Quotes by Essayists - Page 94

Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved.
Jorge Luis Borges
People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.
Barbara Kingsolver
Your goodness must have some edge to it -- else it is none.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.
Siri Hustvedt
What we need now are heroes and heroines, about a million of them, one brave deed is worth a thousand books. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.
Edward Abbey
I couldn't get to sleep. The book lay nearby. A thin object on the divan. So strange. Between two cardboard covers were noises, doors, howls, horses, people. All side by side, pressed tightly against one another. Boiled down to little black marks. Hair, eyes, voices, nails, legs, knocks on doors, walls, blood, beards, the sound of horseshoes, shouts. All docile, blindly obedient to the little black marks. The letters run in mad haste, now here, now there. The a's, f's, y's, k's all run. They gather together to create a horse or a hailstorm. They run again. Now they create a dagger, a night, a murder. Then streets, slamming doors, silence. Running and running. Never stopping.
Ismail Kadare
…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
Life is like writing with a pen. You can cross out your past but you can't erase it.
E B White
My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closest. Their selves were on their shelves.
Anne Fadiman
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 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
Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.
Jorge Luis Borges
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
In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes; and though they know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or twenty centuries for us,—some of them,—and are eager to give us a sign and unbosom themselves, it is the law of their limbo that they must not speak until spoken to; and as the enchanter has dressed them, like battalions of infantry, in coat and jacket of one cut, by the thousand and ten thousand, your chance of hitting on the right one is to be computed by the arithmetical rule of Permutation and Combination,—not a choice out of three caskets, but out of half a million caskets, all alike.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too.
Nick Hornby
Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?
Virginia Woolf
Paradise will be a kind of library
Jorge Luis Borges
In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.
Anne Fadiman
No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.
Stanisław Lem
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
Salman Rushdie
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
You're either reading a book or you're not.
Jonathan Franzen
And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun.
Nick Hornby
anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.
Virginia Woolf
The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.
Walt Whitman
I don't want anyone writing in to point out that I spend too much money on books, many of which I will never read. I know that already. I certainly intend to read all of them, more or less. My intentions are good. Anyway, it's my money. And I'll bet you do it too.
Nick Hornby
I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.
Nick Hornby
I love to lose myself in other men's minds.... Books think for me.
Charles Lamb
I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.
Virginia Woolf
In other words, it's one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of "This is me!
Nick Hornby
Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.
Edwin Percy Whipple
It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.
Anne Fadiman
I go to books and to nature as the bee goes to a flower, for a nectar that I can make into my own honey.
John Burroughs
The truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.
Gabriel Zaid
Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.
Virginia Woolf
Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.
Virginia Woolf
Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our
William Hazlitt
How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
Walter Benjamin
My books are friends that never fai
Thomas Carlyle
The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. 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
Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.
Anne Fadiman
I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them.
Anne Fadiman
What is reading but silent conversation.
Walter Savage Landor
For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.
Virginia Woolf
I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books.
Marilynne Robinson
All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been; it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
Thomas Carlyle
For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
Virginia Woolf
The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.
Virginia Woolf
In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have never been able to resist a book about books.
Anne Fadiman
Tis the good reader that makes the good book.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever read. If you are offended it is your problem, and frankly lots of things offend lots of people.I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it. To read a 600-page novel and then say that it has deeply offended you: well, you have done a lot of work to be offended.
Salman Rushdie
I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.
Barbara Kingsolver
It's a strange grief… to die of nostalgia for something you you will never live.
Alessandro Baricco
A good book should leave you....slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
William Styron
Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity
George Steiner
Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
Virginia Woolf