Books Quotes - Page 77

You can't do magic with books unless they're very special copies.

It makes me sad that not every book is good,' I said. 'Not every book can be loved.''But when I pull a book off a shelf, and examine it, turning it this way and that, inspecting the cover, flipping through the pages and glancing at the words as they flash by, a thought here and a sentence there and I know that there is potential between those pages for love. Even if in my opinion the book is bad, someone else may find it good. Isn’t that like love?

The best feeling in the world might be when you finish a book and you get to pick out another.

There must be something in books, things we can't imagine.

He’s as tense as I am, maybe even more so, but it’s so hard to reconcile that with the serenity of weightlessness. His faux-blond hair is floating out away from his head. He’s wearing a worn, much-mended, and too-large shirt his friend in town must’ve found for him to help him blend in. He looks nothing like the Romeo who dragged me off the base, nothing like the Cormac who threw himself between his own people and me. It’s like that guy’s gone, and I killed him.

I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them.

Reading will help you to discover your sacred-self

I enjoy reading books like that because it’s not at all the life I lead. It’s completely different than any situation I’ll ever be in, thank God. But I get entertainment out of it. Because as much as I like to read about a guy telling a girl she’s so, so wet for him...if anyone ever said that to me during sex, I wouldn’t be turned on by it. I would be terrified I accidentally peed on myself.'Ben laughs. 'And if you and I were having sex and you told me you owned me, I would literally crawl out from under you, put on my clothes, walk out of your house, and go puke in your front yard.

Until I was left with nothing but life and books, I realised these two gracious gifts, where enough for me to exist.

I wrote "David" because it seemed to me that children, who can love a book more passionately than any grown person, got such a lot of harmless entertainment and not enough real, valuable literature.

What I know and I have learn is my books I can't tell you, but search out there and you will find. As a second think as you was here, you will be here and you are going to be here!

LibrariesAreNeccessaryGardens,UnsurpassedAtGrowingExcitement

I have gone to [this bookshop] for years, always finding the one book I wanted - and then three more I hadn’t known I wanted.

I’d volunteer to go to prison, as long as there are books. Because with books I am free.

Even so have I given the womb of the earth to those that be sown in it in their times.

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.

Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with books, I felt myself relax and was suddenly at peace.

A young woman forced to keep drunks supplied with beer and siblings with cleanunderwear—instead of being allowed to pursue something higher —stores up greatreserves of vitality, a vitality never dreamed of by university students yawning over theirbooks. (...) The difference between the universitygraduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in theextent of vitality and self-confidence. The elan with which Tereza flung herself into hernew Prague existence was both frenzied and precarious. She seemed to be expectingsomeone to come up to her any day and say, What are you doing here? Go back whereyou belong!

Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries,hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent.

Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.

Even so-called 'short novels' are pretty long and can take several hours to read, so make sure you stay hydrated. I like to keep an isotonic sports drink handy if I'm going to be reading for any longer than forty minutes. I'll also take regular breaks and make sure I'm wearing loose-fitting clothing.

In reading, friendship is restored immediately to its original purity. With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: “What did they think of us?”—“Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?”—“Did they like us?”—nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else. All such agitating thoughts expire as we enter the pure and calm friendship of reading.

it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.

If I should be available to everyone, I will eventually end up with nothing to give to anyone. So the greatest gift you can receive from me is my time. Count yourself lucky if I give you a minute of my hour.

Tell me I didn't imagine it, Leo. Tell me that even though our bodies were in seperate states, our star selves shared an enchanted place. Tell me that right around noon today (eastern time) you had the strangest sensation: a tiny chill on your shoulder...a flutter in the heart...a shadow of strawberry-banana crossing your tongue...tell me you whispered my name.

They spent pork-barrel money like a tidal-wave sea, but no funds trickled down far enough to reach me. Our books numbered few and were falling apart, and I sat mending pages with a crestfallen heart.

Librarians were like guardian angels, with graying hair and beady eyes, magnified through reading glasses, and always read to recommend new literary windows to gaze through.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Every book is worth reading. If it cannot make you wiser it will make you a critic

12% of employees study further to learn more. 88% of employees study further to earn more.

It began to falter not when the book publishers who loved books gave way to those who preferred profits to reading. It happened when publishers and editors cut back on their drinking. If there is one national flower in book publishing, it is the martini.

Usually, I set one foot in a library and I feel my own internal volume lower. A library is a physical equivalent of a sigh. It's the silence, sure, but it's also the certainty of all those books, the way they stand side by side with their still, calm conviction. It's the reassurance of knowledge in the face of confusion.

I love you," I said to her. "From the bottom of my heart. I don't ever want to let you go again. But there's nothing I can do. I can't make a move.""Because of her?"I nodded.

Maybe it was that nearly everyone else was dead and she felt a little bit dead too, but she figured that even a vampire deserved to be saved. Maybe she ought to leave him, but she wasn't going to.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.

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.

I spent days and nights staring at the blank page, searching the deepest corners of my mind: who have I been, what have I seen, what did I learn? I thought about all the nights I've spent outside, all the times I laid down to cry and how I took a deep breath every morning and decided to simply go on. Because what else is there to do? Decide that this is it? I quit, I'm done? Oh if I could find words to justify those feelings I've carried. I could write the thickest of books with explosions of emotions from a young girl's lost heart. I could make you see, make you hear, make you feel, at least a tiny fragment of what's out there.

The good thing of TV movies/books... TV series... audiobooks is that you can choose the genre and you have plenty of choice.

He had some taste for romance reading before he went to the university, where, we must confess, in justice to his college, he was cured of the love of reading in all its shapes; and the cure would have been radical, if disappointment in love, and total solitude, had not conspired to bring on a relapse.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.

Just imagine what you are losing just because you are not reading!

Shelving books incorrectly is as good as stealing them. It's almost worse.

Books are a narcotic.

I meet people and they become chapters in my stories.

The definition of a good story is one that remains with you long after you've turned that last page.

Reading is the noblest of all the hobbies, that is why people mention it so frequently in their resume even if they don't read much.

A book, for the Sufis, is an instrument as much as it is something to give information....The key is the teacher.

Saint John, in a moment of confusion, tells us not to love the world because "all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life,is not of the Father, but is of the world." This injunction is at best a paradox. Our humble and astonishing inheritance is the world and only the world, whose existence we constantly test (and prove) by telling ourselves stories about it. The suspicion that we and the world are made in the image of something wonderfully and chaotically coherent far beyond our grasp, of which we are also part; the hope that our exploded cosmos and we, its stardust, have an ineffable meaning and method; the delight in retelling the old metaphor of the world as a book we read and in which we too are read; the conceit that what we can know of reality is an imagination made of language — all this finds its material manifestation in that self-portrait we call a library. And our love for it, and our lust to see more of it, and our pride in its accomplishments as we wander through shelves full of books that promise more and more delights, are among our happiest, most moving proofs of possessing, in spite of all the miseries and sorrows of this life, a more intimate, consolatory, perhaps redeeming faith in a method behind the madness than any jealous deity could wish upon us.

Sometimes God’s way of answering prayer is not by removing the pressure, but by increasing your strength to bear it.

Creating a world within the imagination one day at a time through words and colors.

A novel is not an allegory.... It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.

Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.

If you’re a writer, your first duty, a duty you owe to yourself and your readers, and to your writing itself, is to become wonderful. To become the best writer you can possibly be.

No level raised without reading, is like a body trying to live without breathing.

Publishing a book is like being pregnant. By the end, you're just ready to get that baby out!

Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

The man she wanted existed only in the romantic novels she was reading. She had met him. But he would never meet her.

In the end, what makes a book valuable is not the paper it’s printed on, but the thousands of hours of work by dozens of people who are dedicated to creating the best possible reading experience for you.

God has permitted the great lie for a short time only. That time is now coming to an end. Believers in the lie! You have been raised on the milk of your concrete beliefs. Now it is time for you to be weaned to partake of the solid food of the new age, the "New World Order.

Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. So now you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.