Books Quotes - Page 18

This is overdue. Quite a bit, I'm afraid. I apologize. We moved to Topeka when I was very small, and Mother accidentally packed it up with the linens. I have traveled a long way to return it, and I know the fine must be large, but I have no money. As it is a book of fairy tales, I thought payment of a first-born child would be acceptable. I always loved the library. I'm sure she'll be happy there.

Revenge. Justice. Love. They are the three stories that all other stories are made up of. It's the trifecta.

The harder you search the more troubled you become.

Books keep and reciprocate our secrets, dreams, regrets, and hopes better than any friend in the world.

Why do people always want to put their hands on vulnerability? I sped up.

Writing is magic happening on paper

If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

A friend once told me that the real message Bram Stoker sought to convey in 'Dracula' is that a human being needs to live hundreds and hundreds of years to get all his reading done; that Count Dracula, basically nothing more than a misunderstood bookworm, was draining blood from the necks of 10,000 hapless virgins not because he was the apotheosis of pure evil but because it was the only way he could live long enough to polish off his extensive reading list. But I have no way of knowing if this is true, as I have not yet found time to read 'Dracula.

We were not meant to read stories anymore. We were too busy writing our own.

A writer reports on the universe. When he presents his credentials, the gates of heaven and hell are equally opened to him. He can hear the devil’s defense and god’s accusations. The guards at the king’s heart let him in. The writer can be anything and any one he wants. When he writes he is a god, he creates.

A good book is always on tap; it may be decanted and drunk a hundred times, and it is still there for further imbibement.

I read everyday, because reading takes me away, away to a place where nothing is impossible.

It is neither poor handling nor the weather that turns the pages of a book a fine sepia. It is the reader's imagination.

Thank God for books, for validating your feelings, and letting you know you’re not alone.

To be able to influence Tanzanian literature and African literature, and sell our books in Tanzania as well as in our continent, we need to be committed to what we do. And what we do is writing. Write as much as you can. Read as much as you can. Use the library and the internet carefully for research and talk to people, about things that matter. To make a living from writing, and make people read again in Tanzania and Africa; we must write very well, very good stories.

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow

Without reading many different books, you can never leave the port of ignorance and can never obtain the peaceful mind of knowing the truth!

There is no book so bad it does not contain something good.

Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.

But the book! The siren song of the book!

There is something wonderful about a book. We can pick it up. We can heft it. We can read it. We can set it down. We can think of what we have read. It does something for us. We can share great minds, great actions, and great undertakings in the pages of a book.

When the corpses of [Sir John] Franklin's officers and crew were later discovered, miles from their ships, the men were found to have left behind their guns but to have lugged such essentials as monogrammed silver cutlery, a backgammon board, a cigar case, a clothes brush, a tin of button polish, and a copy of "The Vicar of Wakefield." These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen.

Thy heart had gone too far in this world, and think thou to comprehend the way of the most High?

I have rooted myself into this quiet place where I don’t need much to get by. I need my visions. I need my books. I need new thoughts and lessons, from older souls, bars, whisky, libraries; different ones in different towns. I need my music. I need my songs. I need the safety of somewhere to rest my head at night, when my eyes get heavy. And I need space. Lots of space. To run, and sing, and change around in any way I please—outer or inner—and I need to love. I need the space to love ideas and thoughts; creations and people—anywhere I can find—and I need the peace of mind to understand it.

My Best Friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read.

I rely on a backbone of books and, for the most part, it's enough to keep me quiet, half-drugged with dreams of imaginary worlds.

Lift up your eyes from your books, from your past, from your hurts and look upon all people with love, because when you look into another’s eyes and see innocence, you find it in yourself.

The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes connot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog. Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality... in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad of eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

Hugh Laurie (playing Mr. Palmer) felt the line 'Don't palm all your abuses [of language upon me]' was possibly too rude. 'It's in the book,' I said. He didn't hit me.

Don Quixote could never manage without his patient servant Sancho Panza.

Sorrow's children were raised on books.

It’s such a relief to know these are universal truths for so many of us in the adoption triad. Gosh, how much easier things could have been for you, for me, and your folks, if literature like this had been around, say, five, ten years ago, when we could’ve all really used it.

Books are humanity in print.

So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.

There were two immediate results of my forced loneliness: I began to find company in books, and greater pleasure in music.

There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn't have any excuse to be stupid.

I could hardly wait for following chapters, which arrived in dribs and drabs, and I began to feel for all the world like the young T.B. Macaulay walking from London to meet the Cambridge coach bearing the next installment of Waverley novels.

I decided long ago that life's absurd. If you don't develop a sense of humor, it will drive you mad.

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

A lady sent me an email recently advising me to change my environment. I guess she read through the lines of my writing and I had adequately painted a portrait of my experiences for her to form a conclusion that melancholia and fatalistic views of my protagonist reveals the depth or layers of my own consciousness. I haven't experienced much of life at twenty five but I've noticed enough, more than most people do at my age. I won't lie that sometimes it leaves me menacingly depressed. I only represent myself. I am in no competition with anyone. I often muse that if people were half concerned about wars and crimes, corruption in high places and poverty with the heavy regard they place upon other's lives then we would have a better world. Just imagine if the average man on the road heckled politicians the way they are often inclined to insult a fat woman. I have a Ton load of bad experiences but I have not allowed them to deter me, people will think about them at some high point in my life and try to use it to besmirch whatever glory I may attain. I understand that too, they can use it for whatever barometer on their lives they see fit but as for me, I used my crash falls as stairwells to greatness. Sometimes I feel alone because I am youthful and curious about life and people judge me for it and oftentimes it leaves me feeling lonely and asocial. You see the deep thinker has to be careful, the shallow minded will take one look and paint him as madness.

Books should go where they will be most appreciated, and not sit unread, gathering dust on a forgotten shelf, don't you agree?

With slouch and swing around the ringWe trod the Fools’ Parade!We did not care: we knew we wereThe Devils’ Own Brigade:And shaven head and feet of leadMake a merry masquerade.

Found in trees. Sometimes also in old silent movie theaters, seaside zoos, magic shops, hat shops, time-travel shops, topiary gardents, cowboy boots, castle turrets, comet museums, dog pounds, mermaid ponds, dragon lairs, library stacks (the ones in the back), piles of leaves, piles of pancakes, the belly of a fiddle, the bell of a flower, or in the company of wild herds of typewriters. But mostly in trees.

How could you renew your mind, if you never read?

Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.

Quiet,” she hissed at me, her voice shockingly aggressive for such a small person. “Otherwise, I’ll shut you up myself.

I have wandered many roads that I have never traveled; touched many things that my eyes have never seen. It is through stories that life is made, and through stories that life is saved.

Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book.

If someone had asked him, “Ben, are you lonely? , ” he would have looked at that someone with real surprise. The question had never even occurred to him. He had no friends, but he had his books and his dreams...

I surround myself with books when I write, thus surrounding myself with writers... only they don't critique me and then get up for coffee.

A book,a book fullof human touches,of shirts,a bookwithout loneliness, with menand tools,a bookis victory.

To know your way round a library is to master the whole of culture, i.e. the whole world.

And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?

It's stories that inspire people to change. It's stories that make them believe things can be better.

There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction. As Police Commissioner it was my duty to deal with all kinds of squalid misery and hideous and unspeakable infamy, and I should have been worse than a coward if I had shrunk from doing what was necessary; but there would have been no use whatever in my reading novels detailing all this misery and squalor and crime, or at least in reading them as a steady thing. Now and then there is a powerful but sad story which really is interesting and which really does good; but normally the books which do good and the books which healthy people find interesting are those which are not in the least of the sugar-candy variety, but which, while portraying foulness and suffering when they must be portrayed, yet have a joyous as well as a noble side.

Never give up! And write for yourself first and foremost.

Justice is about harmony... revenge is about you making yourself feel better.

Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?" asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends," says I, "how much you used the dictionary before you read it.