Books Quotes - Page 71

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.And while we're on the subject, I'd like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if it's a bad thing. As if "escapist" fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn't you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.

Today, death is your opponent.

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

God made my enemies to serve me in my absence. God made the things that conspired to destroy me feed me into the place that He was preparing for me. I am a big girl and I can handle trouble and my enemies.

There are many more books to read, when will I finish reading?

I guess you can call me "old fashioned". I prefer the book with the pages that you can actually turn. Sure, I may have to lick the tip of my fingers so that the pages don't stick together when I'm enraptured in a story that I can't wait to get to the next page. But nothing beats the sound that an actual, physical book makes when you first crack it open or the smell of new, fresh printed words on the creamy white paper of a page turner.

Keisha Blake, whose celebrated will and focus did not leave her much room for angst, watched her friend ascend to the top deck in her new panda-eyed makeup and had a mauvais quart d'heure, wondering whether she herself had any personality at all or was in truth only the accumulation and reflection of all the things she had read in books and seen on television.

Lost in a book is a great place to be found.

I am often asked a stock question: 'Have you actually read all those books?' To this I have my answer ready: 'Is there anybody who has read all the books in his library?' That would be like claiming to enjoy the incredible luxury and good fortune of being able to accomplish everything in this life that one would wish.

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

And please return it. You may think this a strange request, but I find that although my friends are poor arithmeticians, they are nearly all of them good bookkeepers.

You can build your strength, If you read enough books!

Evil is real but God is greater.

You become a man when, in having children, you not only physically look after and protect them but also protect them with all the love and learning you have to give.

It can be a good thing if deeper theology, or philosophy, only makes one more uncertain. It may lead to a healthy doubt; he may throw his hands up saying, 'God, I just don't know anymore. If you're out there, I'm giving it all to you.' From there, after the surrender, he is allowing God himself, rather than theories, books, and documents, to take over and lead him into all truth.

This book taught me, once and for all, how easily you can escape this world with the help of words! You can find friends between the pages of a book, wonderful friends.

Steadily, the room shrank, till the book thief could touch the shelves within a few small steps. She ran the back of her hand along the first shelf, listening to the shuffle of her fingernails gliding across the spinal cord of each book. It sounded like an instrument, or the notes of running feet. She used both hands. She raced them. One shelf against the other. And she laughed. Her voice was sprawled out, high in her throat, and when she eventually stopped and stood in the middle of the room, she spent many minutes looking from the shelves to her fingers and back again. How many books had she touched? How many had she felt? She walked over and did it again, this time much slower, with her hand facing forward, allowing the dough of her palm to feel the small hurdle of each book. It felt like magic, like beauty, as bright lines of light shone down from a chandelier. Several times, she almost pulled a title from its place but didn't dare disturb them. They were too perfect.

When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.

People come to me for the solution of their problem, if my knowledge and experience is not enough to solve the problem, I go to my library read the relevant book and provide the solution.

Upon reading, great stories by Great Spirits, the glorious inspiration penetrated our soul; we can’t help but to shed tears. It was a soul soothing and a deep spiritual awaken.

All my friends are in my books.

Ordinarily my mom just sunk deeper into her corner of the couch and ignored it. She had succesfully ignored a quarter of a century of entropy and decay, had sat peacefully crunching popcorn and drinking soda while the house fell down around us. If I had to guess the number of books she read during that time, I would place the number at somewhere in the neighborhood of forty thousand.

I just love the smell of an old book store and the feel of the crisp pages along my fingertips.

All writers are waiting for replies. That’s what I’ve learned. Maybe all human beings are

A good book will pull you in from the beginning and take you on a journey you'll never forget.

Let me begin with a heartfelt confession.I admit it. I am a biblioholic, one who loves books and whose life would seem incomplete without them. I am an addict, with a compulsive need to stop by nearly any bookstore I pass in order to get my fix. Books are an essential part of my life, the place where I have spent many unforgettable moments. For me, reading is one of the most enjoyable ways to pass a rainy afternoon or a leisurely summer day. I crave the knowledge and insights that truly great books bring into my life and can spend transported hours scouring used book stores for volumes which "I simply must have". I love the smell and feel of well-loved books and the look of a bookcase full of books waiting to be taken down and read.

Books, in the plural lose their solidity of substance and become a gas, filling all available space.

Books are the way to stretch out people's souls, and I won't have children with small souls.

I don't care about wearing branded clothes or flaunting brands. But I do care about the books that I read and the music that I listen to.

Literature is news that stays news.

Katey's the hottest bookworm you'll ever meet. If you took all the books that she's read and piled them in a stack, you could climb to the Milky Way.

The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write about it.

I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.

There’s always books. And the wind through trees.

The murder of a child has no justification, even if the bombs have missed their mark.

…only then did I wake out of the book.

No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.

Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless.

Simple minded people do things like gossip, lie, spread rumors, and cause troubles. But, I know you're more intelligent.

Sometimes I think books are the only friends worth having.

The voices in my head wouldn't shut up, so I let them write their story.

When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.

Fire is a speed reader, which is why the ignorant burn books: fire races through pages, takes care of all the knowledge, and never bores you with a summary.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Read great books and be great.

He liked bookstores, and libraries too. They had a sacred, peaceful hush, like graveyards without the shadow of death.

In Western Civilization, our elders are books.

The book that simply demands to be read, for no good reason, is asking us to change our lives by putting aside what we usually think of as good reasons. It's asking us to stop calculating. It's asking us to do something for the plain old delight and interest of it, not because we can justify its place on the mental spreadsheet or accounting ledger (like the one Benjamin Franklin kept) by which we tote up the value of our actions.

The library made me feel safe, as if every question had an answer and there was nothing to be afraid of, as long as I could sort through another volume.

I did the only thing I could. I said the dumbest thing any man has ever said to a woman, “Yeah, it’s just me and my trash can here,” as I patted its lid and started pushing it up the driveway.

Some things can be fixed. Some things are just too broken.

With a book he was regardless of time.

But they never again passed up the opportunity to read a good book, together.

If typos are God's way of keeping a writer humble, plot holes certainly keeps one on their knees.

And it is that which draws me to you, too, for you are the tropics, you have the sun in you, and the softness and the clarity...

Authors: The only people you thank for leaving you emotionally devastated.

You have that look on your face,” she whispered mockingly, “that Beast-just-gave-Beauty-a-whole-frickin’-library look and now she’s going to spin around like she can read them all at once through osmosis.

We should do our best to satisfy your interests in stories and books and the world. There are libraries.

Why books?”Her brows rose. “I beg your pardon?”“Why are they your vice?”She set her plate down and wiped her hand on her skirts before reaching for the top volume on a stack of small, leather bound books nearby and extending it to him. “Go on.”He took it. “Now what?”“Smell it.” He tilted his head. She couldn’t help but smile. “Do it.”He lifted it to his nose. Inhaled.“Not like that,” she said. “Really give it a smell.”He raised one brow but did as he was told. “What do you smell?” Sophie asked.“Leather and ink?”She shook her head. “Happiness. That’s what books smells like. Happiness. That’s why I always wanted to have a book shop. What better life than to trade in happiness?