Books Quotes - Page 57

STAY THE COURSE BY FORCE!

It looked like the sort of book described in library catalogues as 'slightly foxed', although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.

An hour spent reading is one stolen from paradise.

My library is an archive of longings.

When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.

In conversation we are sustained by the wisdom of those who have gone before us. We are also empowered to discern how we will face the challenges of both the present and the future. Reading is essential to this conversational way of life, as we often cannot literally converse with our forbears or with those who are following similar vocations in other places. We read as a way of listening to the wisdom of others. The conversation continues as we reply to this wisdom both internally and externally. Internally, we reply as we grapple to make sense of this wisdom in our own context. Externally, we reply to our reading as we discuss it with our church or work community.

Before she came ill, David's mother would often tell him that stories were alive. They weren't alive in the way that people were alive, or even dogs or cats. (...) Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by torch light beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world. (...) They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read, David's mother would whisper. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.

Publishers are businesses and I don’t blame them for that. If they didn’t make money by publishing books, there wouldn’t be any books.

The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.

I neither oblige the belief of other person, nor overhastily subscribe mine own. Nor have I stood with others computing or collating years and chronologies, lest I should be vainly curious about the time and circumstance of things, whereof the substance is so much in doubt. By this time, like one who had set out on his way by night, and travelled through a region of smooth or idle dreams, our history now arrives on the confines, where daylight and truth meet us with a clear dawn, representing to our view, though at a far distance, true colours and shapes.

Nobody steals books but your friends.

So many books, so little time.

Reading is of course dry work, and further refreshment was called for and consumed.

A man who looks like Frodo just spent $150 on erotica books and asked for my phone number. I considered giving him yours just to spite you.

Whenever Monsieur Perdu looked at a book, he did not see it purely in terms of a story, retail price and an essential balm for the soul; he saw freedom on wings of paper.

A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.

Just handle the books gently and you’ll get along fine.

I have lived in worlds beyond counting and countries as strange and wonderful as the dance of dust in sunbeams, because I have lived in books.

We told each other what movies we were currently watching and what books we were reading.

When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book.

She took a deep breath, "Last chance. Are you in need of rescuing?" His expression turned very strange, almost as if she'd struck him, "Yes," he said finally.

If you only read books, how will you read the scripture inside you?

Yet if women are so flighty, fickle, changeable, susceptible, and inconstant (as some clerks would have us believe), why is it that their suitors have to resort to such trickery to have their way with them? And why don't women quickly succumb to them, without the need for all this skill and ingenuity in conquering them? For there is no need to go to war for a castle that is already captured.

If you can't write a book, write a chapter. If you can't do that, write a page, a sentence or a word. For it is from a single word that books are made.

Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say.Of course those who write short books have even less to say.

I put the books I was returning on the appropriate desk, and I began looking at the shelves of new arrivals. Most of them were some permutation on self-help. Going by how popular these books were and how often they were checked out, everyone in Bon Temps should have become perfect by now.

Before the first before and after the last after, there is night waiting.

Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.

Surely it is better, thought Domenica, that forty-five should buy the book and actually read it, than should many thousands, indeed millions, buy it and put it on their shelves, like...Professor Hawking's Brief History of Time. That was a book that had been bought by millions, but had been demonstrated to have been read by only a minute proportion of those who had acquired it. For do we not all have a copy of that on our shelves, and who amongst us can claim to have read beyond the first page, in spite of the pellucid prose of its author and his evident desire to share with us his knowledge of...of whatever it is that the book is about?

If rewriting equals rereading, we must logically conclude that writing is reading. If this is indeed the case, how could we possibly write under a ban on reading? The only way left is mouth-to-mouth – poets and storytellers recite their pieces and before we can commit them to memory, everything vanishes into thin air.

Instead, we'd do what we always did, the only thing we'd ever been dependably stellar at: we'd read.

We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.

I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books.

To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one's life becomes very small.

Every time you enter a library you might say to yourself, "The world is quiet here," as a sort of pledge proclaiming reading to be the greater good.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

Paul, Paul, this is the claim you never made, the fervor you never showed. You were so cool and light, so elusive, and I never felt you encircling me and claiming possession. Rango is saying all the words I wanted to hear you say. You never came close to me, even while taking me. You took me as men take foreign women in distant countries whose language they cannot speak. You took me in silence and strangeness.

If negative emotions have gain access into your heart, it is because you have given it attention. If memories of pain and hurt dominates your heart, it is because you gave them attention. How can a memory hurt you when it has only happened? It can only hurt you when you give it attention.

That's what this country needs -- more books!

Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is used and nothing is lost. Because it's something to do to pass the time until she is old enough to experience the things she writes about.

It gives the war a whole new dimension, you know, hearing from someone right there in the thick of it. They really connected with it.’‘Maybe it reminds them of school,’ she suggests. ‘Didn’t someone describe the trenches as ninety-nine per cent boredom and one per cent terror?’‘I don’t know about boredom. God, the chaos of it, the brutality. And it’s so vivid. I’d definitely be interested in reading his poetry, if only to see how he can go from describing, you know, people getting their guts blown out, to writing about love.’‘Maybe it’s not that much of a leap,’ she says.

A bestseller is a book written by a rich person of Indian roots staying in Europe for more than a decade..

He sat there studiously bent over his work (Bill saw him), which lay in a slant of crisp white winterlight, his face sober and absorbed, knowing that to be a librarian was to come as close as any human being can to sitting in the peak-seat of eternity’s engine.

The great lie that science has given us is that reality is material.

If I have nothing but life and books, I have everything.

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books.

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.

And Sometimes I Feel as if I'm Only a Doorman Awaiting the Arrival of her Royal Majesty.

Monsters are real and ghosts are real too they live inside us and sometimes they win.

Write the ending first and then you'll know before the opening sentence that it's going to be a good book.

Too many books. Too few centuries.

Reading is like diving into an ocean of an alternate world, away from your real world, where in spite of going though the pain and pleasure of the characters, you remain a witness, unscathed.

He wasn't an alchemist, or a hero. He was a librarian, and a dreamer. He was a reader, and the unsung expert on a long-lost city no one cared a thing about.

Clearly, this was another thing I needed to add to the: ‘repetitive cycle of things that were constantly happening in my life’ list, which currently contained fainting and my ability to find trouble.

What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier.

It is when we are faced with death that we turn most bookish.

Don't look at me like that," said Ruza."Like what?""Like I'm a beautiful book you're about to open and plunder with your greedy mad eyes.

How do you explain to a nonreader that books aren't just things but treasured friends? Companions?

And I don't care what age you are, kissing in the rain is the best.