Books Quotes - Page 51

Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.

Then he got more books. He saved all the books.

There was nothing particularly special about her, except that she was good with numbers, and very good at lying, and she made her home in between the pages of books.

Maggie Stiefvater

Many a man lives a burden to the Earth, but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.

John Milton

The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder.

Elizabeth McCracken

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

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.

Jeffrey Eugenides

The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.

G.K. Chesterton

Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was, in a manner, a literary ghoul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature.

Washington Irving

In the candle's flickering light, the library's thousands of books emerged from the shadows, and for a moment Nicholas could not help admiring them again. During free time he had almost never looked up from the pages he was reading, but now he saw the books anew, from without rather than from within, and was reminded of how beautiful they were simply as objects. The geometrical wonder of them all, each book on its own and all the books together, row upon row, the infinite patterns and possibilities they presented. They were truly lovely.

Trenton Lee Stewart

Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.

Lawrence Clark Powell

Because to the poor, books are not diversions. Book are siege weapons.

Joe Queenan

The library had become her solace. Her refuge.Books did not question or judge. They made safe companions.

Inglath Cooper

What is written beneath this heavy handsome book cover will count, so sayeth this cover…

Anne Rice

Each of those churches shows certain books, which they call revelation, or the Word of God. The Jews say that their Word of God was given by God to Moses face to face; the Christians say, that their Word of God came by divine inspiration; and the Turks say, that their Word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from heaven. Each of those churches accuses the other of unbelief; and, for my own part, I disbelieve them all.

Thomas Paine

On getting lost in a book. Set adriftA life unknownConnections formLove is sewn

Patty Wiseman

The worst of it is that I am perpetually being punished for nothing; this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me. It's perfectly awful to let the mind grind itself away between the upper and nether millstones of regret and remorse without respite; with books my life would be livable -- any life.

Oscar Wilde

Give up your thirst for books, so that you do not die a grouch.

Marcus Aurelius

In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world.

Alberto Manguel

Personally, I believe "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I'd rather use film cameras and vinyl records and cathode ray tubes than any sort of the digital technology available. Look around! The streets are full of people who would rather have their eyes on their cell phones than on the world around them! Scientists are researching technology to erase specific memories from people! Our thrown-away digital technology is showing up overseas in huge piles of toxic heavy metals and plastic! And yet there are still people who keep wanting technology and the future to keep going. They dream of flying cars, or humanoid robots, of populated cities on Mars. But do we really NEED this stuff? Maybe before we try to keep turning our world into an episode of The Jetsons, we should focus more on the problems that are surprisingly being overlooked now more than ever. Before we design another stupid cell phone or build a flying car, let's put a stop to racism, to sexism, to homophobia, to war. Let's stop buying all our "American" products from sweat shops overseas and let's end poverty in third-world countries. Let's let film photography never go obsolete, let's let print books continue to be printed. Let's stop domestic violence and child abuse and prostitution and this world's heavy reliance on prescription drugs. Let's stop terrorism, let's stop animal cruelty, , let's stop overpopulation and urbanization, let's stop the manufacture of nuclear weapons......I mean come on, we have all these problems to solve, but digital tech enthusiasts are more concerned that we don't have flying cars or robotic maids yet? That's pathetic.

Rebecca McNutt

As readers, we have gone from learning a precious craft whose secret was held by a jealous few, to taking for granted a skin that has become subordinate to principles of mindless financial profit or mechanical efficiency, a skill for which governments care almost nothing.

Alberto Manguel

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Henry David Thoreau

I'm an open book. But some of the pages are stuck together.

Kelli Jae Baeli

But preserve your mistrust of the page, for a book is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears.

Sofia Samatar

Books are meat and medicineand flame and flight and flowersteel, stitch, cloud and clout,and drumbeats on the air.

Gwendolyn Brooks

And she is the readerwho browses the shelfand looks for new worldsbut finds herself.

Laura Purdie Salas

Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?

Laura Miller

Madam Pince, our librarian, tells me that it is 'pawed about, dribbled on, and generally maltreated' nearly everyday - a high compliment for any book.

J.K. Rowling

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

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We'll always need printed books that don't mutate the way digital books do; we'll always need places to display books, auditoriums for book talks, circles for story time; we'll always need brick-and-mortar libraries.

Marilyn Johnson

Before I had a chance to feel too sorry for myself, I turned toward the front of the cabin and found the bookcases carved right into the wall. Hundreds of leather-bound volumes rested in dim alcoves. I had no idea what stories or information they held. It didn’t matter. I wanted to absorb anything they had to say.

Jodi Meadows

Poor Christopher-John had fallen into the hands of Miss. Daisy Crocker. I greatly sympathized him, but as in everything else, Christopher John tried to see the bright side in having to face such a shrew every morning. "Maybe she done changed," he said hopefully on the first day of school. However, when classes were over he was noticeably quiet. Well?" I asked him. He shrugged dejectedly and admitted, "She still the same.

Mildred D. Taylor

In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be.

Marcel Proust

It is one of the strongest bonds, I think, that can spring up between people: sharing a passion for certain books and their authors.

Alice Steinbach

This would be...a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power.

Chuck Palahniuk

One had a knife. But I had a staff and was trained to use it.

Robin Hobb

Librarians are your very best friend. And don't ever think otherwise.

Rett MacPherson

I believe my life has a value, and i don't want to waste it thinking about clothing.I don't want to think about what i will wear in the morning. Truly, can you imagine anything more boring than fashion?

Michael Crichton

Note to self: don’t throw things at girls.

Emlyn Chand

…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

I don't understand your book. Isn't every book a book of words?

Kristin Cashore

Life is like writing with a pen. You can cross out your past but you can't erase it.

E B White

Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes–characters even–caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you

Diane Setterfield

I recognized it instantly. It was a made-up story, a fantasy, the tale of four kids who went through a magic wardrobe and found themselves in a strange new world. I'd read it more times than I could remember, and although I sneered at the thought of a magical land with friendly, talking animals, there were times when I wished, in my most secret moments, that I could find a hidden door that would take us allout of this place.

Julie Kagawa

The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know — the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be…. The thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever.

Thomas Wolfe

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks? Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet." (A Teller of Tales)

W.B. Yeats

Have you never picked up a book you've read before, and found it speaks to you in a new way?

Django Wexler

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

Olly: jesus. is there a girl on this planet who doesn't love mr.darcyMadeline: All girls love Mr. Darcy?Olly: are you kidding? even my sister loves darcy and she doesn't love anybodyMadeline: She must love somebody. I'm sure she loves youOlly: what's so great about darcy?Madeline: That's not a serious questionOlly: he's a snobMadeline: But he overcomes it and eventually realizes that character matters more than class! He's a man open to learning life's lessons! Also, he's completely gorgeous and noble and brooding and poetic. Did I mention gorgeous? Also, he loves Elizabeth beyond all reason.

Nicola Yoon

The venerable dead are waiting in my library to entertain me and relieve me from the nonsense of surviving mortals.

Samuel Davies

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

More and more I lived in books, they were my comfort, refuge, addiction, compensation for the humiliations that attended contact with the world outside.

Lorna Sage

Reading a novel, War and Peace for example, is no Catnap. Because a novel is so long, reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody knows or cares about.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.

Elizabeth von Arnim

Take what interests and knowledge you can from books, but do not let them replace words and thoughts of your own.

Pai Kit Fai

I shake my head. "Not my kind of scene. I'd rather be home with my book boyfriend." "I'll never get what you book sluts get out of a fictional man…" He shakes his head. "Boys in books are better.

Danielle Torella

We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.

Vladimir Nabokov

In fiction, beauty was run-of-the-mill.

Eileen Favorite

Authors: The only people you thank for leaving you emotionally devastated.

Love The Stacks Bookstore

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Books Quotes - Page 51

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