John Leonard quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by John Leonard

Top John Leonard Quotes

Browse top 9 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by John Leonard.

Favorite John Leonard Quotes

1. "I was going to suggest some hard-won guidelines for responsible reviewing. For instance: First, as in Hippocrates, do no harm. Second, never stoop to score a point or bite an ankle. Third, always understand that in this symbiosis, you are the parasite. Fourth, look with an open heart and mind at every different kind of book with every change of emotional weather because we are reading for our lives and that could be love gone out the window or a horseman on the roof. Fifth, use theory only as a periscope or a trampoline, never a panopticon, a crib sheet or a license to kill. Sixth, let a hundred Harolds Bloom." ~ John Leonard

2. "For Pol Pot, as for every other kamikaze of Kingdom Come, "the goal was not to destroy but to transmute." We have heard this chiliastic tommyrot before, from a variety of faith-based ethnic cleansers forever seeking to transmute the rest of us to death." ~ John Leonard

3. "To be capable of embarrassment is the beginning of moral consciousness. Honor grows from qualms." ~ John Leonard

4. "In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the same of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold." ~ John Leonard

5. "Baseball happens to be a game of cumulative tension but football, basketball and hockey are played with hand grenades and machine guns." ~ John Leonard

6. "Aspiring to a souffle, he achieves a pancake at which the reader saws without much appetite." ~ John Leonard

7. "Books fall from Garry Wills like leaves from a maple tree in a sort of permanent October." ~ John Leonard

8. "The rich are different from you and me because they have more credit." ~ John Leonard

9. "Books are where we go alone to complicate ourselves. Inside this solitude, we take on contours, textures, perspectives. Heightened language levitates the reader. Great art transfigures. And when we go back to it, it's full of even more surprises. We get older; it gets smarter." ~ John Leonard

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Today's Quote

Often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. We lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year's time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our life to worthwhile actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections and enduring undertakings."
Author: André Maurois