Books Quotes - Page 39

Bloodthirsty little beasts. Never trust a duck.

Non-fiction is to theory as fiction is to experience.

A book is a wonderful present. Though it may grow worn, it will never grow old.

This is a book. It is a book I found in a box. I found the box in the attic. The box was in the attic, under the eaves. The attic was hot and still. The air was stale with dust. The dust was from old pictures and books. The dust in the air was made up of the book I found. I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it.

Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards–their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble–the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.

The more we have known of the really good things, the more insipid the thin lemonade of later literature becomes, sometimes almost to the point of making us sick. Do you know a work of literature written in the last, say, fifteen years that you think has any lasting quality? I don't. It is partly idle chatter, partly propaganda, partly self-pitying sentimentality, but there is no insight, no ideas, no clarity, no substance and almost always the language is bad and constrained. On this subject I am quite consciously a laudator temporis acti.

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working m

I appreciate a book intended to be judged by its cover. The insincere readers are often weeded out while the sincere readers remain curious.

On gray days, when it's snowing or raining, I think you should be able to call up a judge and take an oath that you'll just read a good book all day, and he'd allow you to stay home.

Inconveniently, books are all the pages in them, not just the ones you choose to read.

The power of a writer is that he is a god of sorts. He can create his own worlds and populate them with his own people, all by the powers of his imagination. It's the closest a man can come close to the gods. No wonder the most successful writers are considered immortals

I buy, collect and read books.

Perhaps that is the best way to say it: printed books are magical, and real bookshops keep that magic alive.

A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.

Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they'll wait for you forever pay attention to them and they always love you back.

At times, I have been convinced that books hold all the material of life--at least all the stuff that fits between an A and a Z.

Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.

When we're healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea.

I shake my head. "Not my kind of scene. I'd rather be home with my book boyfriend." "I'll never get what you book sluts get out of a fictional man…" He shakes his head. "Boys in books are better.

The best and most exciting kind of love is the one that's so close to the heart and so real in the mind yet, truly never exists in reality -- it keeps the heart young and the mind believing!

My Aunt Helen was my favorite person in the whole world. She was my mom’s sister. She got straight A’s when she was a teenager and she used to give me books to read. My father said that the books were a little too old for me, but I liked them so he just shrugged and let me read.

The books—the generous friends who met me without suspicion—the merciful masters who never used me ill! The only years of my life that I can look back on with something like pride... Early and late, through the long winter nights and the quiet summer days, I drank at the fountain of knowledge, and never wearied of the draught.

The act of underlining always contains an element of self-recognition.

The book smelled dusty and old but also carried a sweet tang, a hint of something inviting. She opened to the first page and started to read, pronouncing the words in a reverent whisper.

Some stories have to be written because no one would believe the absurdity of it all.

And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?

Self-censorship is more efficient than any police. You write and say not what you really think, but what you believe is acceptable. By that process we lose those revolutionary ideas that could change society for the better

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

..no matter how much one reads, the whole story can never be told.

Plants and Books are silent Friends to Mankind.The former grows silently to let you live.The later grows you silently to 'live

Everything seems pointless since you left

Oh for a book and a shady nook,Either indoors or out,with the green leaves whispering overhead,or the street cries all about.Where I may read at all my easeboth of the new and old,For a jolly good book whereon to lookis better to me than gold

Choose thy friends like thy books, few but choice

Stories, A Portal to Anywhere but Here.

What's happiness for a reader? Be pleasantly surprised by a book from which he expected nothing.

Do not read books to escape reality. Read them to understand the reality you live in.

Every night, I have to read a book, so that my mind will stop thinking about things that I stress about.

He had no money and no home; he lived entirely on the road of the racing circuit, sleeping in empty stalls, carrying with him only a saddle, his rosary, and his books....The books were the closest thing he had to furniture, and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.

It would actually constitute more than a miracle, he realised. It would take divine intervention plus luck, plus some unknown element of cosmic wizardry.

Books might be your passion but you can’t fuck a paperback.

Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep; for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter.

[A]s Agatha Swanburne once said, 'To be kept waiting is unfortunate, but to be kept waiting with nothing interesting to read is a tragedy of Greek proportions.

I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours.

If you do not understand the Golden Rule, which is the most important law in the universe, then you are in trouble. All other rules in your holy books combined — are not as valuable as the ONE Golden Rule. Take two minutes to learn the most crucial law in life. Killing another human comes with the highest penalty, regardless of how you justify it. All life is sacred.

She is never alone when she has Her Books. Books, to her, are Friends. Give her Shakespeare or Jane Austen, Meredith or Hardy, and she is Lost - lost in a world of her own. She sleeps so little that most of her nights are spent reading.

What betrayed me? Was it my heart? Or my Soul?

The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.

Reading books is a way for you to communicate with and learn from the best thinkers that are writing today and that have ever lived.

I KNEW I MUST do all as I was told, yet something burned inside me, a seed of defiance that must have derived from a long-ago ancestor. Perhaps my mind was inflamed from the books I had read and the worlds I had imagined.

If you write then you are reborn because by writing about the moment, you can relive it for a second time.

After the end of the world, there is a world. Life doesn’t stop. It changes. And it changes me.

A book is a good substitute for a man. Fiction, preferably

Sometimes surviving is all you can do

The Bible is a book that every Christian should read, listen to, or have read to him or her throughout his or her lifetime; however, in the event that God has gifted a person with the characteristic for the utter joy that envelopes some during times of, what they would describe as, “pleasure reading” (an often times rare characteristic), it is only acceptable that he or she (particularly) reads His Holy Word at least once during his or her lifetime. At least, that’s what I think.

His Highness was always confident in his statements, especially about what he viewed for the first time.

Only You Can Change Your Life. No One Can Do It For You.

Peace washed through her soul in the old store surrounded by thousands of books. This was her church and her place of worship.

Even if it was just walls and a roof with papers inside, it had bewitched him, and drawn him in, and given him everything he needed to become himself.

Every category has its snobs: music, books, movies. There are so many things a man is only pressured into liking or disliking.

Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.