Books Quotes - Page 8

Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.

Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again.

The library was the best place in the world.

What do women want?" Sigmund Freud cried. Books and cats are a good start.

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

In my contact with people, I find that, as a rule, it is only the little, narrow people who live for themselves, who never read good books, who do not travel, who never open up their souls in a way to permit them to come into contact with other souls – with the great outside world.

I always thought the key to immortality would be, like, tiny robots fixing things in your brain,” she says. “Not books.

A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to peer out.

Standing in front of the white picket fence, I stared at the multitude of champagne roses weaving their hunter green vines gracefully through and around the fence. Soft hints of pink hues whispered from the centers of the blooms. Their petals covered the lush ground and rolled in a lazy dance with the warm summer breeze...

Eat Ice Cream. Read Books. Be Happy.

In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.

Sometimes I come up here at night, even when I'm not fixing the clocks, just to look at the city. I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is one big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.

I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.

She trailed her fingers along the book spines as she wandered around the room. “My father thinks reading is a waste of time.” Hunter thought her father was a waste of space.

Books may be irrelevant until it's relevance, importance and purpose is discovered through reading

What is more natural than that a solidity, a complicity, a bond should be established between Reader and Reader, thanks to the book? You can leave the bookshop content, you, a man who thought that the period where you could still expect something from life had ended. You are bearing with you two different expectations, and both promise days of pleasant hopes; the expectation contained in the book - of a reading experience you are impatient to resume - and the expectation contained in that telephone number - of hearing again the vibrations, a times treble and at times smoldering, of that voice, when it will answer your first phone call in a while, in fact tomorrow, with the fragile pretext of the book, to ask her if she likes it or not, to tell her how many pages you have read or not read, to suggest to her that you meet again...

It was so odd what brought out tenderness in people. It was never what you have expected.

More than at any other time, when I hold a beloved book in my hand my limitations fall from me, my spirit is free.

To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo's martyrdom to a mere instance.

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

Certain bookworms eat books. Eat them, swear in them, spill things on them.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Sometimes we want God to use us to do big things when we would not even want to do the basics.

You don't have to feel grateful in order to be grateful.

It is a blessing for which young people ought to be exceedingly thankful, when they have wise and kind and sympathising and intelligent friends (parents especially) who know how to guide them to pure sources of instruction from books, so as on one hand to gratify a natural taste for novelty and entertainment, and on the other, to control that taste within proper bounds; taking conscientious care, at all times, to keep from the young that instruction which ‘causeth to err.

Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time.

The clean book bill will be one of the most immoral measures ever adopted. It will throw American art back into the junk heap.

Everybody should read something. Otherwise we all fall down into the pit of ignorance. Many are down there. Some people fall in it forever. Their lives mean nothing. They should not exist. (From the short story, "Charity".)

I generally read every night befi=ore I fall asleep: Brad does too. I find it comforting to lie beside my husband, each of us with a book in our hands. I see it as a period of calm and intimacy, and as the perfect metaphor-together, yet individual-for our marriage.

It's true that we, writers, write (create) books, but eventually, a good book gives birth to a good, established writer.

Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind.

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

Your story must told.Live a life legacy- written book or notes.This will be there for many generations to know your rich experiences and knowledge.

If someone looks into your eyes, I read in a book one time, he'll see right into your soul. I didn't want anyone to see into my soul.

We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.

Anyone can see that an ass laden with books remains a donkey. A human being laden with the undigested results of a tussle with thoughts and books, however, still passes for wise.

What separates a weak dreamer and a great dreamer is who is wishing and waiting or who is willing and working.

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

Books were my passion and my escape from madness.

Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.

The only way that your work will truly find an audience is if it is genuine.

A terrible plague has either killed mankind or transformed them into demons ... and all they want is Compton's soul.The best place to conceal esoteric information is right in front of us.

Literature recounts history, explores knowledge, narrates universal themes of human existence, actives human conscience, enhances understanding of human motives, and explicates the nuances of human behavior.

The spirits of the brain are directly connected to the testicles. This is why men who weary their imagination in books are less suitable for procreative functions...

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!

All photos speak a thousand words. This one contained a library.

If life was a book; every day would be a new page, every month would be a new chapter, and every year would be a new series.

You don't buy poetry. (Neither do I.)Why?You cannot afford it? Bosh! You spendEditions de luxe on a thirsty friend.You can buy any one of the poetry bunchFor the price you pay for a business lunch. Don't you suppose that a hungry head,Like an empty stomach, ought to be fed?Looking into myself, I find this true, So I hardly can figure it false in you.

Novels are food for the leftover hours of life, the in-between times, the moments of waiting.

I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I even simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant...I AM HAUNTED BY HUMANS.

Hundreds of thousands of people live in my library. Some are real, others are fictional. The real ones are the so-called imaginary characters in works of literature, the fictional ones are their authors. We know everything about the former, or at least as much as we are meant to know, everything that is written about a given character in a novel, a story or a poem in which she or he figures...The rest doesn't matter. Nothing is hidden from us. For us, a novel's characters are real. (p. 80

The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.

Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

I thought I would write a love letter. But then, I wrote a book." - Suzy Davies, on "Johari's Window

Books signify the mind of many souls.

Reading Chekhov, I felt not happy, exactly, but as close to happiness as I knew I was likely to come. And it occurred to me that this was the pleasure and mystery of reading, as well as the answer to those who say that books will disappear. For now, books are still the best way of taking great art and its consolations along with us on a bus.

All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.

I was so utterly content that I was slightly wistful. It was the feeling I got when I was about to finish a really great book. I was nostalgic for this moment even as I was still in it.

Whatever is true about your heart will show up in your actions.

Books think for me.