Quotes by British Authors - Page 684

The evils arising from the loss of her uncle were neither trifling nor likely to lessen; and when thought had been freely indulged, in contrasting the past and the present, the employment of mind and dissipation of unpleasant ideas which only reading could produce made her thankfully turn to a book.
Jane Austen
Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message from the dead - from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.
Charles Kingsley
Escapism sold books, to be sure, but not nearly as many as were sold by exposing America’s flaws and making the average American reader (and book club member) look closely at his or her most cherished social assumptions. Americans might not be eager to accept integration, feminism, homosexuality, juvenile delinquency, and the drug culture– or to shoulder the blame for the existence of these problems– but they were certainly willing to read about them.
Michael Korda
So we may use our books to form a barricade against the world,interweaving their words with our own to ward off the heat of the day.
Peter Ackroyd
I am not man or beast; I am bibliosexual, and a seedy bibliosexual who haunts the streets, laden with carrier bags held by blistered fingers, stooping under the weight of the rucksack that has brought on sciatica and a Dickensian demeanour.
Robin Ince
‎'He often envied people who hadn't read his favourite books. They had such happiness before them.
Charles Finch
It must be a really great book because one can read it as a boy in one way, and then re-read it in middle life and get something very different out of it - and that to my mind is one of the best tests.
C.S. Lewis
she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.
Alan Hollinghurst
Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar. You have to hold it, you have to read it.
Ben Elton
But really it says everything that’s wrong about the publishing industry, that a quarter of a million people bought and read a sex and shopping novel that wasn’t even written by one of those footballer girlfriends, and yet most of the shortlisted titles on the Orange Prize, which is an award for women writers, don’t even sell ten thousand copies. It’s just not right.
Sarra Manning
Reading's not a luxury, art's not a luxury. It's about your soul, and it's about yourself. And if reading is a luxury, being human is a luxury
Jeanette Winterson
There were thousands of brown books in leather bindings, some chained to the book-shelves and others propped against each other as if they had had too much to drink and did not really trust themselves. These gave out a smell of must and solid brownness which was most secure.
T.H. White
And tell them all about the books you've read. Better still, buy some more books and read them. That's an order. You can never read too many books.
P.B. Kerr
They were waiting for me in the books and in stories, after all, hiding inside the twenty six characters and a handful of punctuation marks. These letters and words, when placed in the right order, would conjure all manner of exotic beasts and people from the shadows, would reveal the motives and minds of insects and of cats. They were spells, spelled with words to make worlds, waiting for me, in the pages of books.
Neil Gaiman
Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old.
C.S. Lewis
Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.
Alan Bennett
Books require titles reading them doesn't
Alan Moore
They were steaming out of the station before Maia asked, 'Was it books in the trunk?''It was books, admitted Miss Minton.And Maia said, 'Good.
Eva Ibbotson
You got shook and shook till there was nothing left. You lost your name and your body and your self and you just didn't care.
Anthony Burgess
No two readers can or will ever read the same book, because the reader builds the book in collaboration with the author.
Neil Gaiman
I cannot live without reading.
Aidan Chambers
Books—all books—are complicated things, muttering at us in different contradictory voices, refusing to stay the same when we go back to them. Tying them down too much robs of them of the magic.
Andrew Rilstone
He who studies old books will always find in them something new, and he who reads new books will always find in them something old.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don't really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping.
Matt Haig
There were pools of light among the stacks, directly beneath the bulbs which Philip had switched on, but it was now with an unexpected fearfulness that he saw how the books stretched away into the darkness. They seemed to expand as soon as they reached the shadows, creating some dark world where there was no beginning and no end, no story, no meaning. And if you crossed the threshold into that world, you would be surrounded by words; you would crush them beneath your feet, you would knock against them with your head and arms, but if you tried to grasp them they would melt away. Philip did not dare turn his back upon these books. Not yet. It was almost, he thought, as if they had been speaking to each other while he slept.
Peter Ackroyd
To live among such excellent helps as our libraries afford, to have so many silent wise companions whenever we please.
Richard Baxter
Book collecting is a full-time occupation, and one wouldn't get far if one took time off for frivolities like reading.
A.N.L. Munby
I would prefer to have one comfortable room well stocked with books to all you could give me in the way of decoration which the highest art could supply.
John Bright
[Books are] vital to learning. Half the population don't go to football matches but that doesn't make football any less important.
John Sutherland
It's red hot, mate. I hate to think of this sort of book getting in the wrong hands. As soon as I've finished this, I shall recommend they ban it.
Tony Hancock
They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.
Virginia Woolf
You're not allowed to say anything about books because they're books, and books are, you know, God.
Nick Hornby
Though my appetite for food grew frail, my hunger for books was constant.
Diane Setterfield
Jack shook his head. 'Books. What is it with women and books? My sisters were the same. They were always buying books for boys they fancied.'Ellie bent down and picked up the stone and put it on the table. 'It's like sending a love letter without having to write it yourself,' she said softly.
Hazel Osmond
Books appear to be the most immediate instruments of speculative delight.
Richard de Bury
I was thinking, "So, I’m Emperor, am I? What nonsense! But at least I'll be able to make people read my books now.
Robert Graves
I go downstairs and the books blink at me from the shelves. Or stare. In a trick of the light, a row of them seems to shift very slightly, like a curtain blown by the breeze through an open window. Red is next to blue is next to cream is adjacent to beige. But when I look again, cream is next to green is next to black. A tall book shelters a small book, a huge Folio bullies a cowering line of Quartos. A child's nursery rhyme book does not have the language in which to speak to a Latin dictionary. Chaucer does not know the words in which Henry James communicates but here they are forced to live together, forever speechless.
Susan Hill
I wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A–Z.But this was diff
Jeanette Winterson
Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.
Jeanette Winterson
I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I’m certainly not the dumbest. I mean, I’ve read books like "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Love in the Time of Cholera", and I think I’ve understood them. They’re about girls, right? Just kidding. But I have to say my all-time favorite book is Johnny Cash’s autobiography "Cash" by Johnny Cash.
Nick Hornby
She would go off in the morning with the punt full of books, and spend long glorious days away in the forest lying on the green springy carpet of whortleberries, reading. She would most diligently work at furnishing her empty mind. She would sternly endeavour to train it not to jump.
Elizabeth von Arnim
I had said that Le Guin's worlds were real because her people were so real, and he said yes, but the people were so real because they were the people the worlds would have produced. If you put Ged to grow up on Anarres or Shevek in Earthsea, they would be the same people, the backgrounds made the people, which of course you see all the time in mainstream fiction, but it's rare in SF.
Jo Walton
Books are more precious than jewels. She truly believed this. What did a diamond bring you? A momentary flash of brilliance. A diamond scintillated for second a book could scintillate forever.
Veronica Henry
What's the point of a houseful of books you've already read?
Cory Doctorow
I think about stories and their logic and wonder if there can be any such thing as simply "there is a book.
Scarlett Thomas
I knew books could see people around them, they ground their tiny teeth, tried to rattle like windows, stories to tell.
Steve Aylett
And please return it. You may think this a strange request, but I find that although my friends are poor arithmeticians, they are nearly all of them good bookkeepers.
Walter Scott
As one tends to the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. I clean them, do minor repairs, keep them in good order. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so, for it must be very lonely being dead.
Diane Setterfield
One act presses upon another, on a path we have no choice but to follow, and each time there are reasons. We do what we must, we do what we are told, we do what is easiest. What else can we do but solve one sordid problem at a time? Then we look up and find... this.
Joe Abercrombie
I enjoy books. No room is fit for occupation without a lining of books.
Martin Booth
I doubt if ever one ceases to love, but one can cease to be in love as easily as one can outgrow an author one admired as a boy.
Graham Greene
If a book did nothing else for you, other than to save you from the company of other people; if all it did was to deliver you from their gossip, and their dull affairs, and their appalling manners, and their rotten Arabic, and their stupid ideas, and their woefully misguided opinions, and above all, from the need to be polite to them; if a book did nothing more than that, it would still be the best friend you ever had.
Andrew Killeen
Until recently, I was an ebook sceptic, see; one of those people who harrumphs about the “physical pleasure of turning actual pages” and how ebook will “never replace the real thing”. Then I was given a Kindle as a present. That shut me up. Stock complaints about the inherent pleasure of ye olde format are bandied about whenever some new upstart invention comes along. Each moan is nothing more than a little foetus of nostalgia jerking in your gut. First they said CDs were no match for vinyl. Then they said MP3s were no match for CDs. Now they say streaming music services are no match for MP3s. They’re only happy looking in the rear-view mirror.
Charlie Brooker
Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?
Jeanette Winterson
There's nothing so heavy as books, sir--unless it's bricks.
Graham Greene
The summer passed quietly. I busied myself as best I could, reading a good deal.
Michael Cox
Most books are so well written they barely have any effect on the reader’s senses
Steve Aylett
But Neve, you can’t start a book and leave it halfway through,’ he’d said implacably. ‘It’s almost as bad as turning down the corner of the page, instead of using a bookmark.
Sarra Manning
There's a book for everyone, even if they don't think there is. A book that reaches in and grabs your soul.
Veronica Henry
And Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book.
Jane Austen