defence, quoted in the latter's book, Known and Unknown: A Memoir

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"What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?"
— C.L.R. James in Beyond a Boundary, hailed as the most finely crafted book on cricket ever written. It is said the book is, in a sense, a response to a Rudyard Kipling quote from the poem "English Flag": "What do they know of England who only England know?"

• ALSO READ: Quotes from books, quotes by writers... to inspire, influence, and induce a new way of thinking-3

Is there a book or two from your past that helped you see yourself and your world in a whole new way?

Every Sunday morning, I receive Dr Mardy Grothe's e-newsletter:
     

A WEEKLY CELEBRATION OF GREAT QUOTES IN HISTORY
           (AND THE HISTORY BEHIND THE QUOTES).

Dr Grothe has featured in this space many times before. A psychologist by training, he is an author and, as his website puts it, an engaging and entertaining speaker who gives scores of seminars every year to CEO groups that are part of an international network known as The Executive Committee (TEC).

I am reproducing the relevant portion of his latest piece here because, today, he is discussing a very important topic:

"Life-Altering Books"

BY DR MARDY GROTHE

The quotation in this week's Puzzler ["How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book" — Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden] illustrates one of history's most fascinating themes: the idea that people can be changed — sometimes in dramatic ways — by the reading of a single book.

In the lives of countless people over the centuries, a life-altering book can be as influential as a lifetime of instruction from family members, clergy, and teachers.

It happened several times with Ralph Waldo Emerson [Thoreau's friend and mentor], whose life was impacted in significant ways by the confessions of Rousseau, the essays of Montaigne, and the confessions of St. Augustine. In 1840, he sent a copy of Augustine's book to a friend along with this revealing note:

    It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime
    to be drunk with some book which probably has
    some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us...
    and having exhausted that cup of enchantment
    we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards
    in the hope of being in Paradise again.

Several decades later, Emerson returned to the subject of pivotal books in an essay in Society and Solitude (1870):

    There are books...which take rank in your life
    with parents and lovers and passionate experiences,
    so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

FRANZ KAFKA

The concept of life-altering books was clearly on the mind of Franz Kafka, when he asked in a 1904 letter to his friend, Oskar Pollack: "If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?" He then answered his own question this way:

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?
A book should serve as an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us.

I can think of several books that helped to break the frozen sea within me, including the one featured in this week's Puzzler. I tell the full story in my I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like book, but the brief version is that I read it [Walden]when I was a 20-year-old college student in the middle of a major "identity crisis". After reading the first couple of pages, I couldn't put the book down. And by the time I finished reading it, I had recorded several dozen passages on library index cards and tacked them up on the bulletin board above my desk. Some of those passages ultimately went on to become such an important part of my life that I can recite them from memory today, more than fifty years later.

How about you? Is there a book or two from your past that helped you see yourself and your world in a whole new way? As you think about which books belong in that category, take few moments to peruse this week's selection of quotes on the theme:

   "Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts
    which other men have prepared
    to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life."
          Jesse Lee Bennett

   "It is chiefly through books
    that we enjoy the intercourse with superior minds."
          William Ellery Channing

   "A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity,
    and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen
    by morning light, at noon and by moonlight."
          Robertson Davies

E.M. FORSTER

"The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves."
          E. M. Forster

"Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books."
          Bell Hooks

 "It is from books that wise people
 derive consolation in the troubles of life."
          Victor Hugo

   "If we are imprisoned in ourselves,
    books provide us with the means of escape.
    If we have run too far away from ourselves,
    books show us the way back."
          Holbrook Jackson

   "Books go out into the world,
    travel mysteriously from hand to hand,
    and somehow find their way to the people who need them
    at the times when they need them....
    Cosmic forces guide such passings-along."
          Erica Jong

"People don't realise how a man's whole life can be changed by one book."
          Malcolm X

   "The real purpose of books
    is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking."
          Christopher Morley

SALMAN RUSHDIE

"The lover of books is a miner, searching for gold all his life long. He finds his nuggets, his heart leaps in his breast; he cannot believe in his good fortune."
          Kathleen Norris, in These I Like Best (1941)

"Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul — what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?"
          Salman Rushdie

• ALSO READ:

Tell me, please: What role has reading played in your life? (Another thought-provoking post by Dr Mardy Grothe)

Reading this book will change your approach to life

25 books that will give you a better perspective on life and also help prepare you for the workplace

• EXTERNAL READING: From the New York Times: "What motivates one human being to chuck a book at another?"

Quotes from books, quotes by writers... to inspire, influence, and induce a new way of thinking-3

This was published in the June-July 2013 issue of Books & More magazine:

BOOKMARKS

Quotes from books, quotes by writers... to inspire, influence, and induce a new way of thinking/RESEARCHED AND COMPILED BY RAMESH PRABHU 

“The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones that the school thinks it is teaching.”
— Salman Rushdie, in his memoir Joseph Anton

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“When they’re young, they step on your toes… when they grow up, they step on your heart.”
— “Charlie Brown” telling “Lucy” what his grandmother — “quite a philosopher” — says about children, in You’re a Winner, Charlie Brown!, by Charles Schulz

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“Women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid.”
— American comedian George Carlin in When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?

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“Perhaps only a truly discontented child can become as seduced by books as I was. Perhaps restlessness is a necessary corollary of devoted literacy.”
— Journalist and author Anna Quindlen in her bestseller, How Reading Changed My Life

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“Art is what you can get away with.”
— Pop art pioneer Andy Warhol, quoted in The Form of Things: Essays on Life, Ideas, and Liberty in the 21st Century, by A.C. Grayling

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“A smooth sea never produced a skilful navigator.”
— C.D. Narasimhaiah, founder-editor-publisher of the 60-year-old journal, The Literary Criterion, on his attitude to the obstacles he overcame to keep the publication going, quoted in a recent article in The Hindu (CDN died in 2005)

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“I would sooner be bored by Proust than amused by any other writer.”
— British playwright, novelist, and short-story writer Somerset Maugham, in Ten Novels and Their Authors, expressing his admiration for Marcel Proust’s magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time

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“If we think to regulate printing we … must regulate all recreations and pastimes.” (In other words, other liberties depend on a free press.)
— English poet John Milton, best known for the epic Paradise Lost, in a 17th-century polemic against press licensing, quoted in The Economist

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“He is a kind of literary equivalent of an electron — forever there and not there.”
— Bill Bryson, best-selling American author of humorous books on travel, as well as books on the English language and on science, in Shakespeare: The World as Stage, lamenting that we know so little of Shakespeare’s life

• Also read: Quotes from books, quotes by writers... to inspire, influence, and induce a new way of thinking-2

Quotes from books, quotes by writers... to inspire, influence, and induce a new way of thinking-2

This was published in the April-May 2013 issue of Books & More magazine:

BOOKMARKS

Quotes from books, quotes by writers... to inspire, influence, and induce a new way of thinking/RESEARCHED AND COMPILED BY RAMESH PRABHU

“Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens.”

— "The Whether Man" to "Milo", in The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster

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“Faculties is different in different peoples, but cultivation of 'em goes a long way.”

— "Sam" to "Andy" on the importance of developing good habits such as "observation", in Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe

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“It isn't the books you study in college but the friendships you make that counts.”
— "George F. Babbitt", in Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis

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“For a man to know what he has when he has it, that is what makes him a fortunate man.”

— "Fyodorov" in Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett

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“We are better than animals because we have kinsmen. An animal rubs its itching flank against a tree, a man asks his kinsman to scratch him.”

— "Uchendu", the uncle of "Okonkwo", the protagonist of Nobel Prize-winning author Chinua Achebe's classic, Things Fall Apart

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“Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.”
— Ancient Greek dramatist Euripides, quoted in the epigraph in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Cleopatra: A Life, by Stacy Schiff

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“Women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget.”
— Zora Neale Hurston in Their Eyes Were Watching God, her novel about a woman's search for her authentic self and for real love, first published in 1937

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“Forget for a moment how books should be read: Why should they be read? The first reason ... is that reading books can be intensely pleasurable. Reading is one of the great human delights.”
— Alan Jacobs in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

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“We fall in love with a person, or an idea, or a work of art — not in spite of the risk of losing ourselves, but because it is a way to lose ourselves.”

— Jonathan Biss in Beethoven's Shadow

• Also read: Quotes from books, quotes by writers... to inspire, influence, and induce a new way of thinking-1

Quotes from books, quotes by writers... to inspire, influence, and induce a new way of thinking-1

This was published in the first anniversary issue (February-March 2013) of Books & More magazine:

BOOKMARKS

Quotes from books, quotes by writers... to inspire, influence, and induce a new way of thinking/RESEARCHED AND COMPILED BY RAMESH PRABHU 

“To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.”
— English philosopher A.C. Grayling, in a review in the Financial Times of A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel

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“A capacity and taste for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.”
— Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States

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“Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a dangerous enemy indeed.”
— Author Anne Rice in The Witching Hour

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“Wear the old coat and buy the new book.”
— Austin Phelps, American Congregational minister and educator

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“Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.”
— Gloria Jean Watkins (better known by her pen name Bell Hooks), American author, feminist, and social activist

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“You're the same today as you'll be in five years except for the people you meet and the books you read.”
— Author, speaker, and entrepreneur Charlie "Tremendous" Jones, who rose from the squalid poverty of the Great Depression to be hailed as one of the top twenty speakers of the 20th century

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“No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.”
— Confucius

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“Having your feet up is the first condition for enjoying a read.”
— Interior monologue of The Reader in Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's  Night a Traveller

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“The more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.”
— Dr. Seuss in I Can Read With My Eyes Shut! Theodor Seuss Geisel was an American writer, poet, and cartoonist most widely known for his children's books written under the pen name Dr. Seuss.

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“If you can read this, thank a teacher.”
— Anonymous teacher

Why you should be careful about attributing quotes

Much has been made of how CNN-IBN passed off a recorded interaction as a live one, and the channel and anchor in question have done the right thing by apologizing — and with no yes-but qualifications that journalists are wont to use when they mess up, which is very creditable — but the larger issue is that most journalists and editors in this country are pretty careless about the correct attribution of quotes.

Mint editor R. Sukumar explains the purpose of proper attribution: "Quote... unquote". A must-read for media students... and for journalists.

• Also read: Mihir Sharma in The Indian Express on the Face the Nation controversy. Here is CNN-IBN's clarification and apology.