Books Quotes - Page 2

What is reading but silent conversation?

Walter Savage Landor

You should read it though there is much that is skip-worthy.

Herbert Asquith

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

When you read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.

Clifton Fadiman

Properly we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.

Best-sellerism is the star system of the book world. A (best-seller) is a celebrity among books. It is a book known primarily (sometimes exclusively) for its well-knownness.

Daniel J. Boorstin

The central theme of the novel is that they were glad to see each other.

Reading after a certain (time) diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

Albert Einstein

The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.

Literature is news that stays news.

Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.

Kathleen Norris

Laws die books never.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Master books but do not let them master you. Read to live not live to read.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.

Any book which is at all important should be re-read immediately.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Do give books - religious or otherwise - for Christmas. They're never fattening seldom sinful and permanently personal.

Never lend books - nobody ever returns them the only books I have in my library are those which people have lent me.

Discretion is not the better part of biography.

Lytton Strachey

A dictionary should be descriptive not prescriptive.

Phillip Babcock Gove

Book lovers never go to bed alone.

Anonymous

A lexicographer a writer of dictionaries a harmless drudge.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.

Ernest Hemingway

All the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.

Richard de Bury

Books are the most mannerly of companions accessible at all times in all moods frankly declaring the author's mind without offense.

Amos Bronson Alcott

Everyone who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves to multiply the ways in which they exist to make their life full significant and interesting.

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the even more refined accomplishments of skipping and skimming.

If a book is worth reading at all it is worth reading more than once. Suspense is the lowest of excitants designed to take your breath away when the brain and heart crave to linger in nobler enjoyment. Suspense drags you on appreciation causes you to linger.

William Gerhardie

Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it no excess of explanation and it is full of suggestions the raw material of possible poems and histories.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing links man to man like the frequent passage from hand to hand of a good book.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten none are undeservedly remembered.

The delight of opening a new pursuit or a new course of reading imparts the vivacity and novelty of youth even to old age.

Benjamin Disraeli

The dust and silence of the upper shelf.

The fact of knowing how to read is nothing the whole point is knowing what to read.

The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy it lasts when all other pleasures fade.

Anthony Trollope

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.

Anthony Burgess

The responsibility of a dictionary is to record a language not set its style.

Phillip Babcock Gove

To finish is both a relief and a release from an extraordinarily pleasant prison.

Robert Burchfield

we're just paper on a shelf, in the end

Massive changes may have occurred in libraries in recent years, with new digital resources and services supplementing the old traditional resources and services, the dog-eared card catalogues ripped up and destroyed, workstations suddenly everywhere, but one essential aspect of “libraryness” has not changed: libraries remain places dedicated to storage. Books continue to be published in greater and greater numbers – so great in fact that there are no accurate figures as to exactly how many are published: some say one every thirty seconds, others four thousand per day, others a million per year – and somehow, whether through the off-site storage of the physical books themselves, or microfilm copying, or digital scanning, we remain obliged to keep up with or afloat in this vast deluge of paper. Even the new, high-tech rebranded libraries opened to great fanfare in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in the 1990s could not get away from this essential fact of paper hoarding: they were called “Idea Stores.” - p.56

The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thoughts were your own.

Jeanette Winterson

For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.

Gustave Flaubert

A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination.

I told him. We got a library here. Got plenty of good books, too. -Larry Brown, Dirty Work

For the rest of the afternoon, Miss Bloom smiled almost as bright as the big yellow sun shining through the front picture window. Her library was filled up with people who loved books.

Augusta Scattergood

An ancient mustiness padded the air, tinged with with an acrid scent-a trace of the war between paper and oxygen, played out in slow inexorable burn that would one day crumble this empire to dust." -page 62

Jennifer Lee Carrell

Inside the front flap of the book were handwritten names of the dozen or so people who had checked the book out before Naomi. Instead of writing her name, Naomi had a thin paper receipt with the due date printed on it. She could never possess this book the way those other people had. It was one of those uselessly nostalgic and sentimental thoughts that serve only our own romantic ideals, but I couldn't help believing it was true nonetheless. I took a pencil out from behind the register and handed it to her.

Libraries are always bigger on the inside because every book has an entire word inside of it.

But I didn't mind. I loved that everything was cataloged and ready to go and that I was technically now living and sleeping in a library.

Books on the bookshelvesAnd stacked on the floorBooks kept in basketsAnd propped by the doorBooks in neat pilesAnd in disarrayBooks tucked in closetsAnd books on displayBooks filling cranniesAnd books packed in nooksBooks massed in windowsAnd mounded in crooksLibraries beckonAnd bookstores inviteBut book-filled rooms welcomeUs back home at night!

Papa thought that any book worth reading twice was worth owning. So instead of buying desserts, we bought books.

Natalie S. Bober

She read her way around the library, hungry for journeys, adventures, laughter and passion. She took each new book to bed like a lover, savouring every chapter, going too far some nights until the letters danced like insects and she was groggy next day at work. But still she'd sneak away for lunchtime trysts, her eager fingers fumbling for the bookmark.

Cath Staincliffe

There is a sad disconnectedness that overcomes a library when its owner is gone.

Lois McMaster Bujold

when the press and problems of humanity become too much, I love to escape into books, where people are served up in digestible portions and can be pushed to one side when one is satiated.

Jane Wilson-Howarth

Morris tried to keep the books in some sort of order, but they always mixed themselves up. The tragedies needed cheering up and would visit with the comedies. The encyclopedias, weary of facts, would relax with the comic books and fictions. All in all it was an agreeable jumble.

Libraries are brothels for the mind. Which means that librarians are the madams, greeting punters, understanding their strange tastes and needs, and pimping their books.

One of the many reasons I love libraries. Everyone is lost and not wanting to be found in a library.

Millions of pages cloaked in dust and inspiration and wisdom.

You poor girl, what sort of aged, unfriendly Libraries have you met in short life? A silent Library is a sad Library ... A Library should be full of exclamations! ... A Library should be full of now-just-a-minutes and that-can't-be-rights and scientifick folk running skelter to prove somebody wrong... A Library should not shush ; it should roar !

Catherynne M. Valente

Shara was already an avid reader by then, but she had never realized until that moment what books meant, the possibility they presented: you could protect them forever, store them up like engineers store water, endless resources of time and knowledge snared in ink, tied down to paper, layered on shelves.... Moments made physical, untouchable, perfect, like preserving a dead hornet in crystal, one drop of venom forever hanging from its stinger.She felt overwhelmed. It was--she briefly thinks of herself and Vo, reading together in the library--a lot like being in love for the first time.

Robert Jackson Bennett

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