50 Books to Read Before You Die

words to inspire before you expire

Tag: Words

March 25, 2019 /

“[Kurtz] presented himself as a voice. Not of course that I did not connect him with some sort of action. Hadn’t I been told in all the tones of jealousy and admiration that he had collected, bartered, swindled, or stolen more ivory than all the other agents together? That was not the point. The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out pre-eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words—the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.”

—from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

January 1, 2018 /

“And what I now must tell has never been
Reported by a voice, inscribed by ink,
Never conceived by the imagination . . .”

—from Canto XIX of Dante’s Paradiso by Dante Alighieri

July 7, 2017 /

“Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces. I could not remember when the lines above Atticus’s moving finger separated into words, but I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory, listening to the news of the day, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Dow—anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night. Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”

—from To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

May 25, 2017 /

“Children can feel, but they cannot analyse their feelings; and if the analysis is partially effected in thought, they know not how to to express the result of the process in words.”

—from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

November 18, 2016 /

“Casy spoke again, and his voice rang with pain and confusion. ‘I says, “What’s this call, this sperit?” An’ I says, “It’s love. I love people so much I’m fit to bust, sometimes.” An’ I says, “Don’t you love Jesus?” Well, I thought an’ thought, an’ finally I says, “No, I don’t know nobody name’ Jesus. I know a bunch of stories, but I only love people. An’ sometimes I love ’em fit to bust, an’ I want to make ’em happy, so I been preachin’ somepin I thought would make ’em happy.” An’ then—I been talkin’ a hell of a lot. Maybe you wonder about me using bad words. Well, they ain’t bad to me no more. They’re just words folks use, an’ they don’t mean nothing bad with ’em.’ ”

–from The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

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