Books Quotes - Page 50

They were perfectly suited. They would speak of books the livelong day and night and bore everyone else but themselves to distraction.

Loretta Chase

Amanda took the torn page from Maniac. To her, it was the broken wing of a bird, a pet out in the rain.

Jerry Spinelli

Our clients' faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover.

Diane Setterfield

What should I get from books?” Alcide asked in French.That you are not alone — even along this broken tractor road. You need to know nothing else,” my father answered in French.

David Adams Richards

Surprise!-FitzChivalry

Robin Hobb

Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries,hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent.

Stephen King

French Louis Seymour of the West Canada Creek, who knew how to survive all alone in a treacherous wilderness, and Mr. Alfred G. Vanderbilt of New York City and Raquette Lake, who was richer than God and traveled in his very own Pullman car, and Emmie Hubbard of the Uncas Road, who painted the most beautiful pictures when she was drunk and burned them in her woodstove when she was sober, were all ten times more interesting to me than Milton's devil or Austen's boy-crazy girls or that twitchy fool of Poe's who couldn't think of any place better to bury a body than under his own damn floor.

Jennifer Donnelly

The silence. End of all poetry, all romances. Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so light in the other, thinning toward the end. Still, you consoled yourself. You were not quite at the end of the story, at that terrible flyleaf, blank like a shuttered window: there were still a few pages under your thumb, still to be sought and treasured. Oh, was it possible to read more slowly? - No. The end approached, inexorable, at the same measured pace. The last page, the last of the shining words! And there - the end of the books. The hard cover which, when you turn it, gives you only this leather stamped with old roses and shields.Then the silence comes, like the absence of sound at the end of the world. You look up. It's a room in an old house. Or perhaps it's a seat in a garden, or even a square; perhaps you've been reading outside and you suddenly see the carriages going by. Life comes back, the shadows of leaves. Someone comes to ask what you will have for dinner, or two small boys run past you, wildly shouting; or else it's merely a breeze blowing a curtain, the white unfurling into a room, brushing the papers on a desk. It is the sound of the world. But to you, the reader, it is only a silence, untenanted and desolate.

Sofia Samatar

Unlike television, reading does not swallow the senses or dictate thought. Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination. Can you remember the wonder you felt when first reading The Jungle Book or Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn? Kipling’s world within a world; Twain’s slow river, the feel of freedom and sand on the secret island, and in the depths of the cave?

Richard Louv

Books are like flypaper, memories cling to the printed pages better than anything else.

Cornelia Funke

Good books make you ask questions. Bad readers want everything answered.

Scott Westerfeld

Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. Number one, as I said: quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.

Ray Bradbury

Pleasing things: finding a large number of tales that one has not read before. Or acquiring the second volume of a tale whose first volume one has enjoyed. But often it is a disappointment.

Sei Shōnagon

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

Your goodness must have some edge to it -- else it is none.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way.

Ernest Hemingway

It is often much harder to get rid of books than to acquire them. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witnesses to a moment in our lives we will never see again. While they are still there, it is part of us.

Carlos María Domínguez

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

Books are ... companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.

Barbara W. Tuchman

Libraries are the future of reading. When the economy is down, we need to make it easier for people to buy and read books for free, not harder. It is stupid to sacrifice tomorrow’s book buyers for today’s dollars, especially when it’s obvious that the source in question doesn’t have any more dollars to give you.

Courtney Milan

People will perish, but books are immortal. (Pompeii)

Robert Harris

This is because white people need to show off the books that they have read. Just as hunters will mount the heads of their kills, white people need to let people know that they have made their way through hundreds or even thousands of books.

Christian Lander

Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.

Joan Didion

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

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

I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

Tim O'Brien

How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn't someone want to talk about it! We've started and won two atomic wars since 2022! Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are? I've heard rumors; the world is starving, but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much? I've heard the rumors about hate too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know why? I don't, that's sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes!

Ray Bradbury

The more you read, the more you want to know, and so the more questions you have.

Xinran

Every book is a great action and every great action is a book!

Martin Luther

Adventure,' then, is what might otherwise be called hardship if it were attempted in a different spirit. Turning a difficult task or a perilous journey into an adventure is largely a matter of telling yourself the right story about it, which is one thing that Lewis's child characters have learned from reading, 'the right books.

Laura Miller

What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.American novels, answered Lord Henry.

Oscar Wilde

I could almost hear the characters inside, murmuring and jostling, impatient for me to open the cover and let them out.

Jennifer Donnelly

For me the greatest joy is to be able to submerge myself for a few hours every day in a human time that otherwise would be alien to me. A lifetime is not enough.

Carlos María Domínguez

Books, like people, can't be reduced to the cost of the materials with which they were made. Books, like people, become unique and precious once you get to know them.

Yann Martel

Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

Lionel Trilling

[He] was always here to offer cups of good clear Walden Pond, or shout down the deep well of Shakespeare and listen, with satisfaction, for echoes. Here the lion and the hartebeest lay together, here the jackass became a unicorn.

Ray Bradbury

We read to understand our intuition of the world, to discover that someone a thousand miles and years away has put into words our most intimate desires and our most secret fears. Reading is a collaborative act.

Alberto Manguel

I never minded the random scribblings of other readers, found them interesting in fact. It is a truth universally acknowledged that people write the darndest things in the margins of their books.

Tara Bray Smith

A mind possessed by unmade books, unwritten lines on empty hooks.

Michael Faudet

It turned out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

Anna Quindlen

For a bookworm like Mother, a Brontë novel sister was better than a biological one.

Eileen Favorite

A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the

Victor Hugo

You only benefit from books if you can give something back to them. What I mean is, if you approach them in the spirit of a duel, so you can both wound and be wounded, so you are willing to argue, to overcome and be overcome, and grow richer by what you have learned, not only in the book, but in life, or by being able to make something of your work.

Sándor Márai

Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.

John Muir

I guess that’s the beauty of books. When they finish they don’t really finish.

Markus Zusak

‎He often envied people who hadn't read his favourite books. They had such happiness before them.

Charles Finch

But I loved the library simply because it was a library. I love libraries. I like reading, but I love libraries. Being surrounded by books makes me feel safe, the way some people need trees or mountains around them to feel secure. Not me – nature’s not what I cling to. I cling to books.

Emily Wing Smith

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

Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

Paul Theroux

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

I had always turned to books, to knowledge, to help me get through everything in my life—and,sometimes, to escape it. But grief was a journey through a forest of razor blades. I walked through everypainful inch of it—no shortcuts and no anesthesia.

Michele Bardsley

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

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

A house without books must be sad. Even sadder a house of books without people.

Manuel Rivas

Reading stimulates the imagination and a good imagination can change the world in the most splendid of ways.

Meredith Wood

A precious, mouldering pleasure 't isTo meet an antique bookIn just the dress his century wore;A privilege, I think,His venerable hand to take,And warming in our own,A passage back, or two, to makeTo times when he was young.His quaint opinions to inspect,His knowledge to unfoldOn what concerns our mutual mind,The literature of old...

Emily Dickinson

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

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Books Quotes - Page 50

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