Books Quotes - Page 9

I have had my say, as he wished. Now the book belongs, as he points out, to the world he claims to speak for.

What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!

The more we have known of the really good things, the more insipid the thin lemonade of later literature becomes, sometimes almost to the point of making us sick. Do you know a work of literature written in the last, say, fifteen years that you think has any lasting quality? I don't. It is partly idle chatter, partly propaganda, partly self-pitying sentimentality, but there is no insight, no ideas, no clarity, no substance and almost always the language is bad and constrained. On this subject I am quite consciously a laudator temporis acti.

A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never.

Once more, he was immersing himself in books, reaching the end of long articles, even going back over paragraphs to make sure he'd grasped things. How much more satisfying it was than all that skimming, all that jumping around. At present, he was working his way, deliciously, through a book on Mendel, the father of genetics. A man who might not have spend seven years watching peas, if he'd had the internet.

Just as some books are so beautiful and intriguing that you never want to put them down, forever eager of what lies beyond the scope of a single page, so you never cease to intrigue me, leaving me in constant yearning of all that resides within you.

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

Without reading many different books, you can never leave the port of ignorance and can never obtain the peaceful mind of knowing the truth!

You can make time to read for 10-20 minutes daily.

What is the sweetness of flowers compared to the savour of dust and confinement?

In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?

And I have fitted up some chambers thereLooking towards the golden Eastern air,And level with the living winds, which flowLike waves above the living waves below.—I have sent books and music there, and allThose instruments with which high spirits callThe future from its cradle, and the pastOut of its grave, and make the present lastIn thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die,Folded within their own eternity.

Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.

My spirit has been around far longer than my soul--I've lived several lifetimes already. And one this novel has been written, I will have lived several more.

People open bookstores because they want their souls back.(from "Two Women" published in Do Me: Tales of Sex & Love from Tin House)

And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder, as if someone or something had 'walked over our grave,' as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us - the recognition of something we never knew was there, or of something we vaguely felt as a flicker or a shadow, whose ghostly form rises and passes back into us before we can see what it is, leaving us older and wiser.

In Western Civilization, our elders are books.

Books are a narcotic.

Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

The synopsis looked good, the cover looked nice, you opened the book and began a new life. You found a new home, you met some new friends, you kept on reading, hoping it ould never end. You danced through the pages, you sang out the words you felt all their joy, and all their pain and hurt. The pages cut your fingers, and the words cut your heart, like the author had a knife, and was tearing your soul apart. You laughed with the characters, and with them, you cried, you fell in love with them, too but with them, you died, and when the book reached its end, and your broken heart couldn't heal, you suddenly realized that its not real.

If a book is worth reading it is worth buying.

It is often much harder to get rid of books than to acquire them. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witnesses to a moment in our lives we will never see again. While they are still there, it is part of us.

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.

DEAR DI­ARYYou are greater than the BibleAnd the Con­fer­ence of the BirdsAnd the Up­an­ishadsAll put to­geth­erYou are more se­vereThan the Scrip­turesAnd Ham­mura­bi’s CodeMore dan­ger­ous than Luther’s pa­perNailed to the Cathe­dral doorYou are sweet­erThan the Song of SongsMight­ier by farThan the Epic of Gil­gameshAnd braverThan the Sagas of Ice­landI bow my head in grat­itudeTo the ones who give their livesTo keep the se­cretThe dai­ly se­cretUn­der lock and keyDear Di­aryI mean no dis­re­spectBut you are more sub­limeThan any Sa­cred TextSome­times just a listOf my eventsIs holi­er than the Bill of RightsAnd more in­tense

I am sorry, I am not a writer. I simply put my thoughts on paper. Those helped by them call them a book and me a writer. Those who are not helped call it rubbish and me a fool. Both have reason.

It's red hot, mate. I hate to think of this sort of book getting in the wrong hands. As soon as I've finished this, I shall recommend they ban it.

The moon will guide you through the night with her brightness, but she will always dwell in the darkness, in order to be seen.

It is often much harder to get rid of books than it is to acquire them. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witnesses to a moment in our lives we will never see again. While they are still there, it is a part of us. I have noticed that many people make a note of the day, month, and year that they read a book; they build up a secret calendar. Others, before lending one, write their name on the flyleaf, note whom they lent it to in an address book, and add the date. I have known some book owners who stamp them or slip a card between their pages the way they do in public libraries. Nobody wants to mislay a book. We prefer to lose a ring, a watch, our umbrella, rather than a book whose pages we will never read again, but which retains, just in the sound of its title, a remote and perhaps long-lost emotion.

So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,Go throw your TV set away,And in its place you can installA lovely bookshelf on the wall.Then fill the shelves with lots of books.

Where should I go?" -Alice. "That depends on where you want to end up." - The Cheshire Cat.

Now, public libraries are most admirable institutions, but they have one irritating custom. They want their books back.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

Literacy: Blessing? Or curse?

You remember?' he said incredulously. 'What could you possibly remember?' he asked, staring at her, waiting for the answer.The beauty from within her soul shined brightly through her loving eyes as she looked deep into Noah’s now melting eyes.'I remember — I love you,' she said in a soft voice, nervously biting her lip.

That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.

When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.

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.

One generation passes away, and another generation cometh forth: but the earth abides for ever.

In a way, the books were protection. An escape she would always have access to.A sanctuary, there for when she needed it.

I buy, collect and read books.

Never give up! And write for yourself first and foremost.

I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.

I "love" reading.It makes me feel like I am swallowing up Christ, Homer, Confucius, Newton, Franklin, Socrates, Caesar, and the whole world into one gigantic invincible Sir Moffat. Mine is creative reading. I read building empires in mind. I pray I won't read and read and forget to marry.

Book means fly in the sky,cross the desert, without wing without water.

We are thickly layered, page lying upon page, behind simple covers. And love - it is not the book itself, but the binding.

...the space which [books] occupied was itself an expectation.

Books should go where they will be most appreciated, and not sit unread, gathering dust on a forgotten shelf, don't you agree?

When I began writing The Night Bookmobile, it was a story about a woman's secret life as a reader. As I worked it also became a story about the claims that books place on their readers, the imbalance between our inner and outer lives, a cautionary tale of the seductions of the written word. It became a vision of the afterlife as a library, of heaven as a funky old camper filled with everything you've ever read. What is this heaven? What is it we desire from the hours, weeks, lifetimes we devote to books? What would you sacrifice to sit in that comfy chair with perfect light for an afternoon in eternity, reading the perfect book, forever?

There was going to be a spot for me in this joint, the earth, after all. It was never going to be a great match for someone as bright and strange as me, but books were going to make it survivable.

A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.

Books—they weren't ladders out of the abyss, but they were companions.

[P]art of the pleasure of engaging with a writer is unraveling some allusions and admitting defeat by others.

And I don't care what age you are, kissing in the rain is the best.

I never make up anything. I get everything from my books. They're all true!" --Ann Newton/Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know — the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be…. The thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever.

It was also a room full of books and made of books. There was no actual furniture; this is to say, the desk and chairs were shaped out of books. It looked as though many of them were frequently referred to, because they lay open with other books used as bookmarks.

Books are precious things, but more than that, they are the strong backbone of civilization. They are the thread upon which it all hangs, and they can save us when all else is lost.

King Arthur's Knights had been the first book Arthur had read late at night under the covers with a torch...it was he supposed, thinking back on it, the first book that had showed him what reading was really all about.

I have wandered many roads that I have never traveled; touched many things that my eyes have never seen. It is through stories that life is made, and through stories that life is saved.