“The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year – the days when summer is changing into autumn – the crickets spread the rumour of sadness and change.”
~from E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web
Charlotte’s Web made my list of 10 books that stuck with me. Find out what else did here.
Read a quote I selected from E. B. White’s Trumpet of the Swan here.
“One swallow does not make a summer,
neither does one fine day;
similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.”
~Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethics
Find my other posts on Aristotle here.
“There is no month in the whole year in which nature wears a more beautiful appearance than in the month of August.”
~Charles Dickens in The Pickwick Papers
You may also be interested in how Jack Kerouac’s hometown inspired Dickens.
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”
~James Baldwin
“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
~from Sylvia Plath’s The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.”
~from J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye
You may enjoy this Catcher in the Rye-themed book party I hosted.
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
~from Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood
“We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.”
~from T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party
You may also like this Eliot quote in 10 Quotes About Persevering and Finding Your Story.
“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away… and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast…. be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend.”
~from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet
Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In was one of my favorite books of 2013.
Stephanie Nikolopoulos is a writer and editor based in New York City. This blog features her rambling thoughts on Greek American identity, the Beat Generation, social media, and the literary life.
She is the author with Paul Maher Jr. of Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road."
She's also currently working on a memoir about growing up Greek American.
You can email her at snikolop {@} alumna.scrippscollege.edu.
