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Who said that? Quiz yourself with these bookish quotations

It’s time to dust off your bookshelf and reacquaint yourself with your local library! We’ve gathered ten bookish quotes from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations to test your knowledge.

Do you know who said it?!

  1. Who wrote the following words?

“All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words.”

(a) Amy Lowell

(b) J.R.R Tolkien

(c) Hilda Doolittle (HD)

  1. “Books are made not like children but like pyramids…and they’re just as useless! And they stay in the desert! …Jackals piss at their foot and the bourgeois climb up on them…” claimed which of the following authors:

(a) Franz Kafka

(b) Alphonse Daudet

(c) Gustave Flaubert

  1. Who stated that “Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory…In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man’s freedom.”?

(a) Theodore Roosevelt

(b) Franklin D. Roosevelt

(c) Calvin Coolidge

  1. “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.” avowed which of the following writers?

(a) Oscar Wilde

(b) Charles Dickens

(c) George Eliot

  1. Which of these quotations is attributed to theoretical physicist and philosopher of science, Albert Einstein?

(a) “Knowledge exists in two forms – lifeless, stored in books, and alive in the consciousness of men. The second form of existence is after all the essential one; the first, indispensable as it may be, occupies only an inferior position.”

(b) “I never read books – I write

(c) “All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.”

  1. “Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books” was stated by which of the following philosophers?

(a) Aristotle

(b) Karl Marx

(c) Francis Bacon

  1. Which John Milton poem contains the phrase, “Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself”?

(a) Paradise Lost

(b) Comus

(c) Paradise Regained

  1. Which Shakespeare play does this quotation come from?

“From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive:
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world. “

(a) Love’s Labour’s Lost

(b) Twelfth Night

(c) Romeo and Juliet

  1. Who wrote: “Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh”?

(a) The Bible

(b) Pluto

(c) Alexander Pope

  1. “I think you should only read books which bite and sting you.” was said by which of the following authors?

(a) Franz Kafka

(b) Emily Dickenson

(c) Vladimir Nabokov

 Answers will be posted on Monday! or if you can’t wait until then, look up the answers in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations!

9780199668700Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
9780199668700
Hardback
AU$61.95

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