Books Quotes - Page 14

Just as food is fuel for the body, books are fuel for the mind.

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

I feel sorry for people who say they cannot read big books.

Reviewing a book written by someone you're living with and sleeping with is, needless to say, wrong.

I'm going to find whoever is responsible for me sleeping out side with outside without pillows and kick them in the shins!-Enna

Keep search in sci-fi and many other places books, stories and many other stuff... Keep searching, don't stop and you will find it!

There is no friend like a book there is no beauty like a kind heart.

If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it's probably because at some level you find 'reality' a bit of a disappointment

To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.

A neighbor once told me he had trouble with García Márquez’s novel because he likes to drink while he reads, and 'The Autumn of the Patriarch' gave him no space in which to take a sip of his beer.

All those big words produce disgust today.

Those who spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of accumulations of books when they come across them. They will not pass a stall, a shop, or even a bedroom-shelf without reading some title, and if they find themselves in an unfamiliar library, no host need trouble himself further about their entertainment.

Books are a treasured friend, however it’s difficult to explain it to a non-reader.

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is pleasure beyond compare.

So slip on your goggles and your reading trunks, for the sun is high. Let me leave you with one more thought. In what season of the year do we find ourselves - I'm speaking for a moment in terms of the physical world - wading through things? Surf. Kelp. Books. Summer.

An English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, ‘What’s your alma mater?’ I told him, ‘Books.

To limit the press is to insult a nation to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves: such a prohibition ought to fill them with disdain.

There are people who read books, and then there are people who define their lives by the books they have read and by the books they will read. Their relationship with books is not one of gleaning information and then discarding. It is a friendship that is more akin to, if it were possible, putting an arm around the book and whispering to it, giggling and chuckling with shared knowledge, shared experiences. When you see someone grasp a book to their breast and close their eyes or hold the book to their nose and inhale the scent of the book, they are gently mad, but also they are not just a reader of books, but a lover of books.

(A point of view of a stupidy of mankind)...Hey... did you check out the book by Stephen King in 7 June published??... (I was talking to one friend if I can put him as a friend...)The teacher says "Stop with this books.."... pff I said once not twice, why to stop?

Life is wonderful and strange...and it’s also absolutely mundane and tiresome. It’s hilarious and it’s deadening. It’s a big, screwed-up morass of beauty and change and fear and all our lives we oscillate between awe and tedium. I think stories are the place to explore that inherent weirdness; that movement from the fantastic to the prosaic that is life....What interests me—and interests me totally—is how we as living human beings can balance the brief, warm, intensely complicated fingersnap of our lives against the colossal, indifferent, and desolate scales of the universe. Earth is four-and-a-half billion years old. Rocks in your backyard are moving if you could only stand still enough to watch. You get hernias because, eons ago, you used to be a fish. So how in the world are we supposed to measure our lives—which involve things like opening birthday cards, stepping on our kids’ LEGOs, and buying toilet paper at Safeway—against the absolutely incomprehensible vastness of the universe? How? We stare into the fire. We turn to friends, bartenders, lovers, priests, drug-dealers, painters, writers. Isn’t that why we seek each other out, why people go to churches and temples, why we read books? So that we can find out if life occasionally sets other people trembling, too?

For centuries, no one was concerned that books weren’t girl-friendly, because no one really cared if girls read; but even so, we persisted for long enough that literature has slowly come to accommodate us. Modern boys, by contrast, are not trying to read in a culture of opposition. Nobody is telling them reading doesn’t matter, that boys don’t need to read and that actually, no prospective wife looks for literacy in a husband. Quite the opposite! Male literary culture thrives, both teachers and parents are throwing books at their sons, and the fact that the books aren’t sticking isn’t, as the nature of the complaint makes clear, because boys don’t like reading – no. The accusation is that boys don’t like reading about girls, which is a totally different matter.Because constantly, consistently, our supposedly equal society penalises boys who express an interest in anything feminine. The only time boys are discouraged from books all together is in contexts where, for whatever reason, they’ve been given the message that reading itself is girly – which is a wider extrapolation of the same problem.

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

Altogether, if I had to pick one place to hang out anywhere, from New York to Cape Town and Australia to Hong Kong, a bookstore would be it.

I think the reason why I don't read so much, is because as I have observed, whole books all boil down to a drop of essence. You can read a book full of ten thousand words and at the end, sum it up in one sentence; I am more for the one sentence. I am more for the essence. It's like how you need a truckload of roses to extract one drop of rose oil; I don't want to bother with the truckload of roses because I would rather walk away with the drop of rose oil. So in my mind, I have written two hundred books. Why? Because I have with me two hundred vials with one drop of essence in each!

Better to keep it in the old heads, where no one can see it or suspect it. We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law. Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli, or Christ, it's here. And the hour's late. And the war's begun. And we are out here, and the city is there, all wrapped up in its own coat of a thousand colors... All we want to do is keep the knowledge we think we will need intact and safe. We're not out to incite or anger anyone yet. For if we are destroyed, the knowledge is dead, perhaps for good... Right now we have a horrible job; we're waiting for the war to begin and, as quickly, end. It's not pleasant, but then we're not in control, we're the odd minority crying in the wilderness. When the war's over, perhaps we can be of some use in the world.

The complexities of adult life get in the way of the truth.

That which others hear or read of, I felt and practised myself; they get their knowledge by books, I mine by melancholizing.

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice... and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.

If you are brave, you will open the book and read it.

If time heals all wounds, and a book can hold a person's entire life, then you can speed up the process with a pulp time warp.

Evidently, I'd suffered an epiphany: the subconscious realization that when it comes to coolness, nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book.

I have travel to sacred places through the pages of books.

People who don't read fiction are scared of what's inside their own heads.

If the most High grant thee to live, thou shall see after the third trumpet that the sun shall suddenly shine again in the night, and the moon thrice in the day:

By speech first, but far more by writing, man has been able to put something of himself beyond death. In tradition and in books an integral part of the individual persists, for it can influence the minds and actions of other people in different places and at different times: a row of black marks on a page can move a man to tears, though the bones of him that wrote it are long ago crumbled to dust. In truth, the whole progress of civilization is based upon this power.

If you are writing fiction, think like a god. Release all the power of your imagination; create worlds and destroy them at your will, create as many miracles as your story needs

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.

Books were a dependable pleasure. I read more then than I ever was able to read again until now when I am too old to work much and am mostly alone.

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.

Vanity's contribution to Fiction in general was an abundance of cheap labour and the occasional blockbuster, which was accepted into Fiction with an apologetic 'gosh, don't know how that happened'.

What I saw next stopped me dead in my tracks. Books. Not just one or two dozen, but hundreds of them. In crates. In piles on the floor. In bookcases that stretched from floor to ceiling and lined the entire room. I turned around and around in a slow circle, feeling as if I'd just stumbled into Ali Baba's cave. I was breathless, close to tears, and positively dizzy with greed.

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that.

I didn't come from a success lineage but I am so glad that my earthly lineage is not my final story because when I gave my life to Jesus twelve years back, God interrupted my story.

The most exciting part of writing a novel is when the characters take control of the story

If I couldn't sleep, I could read.

I loved books, even as I loved the similar way opium had of transporting a mind elsewhere

What would you do if you were a goddess, Cotswold?"Her maid, who had been pulling Eleanor's covers up the bed, stilled her motion. Her expression drew together, as though she were considering it."I suppose I would find the most handsome man in the world and make him my... my..." She waved her hand to indicate the word she shouldn't be saying."Cotswold!" Eleanor exclaimed, delightedly. "That sounds scandalous!""Wouldn't it be what you did?"Eleanor shrugged. "I was thinking more along the lines of being able to have and read all the books I wanted to."Cotswold returned to her task. "Choosing a book over a handsome man." She shook her head, mock ruefully. "And here you were wanting to do something scandalous."The honest part was, it would be scandalous.If it were possible to not be a duke's daughter and be someone else, she would choose to work in a bookshop. Not one that sold the material it seemed Lord Alexander wanted to purchase; one with fairy tales and mythological books and any kind of literature where it was just as likely a dragon would drag you off somewhere as a viscount."I just might," Eleanor said in a defiant tone, making her maid snort.

An extrovert looks at a stack of books and sees a stack of papers, while an introvert looks at the same stack and sees a soothing source of escape.

I walked around the library looking for books. I pulled them off the shelves, one by one. But they were all tricks. They were very dull. There were pages and pages of words that didn't say anything. Or if they did say something they took too long to say it and by the time they said it you already were too tired to have it matter at all. I tried book after book. Surely, out of all those books, there was one.

There was going to be a spot for me in this joint, the earth, after all. It was never going to be a great match for someone as bright and strange as me, but books were going to make it survivable.

The boy was a model pupil, forgettable and easily forgotten, and he sent much of his spare time in the back of the English class where there were shelves of old paperbacks, and in the school library, a large room filled with books and old armchairs, where he read stories as enthusiastically as some children ate.

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

All good things are powerful stimulants to life, even a good book written against life.

I read nonfiction."She reared back as if offended.

I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages... and fell into it as into a pool during dry season.

I'm the first to admit that I don't write right. Now, relax and enjoy the show! The sideshow, that is.

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation... A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.

Reading books would be boring if you lack imagination...

I suppose if I had to give a one-word answer to the question of why I read, that word would be pleasure. The kind of pleasure you can get from reading is like no other in the world.