Books Quotes - Page 49

Perhaps that is the best way to say it: printed books are magical, and real bookshops keep that magic alive.

A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one.

We read in slow, long motions, as if drifting in space, weightless. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling gaps, mending faults. And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder... as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us--the recognition of something we never knew was there...

Alberto Manguel

A book is the only immortality

Rufus Choate

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

Who wants a library full of books you've already read?

Harlan Ellison

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

I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.

Anita Brookner

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

We rely upon the poets, the philosophers, and the playwrights to articulate what most of us can only feel, in joy or sorrow. They illuminate the thoughts for which we only grope; they give us the strength and balm we cannot find in ourselves. Whenever I feel my courage wavering, I rush to them. They give me the wisdom of acceptance, the will and resiliance to push on.

Helen Hayes

Reality doesn’t always give us the life that we desire, but we can always find what we desire between the pages of books.

Adelise M. Cullens

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

So go back to the books. They will comfort you and cheer you. If you earnestly work with them, neither sorrow nor anxiety nor distress nor suffering need trouble your mind any more, no, not evermore.

Walter Wangerin Jr.

Don't be afraid of books, even the most dissident, seemingly 'immoral' ones. Culture is a sure bet in life, whether high, low, eclectic, pop, ancient or modern. And I am convinced that reading is one of the most important tools of liberation that any human being, and a contemporary Arab woman in particular, can exploit. I am not saying it is the ONLY tool, especially with all the new alternative - more visual, interactive and hasty - ways of knowledge, learning and growth. But how could I not be convinced of literature's power, when it has been my original emancipator?

Joumana Haddad

... a book indeed sometimes debauched me from my work....

Benjamin Franklin

For centuries, no one was concerned that books weren’t girl-friendly, because no one really cared if girls read; but even so, we persisted for long enough that literature has slowly come to accommodate us. Modern boys, by contrast, are not trying to read in a culture of opposition. Nobody is telling them reading doesn’t matter, that boys don’t need to read and that actually, no prospective wife looks for literacy in a husband. Quite the opposite! Male literary culture thrives, both teachers and parents are throwing books at their sons, and the fact that the books aren’t sticking isn’t, as the nature of the complaint makes clear, because boys don’t like reading – no. The accusation is that boys don’t like reading about girls, which is a totally different matter.Because constantly, consistently, our supposedly equal society penalises boys who express an interest in anything feminine. The only time boys are discouraged from books all together is in contexts where, for whatever reason, they’ve been given the message that reading itself is girly – which is a wider extrapolation of the same problem.

Foz Meadows

You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don't say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that indiscreetly outshouts the message that the book itself must communicate directly, that you must extract from the book, however much or little it may be. Of course, this circling of the book, too, this reading around it before reading inside it, is a part of the pleasure in a new book, but like all preliminary pleasures, it has its optimal duration if you want it to serve as a thrust toward the more substantial pleasure of the consummation of the act, namely the reading of the book.

Italo Calvino

It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.

Annie Dillard

To tell you the truth, I used to consider it a disgrace to be found ignorant by other people. But now, I find that I am not ashamed of knowing less than others, and I'm less inclined to force myself to read books. In short, I have grown old and decrepit.

Sōseki Natsume

There are treasures in books that all the money in the world cannot buy, but the poorest laborer can have for nothing.

Robert G. Ingersoll

For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner,Let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying out for mercy, Let there be no surcease to his agony till he sink in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the worm that dieth not.When at last he goeth to his final punishment, Let the flames of Hell consume him forever.[attributed to the Monastery of San Pedro in Barcelona, Spain]

Nicholas A. Basbanes

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

Edward Gibbon

In a second-hand bookshop head to the back, find the old books with dust undisturbed and worn off covers for these clothe true treasures.

Rachel Hall

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

The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den.

Phillip Adams

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

There were adventure stories supplied with cloths for mopping your brow, thrillers containing pressed leaves of soothing valerian to be sniffed when the suspense became too great, and books with stout locks sealed by the Atlantean censorship authorities ("Sale permitted, reading prohibited!"). One shop sold nothing but 'half' works that broke off in the middle because their author had died while writing them; another specialised in novels whose protagonists were insects. I also saw a Wolperting shop that sold nothing but books on chess and another patronised exclusively by dwarfs with blond beards, all of whom wore eye-shades.

Walter Moers

As many as six out of ten American adults have never read a book of any kind, and the bulletins from the nation’s educational frontiers read like the casualty reports from a lost war.

Lewis H. Lapham

You're like, both like, Alexander the Great.'We can't both be Alexander.'Well sometimes I think you're two side of the same coin, and I'm the metal in between.

Orson Scott Card

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.

Mark Twain

A favorite song or tune may stay on your mind for hours. A good book will stay on your mind until you find another.

F. Haywood Glenn

If you have feelings about reading, you feel the rhythm of prose or of a poem like music. It awakens something in your soul and then of course you study, read, you grow up and you begin to understand the message and that is the first step towards understanding life.

María Kodama

Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate.

Alberto Manguel

I followed her into the library. The pale light from our chamber below dissipated in the room, but I could still make out – my heart leapt at the sight – row after row, shelf above shelf, floor to ceiling, a city of books. Speck turned to me and asked, Now, what shall we read first?

Keith Donohue

Whenever Monsieur Perdu looked at a book, he did not see it purely in terms of a story, retail price and an essential balm for the soul; he saw freedom on wings of paper.

Nina George

I often carry things to read so that I will not have to look at the people.

Charles Bukowski

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

And what do you like to do, little man?" "I like-books," James had said. While standing in the bookshop, with a parcel of books under his arm. The lady had given him a pitying look. "I read-erm-rather a lot," James went on, dreary master of the obvious. King of the obvious. Emperor of the obvious.

Cassandra Clare

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

If your friend wishes to read your 'Plutarch's Lives,' 'Shakespeare,' or 'The Federalist Papers,' tell him gently but firmly, to buy a copy. You will lend him your car or your coat - but your books are as much a part of you as your head or your heart.

Mortimer J. Adler

Can you tell me what happened?"Her lips thinned as she shook her head. "'Tis not a happy tale.""You have me reading a book about a girl who tries to kill an entire town. Anything else at this point would be a pick me up.

Jenny B. Jones

When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

As with men, it has always seemed to me that books have their own peculiar destinies. They go towards the people who are waiting for them and reach them at the right moment. They are made of living material and continue to cast light through the darkness long after the death of their authors.

Miguel Serrano

When you learn to read you will be born again...and you will never be quite so alone again.

Rumer Godden

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

I always thought the joy of reading a book is not knowing what happens next. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)

Christopher Nolan

There’s a different flavor to children’s literature you read after you grow up than there was reading it as a child. Things that were sweet as a child become bitter once you grow up.

Mizuki Nomura

Some things can be fixed. Some things are just too broken.

Susan Vaught

Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.

Austin Phelps

I'm going to find whoever is responsible for me sleeping out side with outside without pillows and kick them in the shins!-Enna

Shannon Hale

People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.

Barbara Kingsolver

Criticism demands infinitely more culture than artistic creation.

Pierre Bayard

The library would've cheered me up, most days. I loved the heavy oaken tables, the high walls stacked with books to the ceiling, the musty smell of old pages and the heavy brass fixtures that had gone dark with age and wear.

Claudia Gray

Steadily, the room shrank, till the book thief could touch the shelves within a few small steps. She ran the back of her hand along the first shelf, listening to the shuffle of her fingernails gliding across the spinal cord of each book. It sounded like an instrument, or the notes of running feet. She used both hands. She raced them. One shelf against the other. And she laughed. Her voice was sprawled out, high in her throat, and when she eventually stopped and stood in the middle of the room, she spent many minutes looking from the shelves to her fingers and back again. How many books had she touched? How many had she felt? She walked over and did it again, this time much slower, with her hand facing forward, allowing the dough of her palm to feel the small hurdle of each book. It felt like magic, like beauty, as bright lines of light shone down from a chandelier. Several times, she almost pulled a title from its place but didn't dare disturb them. They were too perfect.

Markus Zusak

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

With a book he was regardless of time.

Jane Austen

I have no particular plan in life - and that's something I rather like. Most things that people do seem to me to be rather dull and silly. In my ideal life I'd be left alone to read

Elizabeth Knox

What we have in life that we can count on is who we are and where we come from, she thought absently. For better or worse, that is what we have to sustain us in our endevors, to buttress us in our darker moments, and to remind us of our identity. Without those things, we are adrift.

Terry Brooks

I decided long ago that life's absurd. If you don't develop a sense of humor, it will drive you mad.

James Maxey

The paper landed on the table, but the news was stapled to his chest. A tattoo.

Markus Zusak

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Books Quotes - Page 49

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