Books Quotes - Page 6

A library always housed a trove of undiscovered friendships and forays, and a bookstore, a place where those temporary connections might become a constancy, must always hold a charm over any scholar’s heart.

Michelle Franklin

When he was seventy-four years old the Cretan novelist Nikos Kazantzakis began a book. He called it Report to Greco... Kazantzakis thought of himself as a soldier reporting to his commanding officer on a mortal mission—his life. ...Well, there is only one Report to Greco, but no true book... was ever anything else than a report. ... A true book is a report upon the mystery of existence... it speaks of the world, of our life in the world. Everything we have in the books on which our libraries are founded—Euclid's figures, Leonardo's notes, Newton's explanations, Cervantes' myth, Sappho's broken songs, the vast surge of Homer—everything is a report of one kind or another and the sum of all of them together is our little knowledge of our world and of ourselves. Call a book Das Kapital or The Voyage of the Beagle or Theory of Relativity or Alice in Wonderland or Moby-Dick, it is still what Kazantzakis called his book—it is still a "report" upon the "mystery of things."But if this is what a book is... then a library is an extraordinary thing. ...The existence of a library is, in itself, an assertion. ... It asserts that... all these different and dissimilar reports, these bits and pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles beyond, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies. ...The library, almost alone of the great monuments of civilization, stands taller now than it ever did before. The city... decays. The nation loses its grandeur... The university is not always certain what it is. But the library remains: a silent and enduring affirmation that the great Reports still speak, and not alone but somehow all together...

Archibald MacLeish

Librarians were like guardian angels, with graying hair and beady eyes, magnified through reading glasses, and always read to recommend new literary windows to gaze through.

Ellen Hopkins

...when I look at and study the ranks of my books - for I have put the name of each author on the binding - I feel as if I am looking at the holy graves of those who wrote them.

Pietro Candido Decembrio

Every day, librarians enforce copyright policies that we may disagree with and that, in some ways, run contrary to the values of our profession. Every day, librarians must decide between a desire to preserve the privacy of our community members and offering services our communities demand. Every day, librarians must make a choice between doing what’s easy, doing what’s right, and determining what’s right in the first place. No textbook or mission statement or policy document can relieve us of the necessity to make those decisions, nor remove the complexity of those decisions. That’s why we are librarians and why librarians are professionals, not clerks. That’s why we are stewards within the communities we serve, not servants to them. That’s why we must shape the missions and the work of our organizations and communities, and not simply accept them.

R. David Lankes

There was a grumpy librarian in the library. I could tell that he was the librarian because he seemed to be made of books. I told him that we needed information, and he got us some butterfly nets and sent us up to the top floor of the library.I wondered why we were carrying nets. Valentine didn't know.The book I wanted was pretty obvious. It was called A History of Everything.Finding it was easy. Catching it, however, was not. The moment I reached for it, the whole shelfful of books took off into the air, fluttering like pigeons, and suddenly I knew what the butterfly nets were for.I waved the net about and eventually I caught A History of Everything. As soon as I'd got it, all the rest of the books flapped back to their shelf, all except one, a little red-covered book, which fluttered over my head happily.

Neil Gaiman

Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization. Libraries really are wonderful. They’re better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.

Jo Walton

It was immediately clear that the book had been undisturbed for a very long time, perhaps even since it had been laid to rest. The librarian fetched a checked duster, and wiped away the dust, a black, thick, tenacious Victorian dust, a dust composed of smoke and fog particles accumulated before the Clean Air acts.

A.S. Byatt

She became his Ariadne, leading him through the labyrinth of books, stopping now and then to pass another one to him.

Donna Leon

Yet the experience of reading a novel has certain qualities that remind us of the traditional apprehension of mythology. It can be seen as a form of meditation. Readers have to live with a novel for days or even weeks. It projects them into another world, parallel to but apart from their ordinary lives. They know perfectly well that this fictional realm is not 'real' and yet while they are reading it becomes compelling. A powerful novel becomes part of the backdrop of our lives, long after we have laid the book aside.

Karen Armstrong

I sort of fell.""Percy! Six hundred and thirty feet?

Rick Riordan

If winter helps you curl up and more that makes it one of the best of the seasons.

Murray Pura

...the book had been written with winter nights in mind. Without a doubt, it was a book for when the birds had flown south, the wood was stacked by the fireplace, and the fields were white with snow; that is, for when one had no desire to venture out and one's friends had no desire to venture in.

Amor Towles

oh god i live in sea of shallow people ..i hope someday find who really deeper than every book i read it..

angham

The dog growled again, long and ferocious. The hair on my neck tingled.And just when I knew he would attack, a horrible scream split the air, and Darlene passed out and fell over on her side.

Carol Petrie

Rare-book people have this in common with poets: they too are born, not made.

E. Millicent Sowerby

On a small table beside his chair were other haphazardly stacked volumes by such poets as Emerson, Whitman, and Wallace Stevens, a dangerous crew to let into your head.

Dean Koontz

There was a table laid with jellies and trifles, with a party hat beside each place, and a birthday cake with seven candles on it in the center of the table. The cake had a book drawn on it, in icing. My mother, who had organized the party, told me that the lady at the bakery said that they had never put a book on a birthday cake before, and that mostly for boys it was footballs or spaceships. I was their first book.

Neil Gaiman

Wake up. Be thankful. For whatever happens on this day, you are endlessly given the chance to start again-to be alive. And all of us should wish for that.

Carew Papritz

I spent my life folded between the pages of books.

Tahereh Mafi

So How Much of a THING or THINGS is Enough? And if you have EVERYTHING, have you achieved perfect HAPPINESS?

Carew Papritz

I am lost in the world of books. So many books to read.

Lailah Gifty Akita

A great book is one, which really don’t finish when it finishes.

Aman Jassal

Books are the greatest treasure of wisdom and knowledge for mankind.

Lailah Gifty Akita

He loved books, those undemanding but faithful friends.

Victor Hugo

The Number One Rule of Working Is: DO THE BEST WORK YOU CAN. Why do anything but your best? What's the point?

Carew Papritz

Walking into a bookshop is a depressing thing. It’s not the pretentious twats, browsing books as part of their desirable lifestyle. It’s not the scrubby members of staff serving at the counter: the pseudo-hippies and fucking misfits. It’s not the stink of coffee wafting out from somewhere in the building, a concession to the cult of the coffee bean. No, it’s the books. I could ignore the other shit, decide that maybe it didn’t matter too much, that when consumerism meets culture, the result is always going to attract wankers and everything that goes with them. But the books, no, they’re what make your stomach sink and that feeling of dark syrup on the brain descend. Look around you, look at the shelves upon shelves of books – for years, the vessels of all knowledge. We’re part of the new world now, but books persist. Cheap biographies, pulp fiction; glossy covers hiding inadequate sentiments. Walk in and you’re surrounded by this shit – to every side a reminder that we don’t want stimulation anymore, we want sedation. Fight your way through the celebrity memoirs, pornographic cook books, and cheap thrills that satisfy most and you get to the second wave of vomit-inducing product: offerings for the inspired and arty. Matte poetry books, classics, the finest culture can provide packaged and wedged into trendy coverings, kidding you that you’re buying a fashion accessory, not a book. But hey, if you can stomach a trip further into the shop, you hit on the meatier stuff – history, science, economics – provided they can stick ‘pop.’ in front of it, they’ll stock it. Pop. psychology, pop. art, pop. life. It’s the new world – we don’t want serious anymore, we want nuggets of almost-useful information. Books are the past, they’re on the out. Information is digital now; bookshops, they’re somewhere between gallery and museum.

Matthew Selwyn

We could all have been killed -or worse, expelled.

J.K. Rowling

He was like the Great Santini of the Strand. Few people could take him on; he was so well-read and had a memory that could retain every detail of everything he'd ever read, as well as jokes, lyrics, arias, names of store owners he'd met on his honeymoon in Paris, names of restaurants where gangsters were gunned down in 1924. He could quote lines from books he disliked better than you could quote lines from what you claimed was your favorite book of all time.

Jeanne Darst

Why books?”Her brows rose. “I beg your pardon?”“Why are they your vice?”She set her plate down and wiped her hand on her skirts before reaching for the top volume on a stack of small, leather bound books nearby and extending it to him. “Go on.”He took it. “Now what?”“Smell it.” He tilted his head. She couldn’t help but smile. “Do it.”He lifted it to his nose. Inhaled.“Not like that,” she said. “Really give it a smell.”He raised one brow but did as he was told. “What do you smell?” Sophie asked.“Leather and ink?”She shook her head. “Happiness. That’s what books smells like. Happiness. That’s why I always wanted to have a book shop. What better life than to trade in happiness?

Sarah MacLean

I love a book which never ends in my head, even though- a thousand times, it has been read!

Mansi Tejpal

What sort of a book would you like to read next?" she asked.

Roald Dahl

It was that kind of kiss. But as with all kisses, it was not without a certain element of danger

Haruki Murakami

Because sometimes I have a need for human warmth, I answered honestly. Sometimes, if I can't feel something like the warmth of a woman's skin, I get so lonely I can't stand it.

Haruki Murakami

I could never tell what was going on inside the pretty heads of the girls that Naoko brought along, and they probably couldn't understand me, either.

Haruki Murakami

No, we weren't lovers, but in a way we had opened ourselves to each other even more deeply than lovers do. The thought caused me a good deal of grief. What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for - and to do it so unconsciously.

Haruki Murakami

One thing became crystal clear to me when I couldn't see you anymore. I realized that the only way I had been able to survive until then was having you in my life. When I lost you, the pain and loneliness really got to me.

Haruki Murakami

I loved Midori. And I had probably known as much for a while. I had just been avoiding the conclusion for a very long time.

Haruki Murakami

I still loved Naoko. Bent and twisted as that love might be, I did love her. Somewhere inside me, there was still preserved a broad, open space, untouched, for Naoko and no one else.

Haruki Murakami

I have always loved Naoko, and I still loved her. But there is a decisive finality to what exists between Midori and me.

Haruki Murakami

But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have for happiness where you find it, and not worry too much about other people. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a lifetime, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.

Haruki Murakami

I'd swallow some whiskey and listen to the waves while I thought about Naoko. It was too strange to think that she was dead and no longer part of this world. I couldn't absorb the truth of it. I couldn't believe it. I had heard the nails being driven into the lid of her coffin, but I still couldn't adjust to the fact that she had returned to nothingness.

Haruki Murakami

Waiting for your answer is one of the most painful things I have ever been through. At least let me know whether or not I hurt you

Haruki Murakami

No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow.

Haruki Murakami

I suddenly thought about my old girlfriend, the one I had first slept with in my third year of high school. Chills ran through me as I realized how badly I had treated her. I had hardly ever thought about her thoughts or feelings or the pain I had caused her. She was such a sweet and gentle thing, but at the time I had taken her sweetness for granted and later hardly gave her a second thought. What was she doing now? I wondered. And had she forgiven me?

Haruki Murakami

I thought about Kizuki. "So you finally made Naoko yours," I heard myself telling him. Oh, well, she was yours to begin with. Now maybe, she's where she belongs. But in this world, in this imperfect world of the living, I did the best I could for Naoko.

Haruki Murakami

I straightened up and looked out the plane window at the dark clouds hanging over the North Sea, thinking of what I had lost in the course of my life: times gone forever, friends who had died or disappeared, feelings I would never know again.

Haruki Murakami

I know, too, why she asked me not to forget her. Naoko herself knew, of course. She knew that my memories of her would fade. Which is precisely why she begged me never to forget her, to remember that she had existed. The thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow. Because Naoko never loved me.

Haruki Murakami

Some books you read and savor. Some, you carry close to your heart.

S.R. McKade

Once upon a time, you dragged a part of me into the world of the dead, and now Naoko has dragged another pat of me into that world.

Haruki Murakami

Everything seems pointless since you left

Haruki Murakami

Too many memories of her were crammed inside of me, and as soon as one of them found the slightest opening, the rest would force their way out in an endless stream, an unstoppable flood.

Haruki Murakami

I think of you now mare than ever. It's raining today.

Haruki Murakami

Not everybody is looking for a boyfriend with a sports car.

Haruki Murakami

I look around me sometimes and I get sick to my stomach. Why the hell don't these bastards do something? I wonder. They don't do a damn thing, and then they bitch.

Haruki Murakami

I had thought about it so often - too often, to the point where it had distorted my sense of time.

Haruki Murakami

Here I was, seeing you almost every week, and talking with you, and knowing that the only one in your heart was Kizuki. It hurt. It really hurt. And I think that's why I slept with girls I didn't know.

Haruki Murakami

You want to know why you felt that way about me even though you didn't love me.

Haruki Murakami

There was much about him that was fine and beautiful, but he could never find the confidence he needed.

Haruki Murakami

I went on loving him just the same, and I could never be interested in anyone else.

Haruki Murakami

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Books Quotes - Page 6

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