Jim

“[Y]outh is hardly human: it can't be, for the young never believe they will die...especially would they never believe that death comes, and often, in forms other than the natural one.”
― Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms

“Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them…digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analyses of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed. Little learning and much pride comes from hasty reading. Some men are disabled from thinking by their putting meditation away for the sake of much reading. In reading let your motto be ‘much not many.”
― Charles H. Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students

“but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.”
― Jane Austen

“It only put me in Griffindor. said Harry in a defeated voice, because I asked not to go in Slytherin...

EXACTLY, said Dumbledore, beaming once more. Which makes you very different from Tom Riddle. It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets