Top 60 Will Schwalbe Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The greatest gift you can give anyone is your undivided attention...”

— Will Schwalbe

2. “We’re all in the end-of-your-life book-club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one.”

— Will Schwalbe

3. “I was learning that when you’re with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time.”

— Will Schwalbe

4. “Lin Yutang also believed that reading is an art. One chapter of the Importance of Living is devoted to “the Art of Reading.” Lin writes that, “the man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighborhood.”

— Will Schwalbe

5. “If I’d waited until I was well rested to read, I never would have read anything.”

— Will Schwalbe

6. “Loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern world, so full of freedom, independence and our own egotistical selves.” The young man can’t think of anything to say in response. The truth of the statement is too stark for him.”

— Will Schwalbe

7. “Books speak to us thoughtfully, one at a time. They demand our attention. And they demand that we briefly put aside our own beliefs and prejudices and listen to someone else’s. There’s one questions I think we should ask one another a lot more often, and that’s “what are you reading?”

— Will Schwalbe

8. “But it takes so little to help people, and people really do help each other, even people with very little themselves. And it’s not just about second chances. Most people deserve an endless number of chances.”

— Will Schwalbe

9. “Trust is all about instinct. If you had all the facts, you wouldn’t need trust. Trust is what is required in the absence of proof. But I believe you can strengthen your instincts by testing them; every time you prove yourself right or wrong, they grow stronger.”

— Will Schwalbe

10. “Reading and naps, two of life’s greatest pleasures, go especially well together.”

— Will Schwalbe

11. “As for me, I’m on a search and have been, I now realize, all my life – to find books to help me make sense of the world, to help me become a better person, to help me get my head around the big questions that I have and answer some of the small ones while I’m at it.”

— Will Schwalbe

12. “I’m not the same reader when I finish a book as I was when I started, brains are tangles of pathways, and reading creates new ones. Every book changes your life. So I like to ask; How is this book changing mine?”

— Will Schwalbe

13. “In an idealized world, we would all be able to do what our English teachers told us to do, which is to write beautiful prose where enthusiasm is conveyed by word choice and grammar.”

— Will Schwalbe

14. “In Gilead, the narrator’s friend’s son describes himself not as an atheist but in “state of categorical unbelief.” He says, “I don’t even believe God doesn’t exist, if you see what I mean.” I pointed this passage out to Mom and said it closely matched my own views-I just didn’t think about religion.”

— Will Schwalbe

15. “Reading is a respite from the restlessness of technology, but it’s not only that. It’s how I reset and recharge. It’s how I escape, but it’s also how I engage. And reading should spur further engagement.”

— Will Schwalbe

16. “1. Ask: “Do you want to talk about how you’re feeling?” 2. Don’t ask if there’s anything you can do. Suggest things, or if it’s not intrusive, just do them. 3. You don’t have to talk all the time. Sometimes just being there is enough. The.”

— Will Schwalbe

17. “And a piece of advice that she thought was one of the most important things she wanted to pass on: You should tell your family every day that you love them. And make sure they know that you’re proud of them too.”

— Will Schwalbe

18. “What I suddenly understood was that a thank-you note isn’t the price you pay for receiving a gift, as so many children think it is, a kind of minimum tribute or toll, but an opportunity to count your.”

— Will Schwalbe

19. “You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them.”

— Will Schwalbe

20. “I particularly like that last phrase,” Mom said. “About protecting your own happiness.”

— Will Schwalbe

21. “You can only do what you can, and what doesn’t get done, just doesn’t get done.”

— Will Schwalbe

22. “Everyone doesn’t have to do everything,” she told me. “People forget you can also express yourself by what you choose to admire and support. I’ve had so much pleasure from beautiful and challenging things created by other people, things I could never make or do.”

— Will Schwalbe

23. “I read to live. I read for life.”

— Will Schwalbe

24. “And reading all different kinds of books is not simply reading all different kinds of books; it’s a way of becoming more fully human and more humane.”

— Will Schwalbe

25. “Evil almost always starts with small cruelties.”

— Will Schwalbe

26. “And my first item on each day’s list is this: Wake up. If I can check that off, I’ve already done something and can get on with the business of living and trying to honor the memory of those I love who are no longer here.”

— Will Schwalbe

27. “You should tell your family every day that you love them. And make sure they know that you’re proud of them too.”

— Will Schwalbe

28. “No one in the family has ever really gotten over Bob’s death. We talk of him daily, recounting stories and imagining what his reactions would be to new books and recent events. He remains for my family the perfect model of how you can be gone but ever present in the lives of people who loved you, in the same way that your favorite books stay with you for your entire life, no matter how long it’s been since you turned the last page.”

— Will Schwalbe

29. “Reading isn’t the opposite of doing, it’s the opposite of dying.”

— Will Schwalbe

30. “What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?” It helped you remember that people aren’t here for you; everyone is here for one another.”

— Will Schwalbe

31. “Mom agreed but pointed out that she’d been doing the same with others too – talking about books with my sister and brother and some of her friends. “I guess we’re all in it together,” she said. And I couldn’t help but smile at the other meaning of the phrase. We’re all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one.”

— Will Schwalbe

32. “You don’t have to have one emotion at a time.”

— Will Schwalbe

33. “And there’s something you can always tell people who want to learn more about the world and who don’t know how to find a cause to support. You can always tell them to read.”

— Will Schwalbe

34. “I realized then that for all of us part of the process of mom’s dying was mourning, not just her death, but also the death of our dreams of things to come. You don’t really lose the person who has been.”

— Will Schwalbe

35. “Mom would often talk about a refugee boy she’d met in a hospital in Afghanistan. He was the victim of a land mine and had lost a leg. She said to him that she brought greetings to him from schoolchildren in New York. “Tell them not to worry about me,” this little boy told her from his hospital bed. “I still have one leg.”

— Will Schwalbe

36. “I asked: “And I was very surprised by the ending. Were you?” “Of course not – I’d read it first.”

— Will Schwalbe

37. “Pass the time?” said the Queen. “Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, Sir Kevin, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.”

— Will Schwalbe

38. “The thing about Americans,” she said, “is that you’re very concerned about everything all the time.”

— Will Schwalbe

39. “Were you sad to leave Cambridge?” I asked her. She was, she said. Very sad. But she was also looking forward to being back in New York. “The world is complicated,” she added. “You don’t have to have one emotion at a time.”

— Will Schwalbe

40. “The world is complicated,’ she added. ‘You don’t have to have one emotion at a time.”

— Will Schwalbe

41. “I become influenced while I’m reading. I’m not the same reader when I finish a book as I was when I started. Brains are tangles of pathways, and reading creates new ones. Every book changes your life.”

— Will Schwalbe

42. “We all owe everyone for everything that happens in our lives. But it’s not owing like a debt to one person – it’s really that we owe everyone for everything. Our whole lives can change in an instant – so each person that keeps that from happening, no matter how small a role they play, is also responsible for all of it. Just by giving friendship and love, you keep the people around you from giving up – and each expression of friendship or love may be the one that makes all the difference.”

— Will Schwalbe

43. “We all have a lot more to read than we can read and a lot more to do than we can do.”

— Will Schwalbe

44. “The truth is that people never realize their lives are about to change in unforeseen ways – that’s just the nature of unforeseen ways.”

— Will Schwalbe

45. “His point: you don’t have to travel the world to see the ways we mistreat one another; it’s as close as the street outside our windows.”

— Will Schwalbe

46. “I do think back,′ Mom told me, ‘on my wonderful headmistress at Brearly, the one who told us we could have everything we wanted... And then, years later, I went back for a reunion, and I told the headmistress that I, indeed, managed to have it all – a husband, a career, three children – but that I was tired all the time, exhausted in fact. And she said, ‘Oh, dear – did I forget to mention that you can, indeed, have it all, but you need a lot of help!”

— Will Schwalbe

47. “I used to say that the greatest gift you could ever give anyone is a book. But I don’t say that anymore because I no longer think it’s true. I now say that a book is the second greatest gift. I’ve come to believe that the greatest gift you can give people is to take the time to talk with them about a book you’ve shared. A book is a great gift; the gift of your interest and attention is even greater.”

— Will Schwalbe

48. “You need to learn to recognize these things right from the start. Evil almost always starts with small cruelties.”

— Will Schwalbe

49. “Books have played a role in almost every one of the world’s great civil and human rights movements, but only because people who read them decided to act. Reading brings with it responsibility.”

— Will Schwalbe

50. “We were terrified to stop, stop anything, and admit that something was wrong. Activity, frenzied activity, seemed to be the thing we all felt we needed. Only Dad slowed down, and that wasn’t until he was trapped in a hospital getting intravenous antibiotics. Everything would be all right, everything would be possible, anything could be salvaged or averted, as long as we all kept running around.”

— Will Schwalbe