Quotes by British Authors - Page 685

One sheds ones sickness in books- repeats and presents again ones emotions, to be master of them.
D.H. Lawrence
We have to report this." Kai sighed deeply in relief. "I was afraid you were going to say that we had to investigate it ourselves.""Don't be ridiculous," Irene said briskly. "We may collect fiction, but we are not required to imitate the stupider parts of it.
Genevieve Cogman
Make careful choice of the books which you read: let the holy Scriptures ever have the preeminence. Let Scripture be first and most in your hearts and hands and other books be used as subservient to it. While reading ask yourself: 1. Could I spend this time no better? 2. Are there better books that would edify me more? 3. Are the lovers of such a book as this the greatest lovers of the Book of God and of a holy life? 4. Does this book increase my love to the Word of God, kill my sin, and prepare me for the life to come? "The words of the wise are like goads, their collected sayings like firmly embedded nails—given by one Shepherd. Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them. Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body." Ecclesiastes 12:11-12
Richard Baxter
. . . she read with undifferentiated glee . . .
Sebastian Faulks
Perhaps that is the best way to say it: printed books are magical, and real bookshops keep that magic alive.
Jen Campbell
Often the adult book is not for you, not yet, or will only be for you when you're ready. But sometimes you will read it anyway, and you will take from it whatever you can. Then, perhaps, you will come back to it when you're older, and you will find the book has changed because you have changed as well, and the book is wiser, or more foolish, because you are wiser or more foolish than you were as a child.
Neil Gaiman
She liked getting hold of some book... and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her thoughts with any one, or having to decide whether the book was a good one or a bad one.
Virginia Woolf
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book, and a tired man who wants a book to read.
G.K. Chesterton
Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.
Edward Gibbon
I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.
Anita Brookner
I have lots of favourites. That's the trouble with books. You can never choose your favorite. It changes depending on your mood.
Veronica Henry
This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if he do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers.
P.G. Wodehouse
One bright day in the last week of February, I was walking in the park, enjoying the threefold luxury of solitude, a book, and pleasant weather.
Anne Brontë
You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.
Arthur Conan Doyle
When you learn to read you will be born again...and you will never be quite so alone again.
Rumer Godden
With a book he was regardless of time.
Jane Austen
I always thought the joy of reading a book is not knowing what happens next. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)
Christopher Nolan
Our clients' faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover.
Diane Setterfield
Should he give free reign to his desires, the bibliomaniac can ruin his life along with the lives of his loved ones. He'll often take better care of his books than of his own health; he'll spend more on fiction than he does on food; he'll be more interested in his library than in his relationships, and, since few people are prepared to live in a place where every available surface is covered with piles of books, he'll often find himself alone, perhaps in the company of a neglected and malnourished cat. When he dies, all but forgotten, his body might fester for days before a curious neighbor grows concerned about the smell.
Mikita Brottman
The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison.
C.S. Lewis
Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards–their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble–the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.
Virginia Woolf
It was also a room full of books and made of books. There was no actual furniture; this is to say, the desk and chairs were shaped out of books. It looked as though many of them were frequently referred to, because they lay open with other books used as bookmarks.
Terry Pratchett
People will perish, but books are immortal. (Pompeii)
Robert Harris
There are adventures of the spirit and one can travel in books and interest oneself in people and affairs. One need never be dull as long as one has friends to help, gardens to enjoy and books in the long winter evenings.
D.E. Stevenson
What worries me is that a load of shite has been talked about digitisation as being the new Gutenberg, but the fact is that Gutenberg led to books being put in shelves, and digitisation is taking books off shelves.If you start taking books off shelves then you are only going to find what you are looking for, which does not help those who do not know what they are looking for.
Jeanette Winterson
Books smell and feel better. They have that wonderful thingness of turning the pages.
Neil Gaiman
A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to peer out.
E.M. Forster
We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.
George Eliot
But to her, libraries were like hotels: secret villages inhabited by passing strangers from a thousand different worlds brought together just for a few hours.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
I need words and print... I need print like an addict. I could live without it, perhaps. But I hope I never have to try.
Margaret Drabble
‎He often envied people who hadn't read his favourite books. They had such happiness before them.
Charles Finch
The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.
G.K. Chesterton
Madam Pince, our librarian, tells me that it is 'pawed about, dribbled on, and generally maltreated' nearly everyday - a high compliment for any book.
J.K. Rowling
…the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea…. It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and thus compelling words to a shape….You have not finished with it because you have read it, any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up and alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered. So we look back upon essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm, knowing that, come September or May, we shall sit down with them and talk.
Virginia Woolf
Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes–characters even–caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you
Diane Setterfield
What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever.
Virginia Woolf
Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.
Elizabeth von Arnim
More and more I lived in books, they were my comfort, refuge, addiction, compensation for the humiliations that attended contact with the world outside.
Lorna Sage
Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time.
Nick Hornby
History proves there is no better advertisement for a book than to condemn it for obscenity.
Holbrook Jackson
The young need discipline and a full bookcase.
Vivienne Westwood
..........books are yours, Within whose silent chambers treasure lies Preserved from age to age; more precious far Than that accumulated store of gold And orient gems, which, for a day of need, The Sultan hides deep in ancestral tombs. These hoards of truth you can unlock at will:
William Wordsworth
My parents would frisk me before family events. Before weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, and what have you. Because if they didn't, then the book would be hidden inside some pocket or other and as soon as whatever it was got under way I'd be found in a corner. That was who I was...that was what I did. I was the kid with the book.
Neil Gaiman
I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.
J.R.R. Tolkien
A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.
Virginia Woolf
Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.
Julian Barnes
I think that pretty much every form of fiction (I’d include fantasy, obviously) can actually be a real escape from places where you feel bad, and from bad places. It can be a safe place you go, like going on holiday, and it can be somewhere that, while you’ve escaped, actually teaches you things you need to know when you go back, that gives you knowledge and armour and tools to change the bad place you were in.So no, they’re not escapist. They’re escape.
Neil Gaiman
He helped the Librarian up. There was a red glow in the ape's eyes. It had tried to steal his books. This was probably the best proof any wizard could require that the trolleys were brainless.
Terry Pratchett
Certain unique books seem to be without forerunners or successors as far as their authors are concerned. Even though they may profoundly influence the work of other writers, for their creator they're complete, not leading anywhere.
Dodie Smith
...some people might think our lives dull and uneventful, but it does not seem so to us. ...it is not travel and adventure that make a full life. There are adventures of the spirit and one can travel in books and interest oneself in people and affairs. One need ever be dull as long as one has friends to help, gardens to enjoy and books in the long winter evenings.
D.E. Stevenson
She liked books more than anything else, and was, in fact, always inventing stories of beautiful things and telling them to herself.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
He began to read at haphazard. He entered upon each system with a little thrill of excitement, expecting to find in each some guide by which he could rule his conduct; he felt himself like a traveller in unknown countries and as he pushed forward the enterprise fascinated him; he read emotionally, as other men read pure literature, and his heart leaped as he discovered in noble words what himself had obscurely felt.
W Somerset Maugham
Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.
C.S. Lewis
To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions—there we have none.
Virginia Woolf
The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
Samuel Butler
There are good books which are only for adults.There are no good books which are only for children.
W.H. Auden
There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one’s mind and alter one’s whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later:
George Orwell
We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too.
Nick Hornby
Libraries are not made; they grow. Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.
Augustine Birrell
The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one.
James Goldsmith