Books Quotes - Page 22

The night I sat down to read Dostoievski for the first time was a most important event in my life, even more important than my first love. It was the first deliberate, conscious act which had significance for me; it changed the whole face of the world. Whether it is true that the clock stopped that moment when I looked up after the first deep gulp I don't know any more. But the world stopped dead for a moment, that I know. It was my first glimpse into the soul of a man, or shall I say simply that Dostoievski was the first man to reveal his soul to me?"Henry Miller

Later that night though, as I stayed awake into the early hours of morning devouring the second novel in a series, I understood what it meant to befriend a book. The books knew me, far better than I knew them; they knew my fears, my doubts, my dreams. They gave words to feelings I did not even realize I experienced. They listened. They consoled. They kept me company. The books gave me a life outside of my own.

Kelseyleigh Reber

To leap over the wall of self, to look through another’s eyes--this is valuable experience, which literature offers.

X.J. Kennedy

It was pretty silly quoting poetry around free and easy like that. It was the act of a silly damn snob. Give man a few lines of verse and he thinks he's the Lord of all Creation. You think you can walk on water with all your books. Well, the world can get by just fine without them.

Ray Bradbury

No matter how revolutionary people were, he said, they could not live without books. Without books, we would not understand the world; without books, we could not develop; without books, nature could not serve humanity.

Xinran

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently

Jeanette Winterson

Publishers are businesses and I don’t blame them for that. If they didn’t make money by publishing books, there wouldn’t be any books.

Johnny Rich

A good book is not the same as a successful one.

Johnny Rich

A novel must be judged on its merits, not on how hard the journey was to write it.

Johnny Rich

Literature is life.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Technically, you cannot really own a book you bought; you can only own the sheets of paper your copy is printed on; unless, of course, you are the book’s publisher.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Books have that strange quality, that being of the frailest and tenderest matter, they outlast brass, iron and marble.

William Drummond

Words are the only things that last for ever.

William Hazlitt

Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I at the other end of the Age of the Written Word am impressed by the sturdiness and reliability of words on paper... The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies.

Jonathan Franzen

And did the distress I was feeling derive from some internal sickness of the soul, or was it imposed on me by the sickness of society? That someone besides me had suffered from these ambiguities and had seen light on their far side... that I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf—felt akin to an instance of religious grace.

Jonathan Franzen

Like some wondrous birds out of fairy tales, books sang their songs to me and spoke to me as though communing with one languishing in prison; they sang of the variety and richness of life, of man’s audacity in his strivings towards goodness and beauty.

Maxim Gorky

Our existence has always and everywhere been tragic, but man has converted these numberless tragedies into works of art. I know of nothing more astonishing or more wonderful than this transformation.

Maxim Gorky

A picture is worth a thousand words, but the way I paint I'm going to need to contact an editor. Even if I were to abstractly paint the phrase "I love you," it would be the visual equivalent of Joyce's Ulysses.-James Lee Schmidt and Jarod Kintz

James Lee Schmidt

A vision of the little house in Soho flickered across his mind’s eye, his mother at a desk, writing in her journal, with hazy sunlight streaming through the morning windows. The woman inhabited a world he had once thought his own – a world of publishers and reliable suppliers. A London that was confident and competent amid its grey, puddle-strewn streets.

Sara Sheridan

Reading is an intimate act, perhaps more intimate than any other human act. I say that because of the prolonged (or intense) exposure of one mind to another.

Harold Brodkey

I want all the books on the she

E.L. Konigsburg

Stories shape the world.

Lance Conrad

I can imagine her memories of the novel, or, more likely, of who she was and how she felt when reading it.

Rabih Alameddine

But now books and men had gone their separate ways. Who has the patience for a book? Only a book.

John M. Keller

The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge.

Thomas C. Foster

In literature, the reader standing at the threshold of the end of a book harbors no illusion that the end has not come—he or she can see where it finishes, the abyss the other side of the last chunk of text. Which means that the writer is never in danger of ending too soon—or if he does the reader has been so forewarned. This is the advantage a book has over a film—it is the brain that marshals forward the text and controls the precise moment of conclusion of the book, as the density of the pages thins. A film can end without you if you’ve fallen asleep or, because you can’t wait any longer to use the bathroom, slipped out of the darkness of the theatre salon, and missed it. There will never be a form more perfect than the book, which always moves at your pace, that sits waiting for you exactly where you’ve left it and never goes on without you.

John M. Keller

Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The core – and perhaps unexpected – thing that books do for us is simplify. It sounds odd, because we think of literature as sophisticated. But there are powerful ways in which books organise, and clarify our concerns – and in this sense simplify.

Alain de Botton

Literature recounts history, explores knowledge, narrates universal themes of human existence, actives human conscience, enhances understanding of human motives, and explicates the nuances of human behavior.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Her seven-year-old self had decided that stealing books was morally bankrupt, but since the books hadn’t actually left the library—they’d merely been relocated—it wasn’t technically stealing. Echo looked around at her sea of tomes, and a single word came to mind: Tsundoku. It was the Japanese word for letting books pile up without reading them all.

Melissa Grey

There is much to discover that's not on the back cover!

E.A. Bucchianeri

But even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight — matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows.

Leon Wieseltier

When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.

Julian Barnes

Quote from “FUTURE GONE”:“…I set the house on fire. It’s dark outside. The fire tears down the darkness. I turn my back to the place and leave, not knowing where. And suddenly I understand…All dreams are dead now”.

Alexandar Tomov

Time…Once it’s gone, it belongs to the past.We do not hold on to the now, andWe do not treasure the future…We keep receiving this present, but we never open and cherish it until it is too late.Until it comes no more.

Michelle Horst

The novel was set in an unspecified near future, because setting a novel in the present in a time of unprecedented technological and social dislocation seemed to me shortsighted.... To write a book set in the present, circa 2013, is to write about the distant past.

Gary Shteyngart

Books’ll be back,” Esther-in-Unalaq predicts. “Wait till the power grids start failing in the 2030s and the datavats get erased. It’s not far away. The future looks a lot like the past.

David Mitchell

I guess if there’s one thing I can say about the 21st century, it’s that the 21st century is all flash and no substance… everything is digital, nothing but files of invisible electronic data on computers and mindless zombies on their cellular phones… it’s sad how because of the digital age, society is ultimately doomed. Nothing in the digital age is real anymore, and you know, they say celluloid film and ray tube televisions and maybe even paper might become obsolete in this century? …What’s most annoying is that nobody cares, they’ve just learned to accept the digital age and get addicted to it… none of them are ever going to step up and say to the world, “you’re all a bunch of sheep!” and even if they did say anything, I doubt anyone would listen… they’re all too obsessed and attached to their cellular phones and overly big televisions and whatever other moronic things they’ve got these days… it almost makes me want an apocalypse to happen, to erase digital technology and force the world to start over again.

Rebecca McNutt

I'll make a book on learning how to be a complete moron someday, and I'm sure no one will buy it, because everyone will have mastered that already by the time I gather enough moronism to process it into digestible upgrade instructions for your average village cyborg-idiot.

Will Advise

She pulls me further down. More trapped souls reach out to us, dressed in clothes from decades past. The girl ignores them as we descend along the timeline – decade by decade – towards the birth of the island.

Julie Koh

Never forget,' says Sugar Daddy, 'we are a nation built on sugar. It is our history and it is the source of our prosperity, now and in the future.'This is true. Our entire nation sits on reclaimed land made from sugar. Ours is an island that rose out of the sea, built on a hard core of toffee.

Julie Koh

Your thoughts define the boundaries of your life. Think big.

Kulpreet Yadav

This book began with the assertion that Margaret Fuller's life was her most remarkable creation. It is just possible, however, that her most wonderful creations may still lie in the future. Fuller's most precious gift to us may reside in the ideas and the works, still yet to be imagined, of women and men who follow her example. We may decide that, despite all that Margaret Fuller endured and suffered in order to become exceptional, her life, or rather her lives, well deserve imitating.

John Matteson

I place my fingers upon these keys typing 2,000 dreams per minute and naked of spirit dance forth my cosmic vortex upon this crucifix called language.

Aberjhani

I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don’t. We never know. We just make stuff up.

Neil Gaiman

Creativity doesn’t come from glancing quickly at your Twitter feed while in line at Starbucks. It comes from deep thought. It comes from voraciously reading books—long books that require focused attention. It comes from meaningful discourse with other intellectually curious people. It comes from listening and asking good questions.

Joshua Rogers

Writers are not just writers, they are creators of worlds, sculptors of the mind, they are architects of language.

Jamie L. Harding

The show must go on, and so must The Book.

E.A. Bucchianeri

We spend our lives waiting for our book and it never comes.

Jorge Luis Borges

I love the longueurs of a book even if they seem pointless because you can get a peek into the author’s mind, a glimpse of their creative soul.

E.A. Bucchianeri

To imagine is to spark beauty in our thoughts.

Emilyann Girdner

When I write sometimes I strike gold, sometimes I labor in vain and keep producing rubbish

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Don't believe in everything that is written. Not everything that is written is true

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Writing is magic happening on paper

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Every book is worth reading. If it cannot make you wiser it will make you a critic

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Today almost everybody is a writer, the enormous publish button on blogs and websites begs you everywhere to click on it! And bam you are a writer. To hell with agents and publishing houses and rejection letters. Immortality for you is on the click of a mouth! We are advancing at the speed of light! You can become an author at 140 characters. To hell with long winding sentences and long hours of scratching the head, the immortals of today instantly get a "like" and they instantly enter the pantheon! They seat side by side Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, St Paul, Buddha, Martin Luther, Rousseau, Bangambiki…

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Writing is self-pleasure

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Writing is all about self-expression, we want to speak up, to get it off our chest. Whether we make an impact or not that is not for us to decide

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Previous 1 … 20 21 22 23 24 … 84 Next

Books Quotes - Page 22

Related Topics