Books Quotes - Page 53

In reading, friendship is restored immediately to its original purity. With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: “What did they think of us?”—“Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?”—“Did they like us?”—nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else. All such agitating thoughts expire as we enter the pure and calm friendship of reading.

Marcel Proust

We have everything we need to be happy but we aren't happy. Something is missing...It is not books you need, it's some of the things that are in books. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

Ray Bradbury

Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they area dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.

Italo Calvino

One is never alone with a book nearby, don't you agree? Every page reminds us of a day that has passed and makes us relive the emotions that filled it. Happy hours underlined in red pencil, dark ones in black...

Arturo Pérez-Reverte

I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.

Eudora Welty

Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.

Gary Shteyngart

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

Henry David Thoreau

I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed.

Umberto Eco

Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.

Milan Kundera

If you've ever read one of those articles that asks notable people to list their favorite books, you may have been impressed or daunted to see them pick Proust or Thomas Mann or James Joyce. You might even feel sheepish about the fact that you reread Pride and Prejudice or The Lord of the Rings, or The Catcher in the Rye or Gone With the Wind every couple of years with some much pleasure. Perhaps, like me, you're even a little suspicious of their claims, because we all know that the books we've loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly - or the ones we'd most like other people to think we read over and over again.

Laura Miller

She liked books more than anything else, and was, in fact, always inventing stories of beautiful things and telling them to herself.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts.

Alberto Manguel

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.

Friedrich Nietzsche

For me, reading is so much more. Books teach you how other people think, and what they're feeling, and how they change from ordinary beings to extraordinary ones. Often they are so appealing and intelligent, you'd rather spend time reading about them than doing anything else.

Jennifer Kaufman

He began to read at haphazard. He entered upon each system with a little thrill of excitement, expecting to find in each some guide by which he could rule his conduct; he felt himself like a traveller in unknown countries and as he pushed forward the enterprise fascinated him; he read emotionally, as other men read pure literature, and his heart leaped as he discovered in noble words what himself had obscurely felt.

W Somerset Maugham

The library knows that it is a temporary fix. We have a stamp for the inside front cover: BROKEN SPINE NOTED. It is like a bracelet worn by a diabetic. When you return the book with this message stamped inside, we know you're not the one responsible for this horrible thing. It was some other bastard before you. The book has a preexisting condition.

Don Borchert

I might love my e-reader, but I'd never pass up the chance to browse real books.

Nichole Chase

All good and true book-lovers practice the pleasing and improving avocation of reading in bed ... No book can be appreciated until it has been slept with and dreamed over.

Eugene Field

There are worse prisons than words.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

She never managed to find herself in these books no matter how hard she tried, exhuming traits from between the pages and donning them for an hour, a day, a week. We think in some ways, we have all done this our whole lives, searching for the book that will give us the keys to ourselves, let us into a wholly formed personality as though it were a furnished room to let. As though we could walk in and look around and say to the gray-haired landlady behind us, "We'll take it.

Eleanor Brown

In a word, literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. The things I have learned and the things I have been taught seem of ridiculously little importance compared with their "large loves and heavenly charities.

Helen Keller

A book had always been a door to another world... a world much more interesting and fantastical than reality. But she had finally discovered that life could be even more wonderful than fantasy.And that love could fill the real world with magic.

Lisa Kleypas

Some people claim that it is okay to read trashy novels because sometimes you can find something valuable in them. You can also find a crust of bread in a garbage can, if you search long enough, but there is a better way.

Jim Rohn

I enjoy books as misers enjoy treasures, because I know I can enjoy them whenever I please.

Michel de Montaigne

Epics are never written about libraries. They exist on whim it depends on if the conquering army likes to read.

Patricia A. McKillip

If nothing else, a house is a place to keep books in.

Robert Pogue Harrison

The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Ray Bradbury

In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes; and though they know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or twenty centuries for us,—some of them,—and are eager to give us a sign and unbosom themselves, it is the law of their limbo that they must not speak until spoken to; and as the enchanter has dressed them, like battalions of infantry, in coat and jacket of one cut, by the thousand and ten thousand, your chance of hitting on the right one is to be computed by the arithmetical rule of Permutation and Combination,—not a choice out of three caskets, but out of half a million caskets, all alike.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

With thought, patience, and discrimination, book passion becomes the signature of a person's character.

Nicholas A. Basbanes

I had spent the dayfriendless, lonely and sad,a stranger to myself.After drowning the dayon the sea shore,I walked backto my empty houseon the deserted street.The momentI opened the door,the book on my tableflipped its pagesand said:"Friend,Where were youfor so long?

Gulzar

A book with the genuine power to stir and comfort its readers.

Mitch Albom

To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions—there we have none.

Virginia Woolf

The shame that tormented me was all the more corrosive for having no very clear origin: I didn't know why I felt so tainted, and worthless, and wrong-only that I did, and whenever I looked up from my books I was swamped by slimy waters rushing in from all sides.

Donna Tartt

Betsy returned to her chair, took off her coat and hat, opened her book and forgot the world again.

Maud Hart Lovelace

Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.

C.S. Lewis

Life happened because I turned the pages.

Alberto Manguel

He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design.""You say this as if you envied him.""There are worse prisons than words.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.

Pat Conroy

He kissed me for a long moment, holding my shoulders, perhaps to keep me from pressing my whole body against his. Then he tried to lift my bag."My God," he said. "What happened?""I found out one may check out twenty books at a time from the school library.

Laura Whitcomb

What are books but tangible dreams? What is reading if it is not dreaming? The best books cause us to dream the rest are not worth reading.

Rikki Ducornet

A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.

Richard Flanagan

The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest.

Romain Rolland

The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.

Oliver Goldsmith

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Samuel Butler

Shelving books incorrectly is as good as stealing them. It's almost worse.

Paul Acampora

We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too.

Nick Hornby

The function of a book is to provide a reading experience.

Douglas Rushkoff

I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.

Franz Kafka

I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.

Helene Hanff

Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with books, I felt myself relax and was suddenly at peace.

Helene Hanff

There are good books which are only for adults.There are no good books which are only for children.

W.H. Auden

The world belongs to those who read.

Rick Holland

When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.

Paula Fox

Libraries are not made; they grow. Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.

Augustine Birrell

But the penciled sheets did not seem like nor smell like the library book so she had given it up, consoling herself with the vow that when she grew up, she would work hard, save money and buy every single book that she liked.

Betty Smith

-- that books were mirrors, reflective in sometimes unpredictable ways.

Wally Lamb

We were never organized readers who would see a book through to its end in any sory of logical order. We weave in and out of words like tourists on a hop-on, hop-off bus tour. Put a book down in the kitchen to go to the bathroom and you might return to find it gone, replaced by another of equal interest. We are indiscriminate.

Eleanor Brown

I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.

Helen Keller

There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one’s mind and alter one’s whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later:

George Orwell

Ordinarily my mom just sunk deeper into her corner of the couch and ignored it. She had succesfully ignored a quarter of a century of entropy and decay, had sat peacefully crunching popcorn and drinking soda while the house fell down around us. If I had to guess the number of books she read during that time, I would place the number at somewhere in the neighborhood of forty thousand.

Haven Kimmel

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Books Quotes - Page 53

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