14 Famous Quotes From Banned Books

“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door...Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?”

– Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

"Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts."

– Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

"I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy."

– James Joyce, Ulysses

"Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined."

– Toni Morrison, Beloved

“It's strange because sometimes, I read a book, and I think I am the people in the book.”

– Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

"Words without experience are meaningless."

– Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

"People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too."

– William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

"Good writin' ain't necessarily good readin'."

– Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

"The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him."

– Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

“Even trained for years as they all had been in precision of language, what words could you use which would give another the experience of sunshine?”

– Lois Lowry, The Giver

“Punctuation, is? fun!”

– Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“Thomas Edison's last words were "It's very beautiful over there". I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful.”

– John Green, Looking for Alaska

"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."

– J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Yup, all those books were banned at some point ... and here's a few more

If you want to be really rebellious … add these banned books from the official list for 2016 to your reading list:

  • Make Something Up: Stories You Can’t Unread (published in 2016) is written by Chuck Palahniuk. It was banned for profanity, sexual explicitness, and being “disgusting and all around offensive.”
  • Eleanor & Park (published in 2013), is written by Rainbow Rowell. The young adult novel was banned for offensive language.
  • Big Hard Sex Criminals (published in 2015), is written by Matt Fraction and illustrated by Chip Zdarsky. It is an adult comic book. It was banned because it was considered to be sexually explicit.
  • Two Boys Kissing (published in 2015), is by David Levithan. The young adult novel was banned because its cover has an image of two boys kissing, and it was considered to include sexually explicit LGBT content.
  • I Am Jazz (published in 2014), is written by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings and illustrated by Shelagh McNicholas. It was banned because it portrays a transgender child and because of language, sex education, and offensive viewpoints.
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