“A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful.”
Maurice Sendak (1928–2012) American illustrator and writer of children's books
To Peter Reich on his memoir: A Book of Dreams about his early life and his father Wilhelm Reich.
“A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful.”
Maurice Sendak (1928–2012) American illustrator and writer of children's books
Khalil Gibran (1883–1931) Lebanese artist, poet, and writer
The Vision: Reflections on the Way of the Soul (1994)
Context: All that you see was and is for your sake. The numerous books, uncanny markings, and beautiful thoughts are the ghosts of souls who preceded you. The speech they weave is a link between you and your human siblings. The consequences that cause sorrow and rapture are the seeds that the past has sown in the field of the soul, and by which the future shall profit.
Henry Miller book Tropic of Cancer
Source: Tropic of Cancer (1934), Chapter One
Context: This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will.
John Selden (1584–1654) English jurist and scholar of England's ancient laws and constitution, and of Jewish law
as reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 29.
“Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver.”
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet
"The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo: The Golden Echo, line 19
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)
“The world was made in order to result in a beautiful book.”
Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) French Symbolist poet
Le monde est fait pour aboutir à un beau livre.
Remark made to Jules Huret, who published it in his Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire (1891); as translated in Stéphane Mallarmé (1969) by Frederic Chase St. Aubyn, p. 23.
Observations