Books Quotes - Page 57

The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.

If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.

Alberto Manguel

The act of true reading is in its very essence democratic. Consider the nature of what happens when we read a book - and I mean, of course, a work of literature, not an instruction manual or a textbook - in private, unsupervised, un-spied-on, alone. It isn't like a lecture: it's like a conversation. There's a back-and-forthness about it. The book proposes, the reader questions, the book responds, the reader considers. We bring our own preconceptions and expectations, our own intellectual qualities, and our limitations, too, our own previous experiences of reading, our own temperament, our own hopes and fears, our own personality to the encounter.

Philip Pullman

All his life, Klaus had believed that if you read enough books, you could solve any problem, but now he wasn't so sure.

Lemony Snicket

There are many horrible sights in the multiverse. Somehow, though, to a soul attuned to the subtle rhythms of a library, there are few worse sights than a hole where a book ought to be.Someone had stolen a book.

Terry Pratchett

Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books.

Karl Lagerfeld

I hate books they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other you will find what is needful for you in a book.

George MacDonald

I know, you've been here a year, you think these people are normal. Well, they're not. WE'RE not. I look in the library, I call up books on my desk. Old ones, because they won't let us have anything new, but I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares. Children aren't in armies, they aren't COMMANDERS, they don't rule over forty other kids, it's more than anybody can take and not get crazy.

Orson Scott Card

The books were legends and tales, stories from all over the Realm. These she had devoured voraciously – so voraciously, in fact, that she started to become fatigued by them. It was possible to have too much of a good thing, she reflected.t“They’re all the same,” she complained to Fleet one night. “The soldier rescues the maiden and they fall in love. The fool outwits the wicked king. There are always three brothers or sisters, and it’s always the youngest who succeeds after the first two fail. Always be kind to beggars, for they always have a secret; never trust a unicorn. If you answer somebody’s riddle they always either kill themselves or have to do what you say. They’re all the same, and they’re all ridiculous! That isn’t what life is like!”tFleet had nodded sagely and puffed on his hookah. “Well, of course that’s not what life is like. Except the bit about unicorns – they’ll eat your guts as soon as look at you. those things in there” – he tapped the book she was carrying – “they’re simple stories. Real life is a story, too, only much more complicated. It’s still got a beginning, a middle, and an end. Everyone follows the same rules, you know. . . It’s just that there are more of them. Everyone has chapters and cliffhangers. Everyone has their journey to make. Some go far and wide and come back empty-handed; some don’t go anywhere and their journey makes them richest of all. Some tales have a moral and some don’t make any sense. Some will make you laugh, others make you cry. The world is a library, young Poison, and you’ll never get to read the same book twice.

Chris Wooding

When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn't control what came through it.

Nicole Krauss

Only five books tonight, Mommy," she says.No, Olivia, just one."How about four?"Two."Three."Oh, all right, three. But that's it!

Ian Falconer

A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.

Umberto Eco

Write it down, boy. If you come across a passage in your reading that you’d like to remember, write it down in your little book; then you can read it again, memorize it, and have it whenever you wish.

Keith Donohue

There was something appealing in thinking of a character with a secret life that her author knew nothing about. Slipping off while the author's back was turned, to find love in her own way. Showing up just in time to deliver the next bit of dialogue with an innocent face.

Karen Joy Fowler

Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.

Alberto Manguel

Unpacking books is a revelatory activity.

Alberto Manguel

I am a part of all I have read.

John Kieran

I hate most people. And I don’t want to, it’s an awful way to be. But the human race gives me no comfort. I find myself turning to books and films for comfort still. It’s repulsive, because one’s life consists of people, not things.

Morrissey

Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.

Alberto Manguel

The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity...

A. Edward Newton

A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall. Books perfume and give weight to a room. A bookcase is as good as a view, as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms, fogs, zephyrs. I read about a family whose apartment consists of a series of spaces so strictly planned that they are obliged to give away their books as soon as they've read them. I think they have misunderstood the way books work. Reading a book is only the first step in the relationship. After you've finished it, the book enters on its real career. It stand there as a badge, a blackmailer, a monument, a scar. It's both a flaw in the room, like a crack in the plaster, and a decoration. The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral port

Anatole Broyard

Success is no proof of virtue. In the case of a book, quick acclaim is presumptive evidence of a lack of substance and originality.

Walter Kaufmann

Have books ‘happened’ to you? Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk to you

Haruki Murakami

From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood.

Betty Smith

The public library is where place and possibility meet.

Stuart Dybek

I don't want anyone writing in to point out that I spend too much money on books, many of which I will never read. I know that already. I certainly intend to read all of them, more or less. My intentions are good. Anyway, it's my money. And I'll bet you do it too.

Nick Hornby

Nothing ever invented provides such sustenance, such infinite reward for time spent, as a good book.

David McCullough

I truly believe that if you have more friends than books, you have too many friends. Or not enough books. Probably both.

Zoë Marriott

A censor is an expert in cutting remarks. A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.

Laurence J. Peter

When I began writing The Night Bookmobile, it was a story about a woman's secret life as a reader. As I worked it also became a story about the claims that books place on their readers, the imbalance between our inner and outer lives, a cautionary tale of the seductions of the written word. It became a vision of the afterlife as a library, of heaven as a funky old camper filled with everything you've ever read. What is this heaven? What is it we desire from the hours, weeks, lifetimes we devote to books? What would you sacrifice to sit in that comfy chair with perfect light for an afternoon in eternity, reading the perfect book, forever?

Audrey Niffenegger

The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves.

Cesare Pavese

Our private tastes in books showed a hint of our secret selves.

Nova Ren Suma

It is time to browse through the precious books that have meant the most to you that you may rediscover illuminating phrases and sentences to light your pathway to the future...

Wilferd Peterson

I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.

Nick Hornby

Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes!

Ray Bradbury

When I was in my twenties and broke, I'd buy books before food. A meal will sustain you for a few hours, a good book will sustain you for life.

Gabrielle Zevin

Always buy pornographic books in hardback because they're easier to hold with one hand.

Robert Clark

I love to lose myself in other men's minds.... Books think for me.

Charles Lamb

The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me--I have no others.

Thomas Bernhard

I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.

Virginia Woolf

Before you sleep, read something that is exquisite, and worth remembering.

Erasmus

Keep good company, read good books, love good things and cultivate soul and body as faithfully as you can

Louisa May Alcott

Prometheus, thief of light, giver of light, bound by the gods, must have been a book.

Mark Z. Danielewski

In other words, it's one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of "This is me!

Nick Hornby

When was the last time you read a book? The truth now. And picture books don't count-I mean something with print in it.

William Goldman

Reading is the royal road to intellectual eminence...Truly good books are more than mines to those who can understand them. They are the breathings of the great souls of past times. Genius is not embalmed in them, but lives in them perpetually.

William Ellery Channing

This must be what an addict feels like, I think, trying to fight the pull of one last, quick read. My fingers itch toward the binding, and finally, with a sigh of regret, I just grab the book and open it, hungrily reading the story.

Jodi Picoult

In a few minutes I heard the books' voices: a low, steady, unsupressible hum. I'd heard it many times before. I've always had a finely tuned ear for a library's accumulations of echo and desire. Libraries are anything but hushed.

Martha Cooley

Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.

Annie Dillard

Cakes are like books: There are new ones you want to read and old favorites you want to reread.

Ellen Rose

Did you ever hear anyone say, 'That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me'?

Joseph Henry Jackson

I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, or how lonely the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland

Arthur Conan Doyle

For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidised flat, books are like flowers. He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicoloured rows: he watches over each of them with an old-fashioned gardener's delight, holds them like fragile objects in his thin, bloodless hands.

Stefan Zweig

[W]hat I like best is staying home and reading. Being rich is not about how many homes you own. It’s the freedom to pick up any book you want without looking at the price and wondering whether you can afford it.

John Waters

I read because one life isn't enough, and in the page of a book I can be anybody.

R. Peck

And of course I'm in the press all the time. So many books have been written about me; Into thin air, up in the air,Gone with the wind-

Rick Riordan

We are made wholeBy books, as by great spaces and the stars

Mary Carolyn Davies

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Edwin Percy Whipple

Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity... We cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access reassurance.

A.E. Newton

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Books Quotes - Page 57

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