Books Quotes - Page 13

Bias rules our minds and causes us to overlook the obvious. From 'Fillossofee: Messages From a Grandfather', by Robert Gately

Reading is a time machine that allows you to acquire wisdom from the past and to analyze and imagine another person’s vision of the future.

He began to read at haphazard. He entered upon each system with a little thrill of excitement, expecting to find in each some guide by which he could rule his conduct; he felt himself like a traveller in unknown countries and as he pushed forward the enterprise fascinated him; he read emotionally, as other men read pure literature, and his heart leaped as he discovered in noble words what himself had obscurely felt.

I asked of the limitless sunshineHow to shine with the dawn's glowing light;No answer came back from the sunshine, But my soul heard a whisper, "Burn bright!

Books had rescued me when i most needed saving... Books were smarter than me and words inspired me... to try something new, charge forward without a clear understanding of what would happen next, because "given something like death, what does it matter if one looks foolish now and then, or tries too hard, or cares too deeply?"In the end, Thoreau, Whitman, Hafiz, and a dozen other writers put me up to the task of seeing if I dared to "live a life worth living.

Neither would you, had you grown up in a library of melodramatic romance novels.

Write from the heart. A book without a pulse is like a person without a spirit." Linda Radke, President of Five Star Publications

As night falls silently all around,She carefully turns the last page.

You are more likely to find three TVs inside a randomly selected house than you are to find a single book that is or was not read to pass an exam, to please God, or to be a better cook.

I often find that once a child unlocks the secret of words, they hunger for them. There is a kind of magic in reading. It takes the mind to places where the body may not go, allowing one to forget, for a while, life's troubles.

A book is indeed dead until a reader brings it into life by reading it.

If everyone could learn how to read books properly and how to use them as effective tools for daily living, the facilities of colleges could easily go out of existence without any loss to society.' -From a speech by the president of Mount Holyoke College, as reported in the Philadelphia Public Ledger, May 13, 1938

These be they that have put off the mortal clothing, and put on the immortal, and have confessed the name of God: now are they crowned, and receive palms.

The only things that erased my lonliness were written works

Rule number one: Don't fuck with librarians.

Blood shall drop out of wood, and the stone shall give his voice, and the people shall be troubled:

There is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, 'See, this is new?' it had been already of old time, which was before us.

Over a hundred German scientists arrived here [Huntsville] at eleven o’clock on an April morning and by nightfall more than sixty had applied for cards at the free library.

I cannot live without books because books are my life.

It's hard not being able to see you, but my life in Tokyo would be a lot worse if it weren't for you.

Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you'll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.

... Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory

A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.

Perhaps I was drawn to stories in which people found their true desires because I was a stranger to myself.

You can tell if someone really loves Books by the way they look at them, how they open and close them, how they turn the pages.

Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.

Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.

I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn’t have to write at all anymore if I didn’t want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don’t know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they’re through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five…I had a shutting-off feeling…that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK .

What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?

Browsing through the shelves in bookstores or libraries, I was completely happy.

The hero was the sort of character you could feel yourself falling in love with, no matter how much you tried to convince yourself that he wasn't real

With the right books, we can change everything.

Give up your thirst for books, so that you do not die a grouch.

I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don’t. We never know. We just make stuff up.

This is an instance of the truism that, when switching from one recording medium to another, there is always a considerable data loss. As the Roman empire declined, continuing preservation of early texts would be dependent on the efforts of the book copyists in the Middle Ages - and good luck. Are there any resemblances to our current digitization concerns?

Somewhere there must be women reading books,and talking of chicken rissoles to their cooks …(from,‘Somewhere in England’)

It’s tough, but if you want to survive, sometimes you have to do the seemingly impossible.

...I will not allow books to prove any thing.""But how shall we prove any thing?""We never shall.

He'll be down with the books. My old septon used to say books are dead men talking. Dead men should keep quiet is what I say. No one wants to hear a dead man's yabber.

Books that have been owned by someone for many years for a specific purpose carry not just memories, (that is obvious), they also reveal their owner's true values; for the books we own may indicate something about us very different from what we think.

I'll live to be one year younger, because I can't stand the idea of a world without you in it, and die buried beneath an avalanche of my own books.

Betsy returned to her chair, took off her coat and hat, opened her book and forgot the world again.

When the writing is good, a book becomes a mirror. The reader will see an uncanny familiarity and respond accordingly.

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.

If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?

Are we to deny our daughters the works of Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck or Shakespeare?....Where is the equality in banning girls from enjoying wonderful works of literature?....What kind of society defines suitable reading material by sex? This is indefensible censorship encouraging ignorance and bias. [About Caitlin Moran's statement.]

Nearly all our associations are determined by chance or necessity; and restricted within a narrow circle. We cannot know whom we would; and those whom we know, we cannot have at our side when we most need them. All the higher circles of human intelligence are, to those beneath, only momentarily and partially open... there is a society continually open to us, of people who will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our rank or occupation; — talk to us in the best words they can choose, and of the things nearest their hearts. And this society, because it is so numerous and so gentle, and can be kept waiting around us all day long, — kings and statesmen lingering patiently, not to grant audience, but to gain it! — in those plainly furnished and narrow ante-rooms, our bookcase shelves, — we make no account of that company, — perhaps never listen to a word they would say, all day long!

Books … they’re kind of a compulsion for me. To find a great bookstore is a great thing.

Many scholars forget, it seems to me, that our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than upon our understanding. The trouble is that very few of their laborious explanations stick in the memory. The mind drops them as a branch drops its overripe fruit. ... Again and again I ask impatiently, "Why concern myself with these explanations and hypotheses?" They fly hither and thither in my thought like blind birds beating the air with ineffectual wings. I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.

Every heart must have its privatebestseller book.

One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.

...and he glanced at the backs of the books, with an awakened curiosity that went below the binding. No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.

The library was my only blessing. Every time I climbed the stairs, my heart lifted. All day, I looked forward to the happy hours I spent in that beautiful room. My guilt over appa's fate was too heavy to carry up there, and I learned to leave it below, somewhere on the ground floor. I left the house far behind as I walked on the path paved by the books, and every evening, baby Mangalam slept soundly on the bed I made for her on the window seat.

I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.

What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us!

Set as higher dimensional beings walking the earth today, who must INcarnate (there is no REincarnation if there is no time. Exception: descending spirals which crystallize in lower frequencies) to live in the various dream worlds (this one included) with the final "kick"/baptism by water, pulling up ALL the densities/dimensions through LOVE.

Today, death is your opponent.

Create a world in front of your readers where they can taste, smell, touch, hear, see, and move. Else they are likely going to move on to another book.

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.

The point is, every book we had could save us in a different way -- only, we had to open it. We had to drop our eyes to the page and drink in the words that were there.