Books Quotes - Page 70

Your thoughts define the boundaries of your life. Think big.

A delight to read is a great treasure.

Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.

I kiss her. I kiss her and kiss her. I try not to bite her lip. She tastes like vodkahoney.

Reading to me has always been like having a conversation with people who wouldn’t ask me any personal questions. Instead, they open up their own hearts and tell their secrets to me.

But what struck me was the book-madness of the place--books lay scattered across the unmade bed and the top of a battered-looking desk, books stood in knee-high piles on the floor, books were crammed sideways and right side up in a narrow bookcase that rose higher than my head and leaned dangerously from the wall, books sat in stacks on top of a dingy dresser. The closet door was propped open by a pile of books, and from beneath the bed a book stuck out beside the toe of a maroon slipper.

Where did the stereotypical image of the reclusive author in a bathrobe and slippers, indulging in vices and spending hours before a typewriter, even come from? I don't know about you, but most writers don't have the luxury of doing any of this. Otherwise we'd have no life experience and nothing to write about, anyway.

Were all mad here

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.

Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time.

I write to get ideas out of my head

Writers are not just writers, they are creators of worlds, sculptors of the mind, they are architects of language.

Of all things, I liked books best.

Radical Muslims fly planes into buildings. Radical Christians kill abortion doctors. Radical Atheists write books.

If I save my insight, I don’t attend to weakness of eyesight.

Some people claim that it is okay to read trashy novels because sometimes you can find something valuable in them. You can also find a crust of bread in a garbage can, if you search long enough, but there is a better way.

Don't mark up the Library's copy, you fool! Librarians are Unprankable. They'll track you down! They have skills!

So let us praise the distinctive pleasures of re-reading: that particular shiver of anticipation as you sink into a beloved, familiar text; the surprise and wonder when a book that had told one tale now turns and tells another; the thrill when a book long closed reveals a new door with which to enter. In our tech-obsessed, speed-obsessed, throw-away culture let us be truly subversive and praise instead the virtues of a long, slow relationship with a printed book unfolding over many years, a relationship that includes its weight in our hands and its dusty presence on our shelves. In an age that prizes novelty, irony, and youth, let us praise familiarity, passion, and knowledge accrued through the passage of time. As we age, as we change, as our lives change around us, we bring different versions of ourselves to each encounter with our most cherished texts. Some books grow better, others wither and fade away, but they never stay static.

Justice is paramount. The new judgement is the justice of the hidden time.

O Lord that bear rule, who may know these things, but he that had not his dwelling with men?

No matter how people mess with you or let you down, or how you let yourself down, a good book means that when you get in bed that night, you have a good hour. I feel like you pay all day for that hour. That's what books mean to me. I can open this two-dimensional, flat white page with squiggly little black marks on them, and someone has created this world that you're going to enter into ...

When I look through Bob, the actual stories between his mottled covers may have been written by others, but they belong to me now. Nobody else on the planet has read this particular series of books in this exact order and been affected in precisely this way. Each of us could say the same about our respective reading trajectories. Even if we don’t keep a physical Book of Books, we all hold our books somewhere inside us and live by them. They become our stories.

You could never be certain what you would find in a book that had spent time with someone else.

But sir, I'm seventeen," I reply bluntly. "I'm genetically programmed to want to make statements.

That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?

Ideas are cheap. Writing them into a freakin' 90k word novel is the hard part.

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.

Don't judge me by my books. They're not my voices, and they were never my stories to tell.

We sometimes reveal how ignorant or bored we were when we read a book by giving it 5-stars.

The stories books tell transcend those of the characters inked upon their pages. A book discloses far more about the person who reads it.

Good books do not waste our time as most people do... collect a great quantity of books, build alibrary worthy of your noble soul, andspend without stint all the money necessary for it.

Books pull you to other worlds ... let them, and enjoy the adventure.

We" - this "we" is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through - don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.

A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people - people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a

Don't Rush Up The Stairs, you Just Might Fall. Take it One Step At A Time!

At some point in reading, we realize we have to read not just the books that we'd enjoy, but the books that move us, touch us, those that break us and hurt us, those which remind us that we will always be the ignorant of this life. We have to read the books that make us so little, make us a speck of dust or a grain of sand in a galaxy, until we feed our minds with all the knowledge we need, which is infinite in itself.

I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was.

Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.

There is more than one way not to read, the most radical of which is not to open a book at all. For any given reader, however dedicated he might be, such total abstention necessarily holds true for virtually everything that has been published, and thus in fact this constitutes our primary way of relating to books. We must not forget that even a prodigious reader never has access to more than an infinitesimal fraction of the books that exist.

If one million of you give assent to the one thousand who participate in the murder of a child, then one million of you are a million times guilty.

The books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill!

I should rather have you than a heap of gold, even if it were very comfortable to sleep on.

No one knows as well as I how much nonsense is printed in books.

The books you have read and the knowledge and inspiration you have gained can never be taken away from you.

As long as she had books and money, nothing could be a catastrophe.

I cannot perceive that you're still a girl. Ur kisses don't seem so innocent. They just drive me crazy!" #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion

The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.—Steinbeck Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

Once he'd asked, "Don't you want to read? There are hundreds of books in the sitting room."She had laughed and said, "I've read them all. I want to remember them the way they were. If I read them now, the endings will have changed.

Books. People have no idea how beautiful books are. How they taste on your fingers. How bright everything is when you light it with words.

Learn to eat with your enemies all around you but most of all thank God for his presence. Keep your eyes fixed to the presence of God in the presence of your enemies.

There is no revelation in my words. I am merely stating what others have forgotten to write down.

So we may use our books to form a barricade against the world,interweaving their words with our own to ward off the heat of the day.

It is time to browse through the precious books that have meant the most to you that you may rediscover illuminating phrases and sentences to light your pathway to the future...

God always sees me with no make-ups on because He knew how we started.

Maybe you should stop putting so much faith into what you read in books.

Quiet people have the loudest minds.

«She had Google, and she had Wikipedia. She could look up anything obscure, any words or phrases that she didn’t understand. A romance novel was just a book, while the Internet was the Internet. The Internet would crack these nuts for sure.»

I hate most people. And I don’t want to, it’s an awful way to be. But the human race gives me no comfort. I find myself turning to books and films for comfort still. It’s repulsive, because one’s life consists of people, not things.

A book is never finished it's abandoned.