Books Quotes - Page 17

Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.

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.

Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.

Reading is all about losing and finding yourself.

You are like the winged goddess from Greek mythology. As beautiful and soaring like an angel as her". #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion:

She never managed to find herself in these books no matter how hard she tried, exhuming traits from between the pages and donning them for an hour, a day, a week. We think in some ways, we have all done this our whole lives, searching for the book that will give us the keys to ourselves, let us into a wholly formed personality as though it were a furnished room to let. As though we could walk in and look around and say to the gray-haired landlady behind us, "We'll take it.

It [the book] was spinning a magic spell around her heart, sticky as a spider's web and enchantingly beautiful..

To take each day as a separate page, to be read carefully, savoring all of the details, this is best for me, I think.

We owe it to each other to tell stories.

How, and when shall these things come to pass? wherefore are our years few and evil?

Books were already a familiar refuge, after all, and they still took me in without the slightest judgment. They don’t close to you the way a person can. You might feel as though you don’t belong anywhere, least of all in your own home, you might feel bound to a person whose actions you abhor yet unable to divorce yourself, struggling to individuate in their shadow—“all these feelings you wouldn’t dare articulate to another person, no matter how highly trained—but you can bring your whole untempered self to books. You can ask them anything, and though you may need to search for the resonant lines, though the answer may come at a slant, they will always speak to you, they will always let you in.

A library cannot be made all at once, any more than a house or a nation or a tree; they must all take time to grow, and so must a library. I wouldn't even know what books to go and ask for. I dare say, if I were to try, I couldn't at a moment's notice tell you the names of more than two score of books at the outside. Folk must make acquaintance among books as they would among living folk.

I generally give the title-page a fair chance," Roger said. "Once can't always judge books merely by the cover.

The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one.

What is the quality you most like in a man? The ability to return books.

Should he give free reign to his desires, the bibliomaniac can ruin his life along with the lives of his loved ones. He'll often take better care of his books than of his own health; he'll spend more on fiction than he does on food; he'll be more interested in his library than in his relationships, and, since few people are prepared to live in a place where every available surface is covered with piles of books, he'll often find himself alone, perhaps in the company of a neglected and malnourished cat. When he dies, all but forgotten, his body might fester for days before a curious neighbor grows concerned about the smell.

Knowledge drifts in and out of my mind", said Lestat with a little look of honest distress and a shake of his head. "I devour it and then I lose it and sometimes I can't reach for any knowledge that I ought to possess. I feel desolate, but then knowledge returns or I seek it out in a knew source."(...)"But you love books, then", Aunt Queen was saying. I had to listen."Oh, yes," Lestat said. "Sometimes they're the only thing that keeps me alive.""What a thing to say at your age", she laughed."No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don't you think? The young are eternally desperate," he said frankly. "And books, they offer one hope - that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.

The books in the library were old, rotted, and there was no one left in the world to read them, but Kira made sure that none of them went into the fire. It seemed wrong.

Luckily for me, I loved books. Books can enlighten but can also benight, but at least one can play one off against another.

Speak peace unto the world and good souls will stand.

Having had virtually no contact with the outside world for the last few weeks, Evan had temporarily forgotten the social norms governing shopping conduct or approaching celebrities in public.

What I saw next stopped me dead in my tracks. Books. Not just one or two dozen, but hundreds of them. In crates. In piles on the floor. In bookcases that stretched from floor to ceiling and lined the entire room. I turned around and around in a slow circle, feeling as if I'd just stumbled into Ali Baba's cave. I was breathless, close to tears, and positively dizzy with greed.

They say you can judge a person by their book, but I say they will hide under the covers.

There so much to learn from a single book.

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

Think not of the fragility of life, but of the power of books, when mere words can change our lives simply by being next to each other.

Behind Tana there was the sounds of splintering wood, as though something very large had hot the door. "No," she said softly, "Oh no. No." "Leave me," said Gavriel. ....."Shut up or I might," she told him.

And as their penile pain began to subside, the two men were able to form more complex thoughts, resulting in a collaborative work: the development of a worldview that might be described as “penilosophy.

Even prisoners can escape if they have books.

All Authors come from the unified countrynent known as Australia. Authors live in the future where love is external.

Knight's disdain for Thoreau was bottomless - 'he had no deep insight into nature'...

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.

I had a dream about you last night. I was writing a ‘Sex for dummies-Christians That Secretly What to be Porn Stars- 1st edition.’ And you helped me with the illustrations.

In a way, it's nice to know that there are Greek gods out there, because you have somebody to blame when things go wrong. For instance, when you're walking away from a bus that's just been attacked by monster hags and blown up by lightning, and it's raining on top of everything else, most people might think that's just really bad luck; when you're a half-blood, you understand that some devine force is really trying to mess up your day.

Children's reading and children's thinking are the rock-bottom base upon which this country will rise. Or not rise. In these days of tension and confusion, writers are beginning to realize that books for children have a greater potential for good or evil than any other form of literature on earth.

Someone ought to publish a book about the doomsayers who keep publishing books about the end of publishing.

Great characters- They are pivotal for a great plot. THEN a solid plot: Why then? If you do not have great characters it is impossible to create a good plot, nonetheless a solid one. Once you have built great characters for the scenes, there you have it. It’s just like the movies, you cannot have a great film if the characters are frail and their lines are weak as well. I guess great world-building comes along with a good plot. If there is something that will work fine in a novel is how you will develop from the theme. You’ve got to establish a good timeline, and from there it comes a world. You see the technical matters don’t match or matter as much to me. Even a poorly written story, if there is a good plot and great characters on it will make a divine combination There are simply many cases of it over the mainstream and that even reached the big screen.

When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness.

It was that kind of kiss. But as with all kisses, it was not without a certain element of danger

For all her faults, it was actually my mom who instilled in me a love of reading, and books, for which I will always be grateful. She’s a complete bibliophile, so I’ve pretty much grown up around libraries and books.

A book is an ocean,Its upon you,Whether you find pearls,Or only take a drop….!!!!

We are very fond of books. You can learn nearly everything from them that rabbits can't teach you.

Later that night though, as I stayed awake into the early hours of morning devouring the second novel in a series, I understood what it meant to befriend a book. The books knew me, far better than I knew them; they knew my fears, my doubts, my dreams. They gave words to feelings I did not even realize I experienced. They listened. They consoled. They kept me company. The books gave me a life outside of my own.

It is easy to see the glow but hard to recognize the awakening of silence.

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.

Sadly as some old mediaeval knightGazed at the arms he could no longer wield,The sword two-handed and the shining shieldSuspended in the hall, and full in sight,While secret longings for the lost delightOf tourney or adventure in the fieldCame over him, and tears but half concealedTrembled and fell upon his beard of white,So I behold these books upon their shelf,My ornaments and arms of other days;Not wholly useless, though no longer used,For they remind me of my other self,Younger and stronger, and the pleasant waysIn which I walked, now clouded and confused.

It were better that we were not at all, than that we should live still in wickedness, and to suffer, and not to know wherefore.

Ah, if only we were born roaring with laughter and took that emotional template through life with us! Whoever's in charge seriously messed up somewhere. I can only hope that right now, that selfsame Whoever is wryly relating their cock-up to some celestial colleague, who responds: 'Hey, you should put that in a book. LOL!

A publisher is somebody looking for someone who has something to say.

People talk about books being an escape, but here on the tube, this one feels more like a lifeline...The motion of the train makes her head rattle, but her eyes lock on the words the way a figure skater might choose a focal point as she spins, and just like that, she's grounded again.

Initially [my favorite books] seem to immerse me in another life, but ultimately they immerse me in me; I am looking through the window into another person’s home, but it is my face that I see in the reflection.

The library knows that it is a temporary fix. We have a stamp for the inside front cover: BROKEN SPINE NOTED. It is like a bracelet worn by a diabetic. When you return the book with this message stamped inside, we know you're not the one responsible for this horrible thing. It was some other bastard before you. The book has a preexisting condition.

Anger does not change the fact. The will to take control is everything.

This is what books should do: Carry a person and not be carried by him; take the day off his back, not add its own ounces of paper to his vertebrae.

One of the most difficult things when you were trying to navigate the world of books was dealing with all the unreliable authors. They were so unbelievably tricky to keep track of. An author might write a brilliant book, only to follow it up with something utterly mediocre. Or, and this was almost worse, one might have written a brilliant book but then turn out to be dead. Then there were those authors who started a series but never finished it.

This is the most important thing about me--I'm a card-carrying reader. All I really want to do is sit and read or lie down and read or eat and read or shit and read. I'm a trained reader. I want a job where I get paid for reading books. And I don't have to make reports on what I read or to apply what I read.

I always have enjoyed people to read for me or to have the chace to listen of how they narrate a book.

I am very careful about who I choose to build memories with. Some of them might last a lifetime.

Blessings be the inventor of the alphabet, pen and printing press! Life would be--to me in all events--a terrible thing without books.

If the most High grant thee to live, thou shall see after the third trumpet that the sun shall suddenly shine again in the night, and the moon thrice in the day: