Non Fiction Literature

🇺🇸Nicholas Sparks

Literature

b. 1965

"...when you're struggling with something, look at all the people around you and realize that every single person you see is struggling with something, and to them, it's just as hard as what you're going through."

🇬🇧Richard Wright

Literature

1943–2008

"The moment we act as if it's true, then it's true."

🇺🇸James Nestor (writer)

Literature

"he lowest recorded heart rate ... was 7 beats per minute... about 1/2 of someone in a..."

🇬🇧Melvyn Bragg

Politics

b. 1939

"I OWE Christianity a debt, and so, I believe, does the world we have lived in for the last 2000 years."

🇺🇸Rachel Maddow

Politics

b. 1973

"As you can tell, my Halloween costume this year is once again middle-aged lesbian pundit in cheap jacket. Boo."

🇲🇽Luis Alberto Urrea

Literature

b. 1955

"The kitchen was the United States; the living room was Mexico…One side was struggling with all her might to make me an American boy, and the other side, with all of his might, was trying to keep me a Mexican boy."

H. G. Wells

Literature

1866–1946

"An artist who theorizes about his work is no longer artist but critic."

🇺🇸Jonathan Safran Foer

Literature

b. 1977

"I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time......why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time, my greatest regret is how much I believed in the future."

🇺🇸Alexander Chee

Literature

b. 1967

"I think fiction is the thing you invent to fit the shape of what you learned and nonfiction is the thing you invent to fit the shape of what you found or maybe even what you can’t run away from…"

🇬🇧Stephen Baxter

Music

1929–2020

"In his reliance on evidence, preferably obtained at first hand, Hutton was showing the way to the geological methods of the future."

C. L. R. James

Literature

Marxism

1901–1989

"If you are not their slaves, you are rebels."

🇦🇷Alberto Manguel

Literature

b. 1948

"Socrates affirmed that only that which the reader already knows can be sparked by a reading, and that the knowledge cannot be acquired through dead letters."

🇺🇸Bill Bryson

Literature

b. 1951

"Absolute brain size does not tell you everything — or possibly sometimes even much. Elephants and whales both have brains larger than ours, but you wouldn't have much trouble outwitting them in contract negotiations."

🇬🇧Terry Eagleton

Literature

New Left

b. 1943

"It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it."

"The message of Vietnam is not that Americans will not take casualties; it is that the American people do not want the lives of their sons and daughters wasted."

🇺🇸Noam Cohen

Literature

"Before Wikileaks, or even the Internet, there were just plain leaks."

🇺🇸John Jay Chapman

Literature

1862–1933

"When a man talks with absolute sincerity and freedom he goes on a voyage of discovery. The whole company has shares in the enterprise."

🇬🇧Sarah Bakewell

Literature

b. 1963

"Learning should be a pleasure, and children should grow up to imagine wisdom with a smiling face, not a fierce and terrifying one."

"The universe now appeared to me as a void wherein floated rare flakes of snow, each flake a universe."

🇳🇴Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Politics

1962–2024

"One reason for the increased interest in studies of identity in anthropology may be the fact that issues to do with the nature of groups have become hugely important in politics worldwide in the last decades."

"People make mistakes in life through believing too much, but they have a damned dull time if they believe too little."