Quotes about books

page 17

“When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.
:This quote, often attributed to Jomo Kenyatta, was first written in a fiction play published by holocaust doubter Rolf Hochhuth, in his controversial The Deputy, a Christian tragedy (1964), Grove Press, p. 144. No reference to any historical or original source was given. Other citations are found in books written by critics of religion, such as Christos Tzanetakos's "The Life and Work of an Atheist Pioneer", iUniverse; and Jack Huberman's "Quotable Atheist: Ammunition for Nonbelievers, Political Junkies, Gadflies, and Those Generally Hell-Bound" (2008), 175. No references are given.
: In Desmond Tutu: A Biography (2004) by Steven Gish, p. 101; is clarified Tutu used it as a joke which was not of him.”

“Every body is a book of blood;
Wherever we're opened, we're red.”

“Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)”

“This book will take you two days to read. Did you even see the cover? It’s mostly pink. If you’re reading this book every night for months, something is not right.”

“Don't you ever mind," she asked suddenly, "not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?”

“But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create.”

“It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written.”

“They defy gravity, as good books should.”

“Life's harder, the deeper you feel things, was all I could think as I put the books away. Feelings, who needs them? Sometimes they're like a gift, when you feel love or happiness. Sometimes they're a curse.”

“The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.”

“Even as a kid, my memories are of books taking me out of myself.”

“Books have great value, actions have greater value.”

“The world is your exercise book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, though you may express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write lies, or nonsense, or to tear the pages.”

“Every beginning, after all, is nothing but a sequel, and the book of events is always open in the middle.”

“Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.”

“Books are keys that open many doors.”

“It doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.”

“We can buy you one of those books they have for little kids 'Timmy Has Two Dads'. Except I don't think they have one called 'Timmy Has Two Dads and One of Them Was Evil'. That part you're just going to have to work through on your own.”

“But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.”

“There are books which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty.”

“[ Woe be to him that reads but one book. ]”

“Nevertheless, the book gave Jack a feeling he had never had before, that the past was like a story, in which one thing led to another, and the world was not a boundless mystery, but a finite thing that could be comprehended.”

“When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.”

“A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum.”

“The books that have helped me most are the ones I reacted to, not just read”

“Where shadows dim with shadows mate,
in caverns deep and dark.
Where old books dream of bygone days,
when they were wood and bark…”

“This book, when I am dead, will be
A little faint perfume of me.
People who knew me well will say,
She really used to think that way.”

“A thirteen-year-old is a kaleidoscope of different personalities, if not in most ways a mere figment of her own imagination. At that age, what and who you are depends largely on what book you happen to be reading at the moment.”

“Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait on line for Santa, or some such inconvenience.”

“Of course I loved books more than people.”

“And how could anyone consent to give up the smell of open books, old or new?”

“the moment you don't feel like praying, get on your knees. And the moment you don't feel like reading your bible, you'd better get that Book open.”

“To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.”

“I wanted to live among books.”

“I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.”

“As a child, my number one best friend was the librarian in my grade school. I actually believed all those books belonged to her.”

“It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.”

“There are adventures of the spirit and one can travel in books and interest oneself in people and affairs. One need never be dull as long as one has friends to help, gardens to enjoy and books in the long winter evenings.”

“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.”

“Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.”

“It's a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids.”

“You see? I know where every single book used to be in the library.' She pointed to the shelf opposite. 'Over there was, which was a hugely popular fishing book and one of a series, I believe.”

“You mean old books?"

"Stories written before space travel but about space travel."

"How could there have been stories about space travel before --"

"The writers," Pris said, "made it up.”

“Look, don’t get me wrong. I worship the ground this guy walks on. I’m excited to meet him tonight. I’m dying to meet him tonight. If he wanted to carry me off and make me his love slave, I’d do it, so long as I got advance copies of his books.”

“Books fall open, you fall in. When you climb out again, you're a bit larger than you used to be.”

“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.”

“This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.”

“Does G get angry because it follows F in the alphabet? Does page 68 in a book start a revolution because it follows 67?”

“If you want a happy ending, it just depends on where you close the book!”

“Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.”

“I wanted to read all these books, but I would have to have been in a rest home or something to do that (p. 37,).”

“If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one's chances of survival increase with each book one reads.”

“College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.”

“Remember to get the weather in your damn book--weather is very important.”

“If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.”

“I learn more from books than from people”

“the Real-World was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor.”

“She thought of the library, so shining white and new; the rows and rows of unread books; the bliss of unhurried sojourns there and of going out to a restaurant, alone, to eat.”

“This was but a prelude;
where books are burnt
human-beings will be burnt
in the end”

“I am always glad when any of my books can be put into an inexpensive edition, because I like to think that any people who might wish to read them can do so. Surely books ought to be within reach of everybody.”

“Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.”

“A book is a loaded gun.”

“There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.”

“In spite of the seven thousand books of expert advice, the right way to disciplne a child is still a mystery to most fathers and… mothers Only your grandmother and Genghis Khan know how to do it.”

“None of [the books are] worth reading. There are no fairy tales, no faerie tails, no sword-swinging princesses or lightning-throwing gods.”

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. … We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it.”

“When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.”

“You need me as much as I need you. That makes us equal partners in my book.
Well, your book is just wrong.”

“‎'All we need is a book,' roared Leslie; 'don't panic, hit 'em with a book.”

“The great authors were great readers, and one way to understand them is to read the books they read.”

“Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.”

“In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.”

“You should spend more time reading the Good Book and less reading all those novels. What are you going to tell the Lord on Judgement Day when He asks you why you didn't read your bible? Hmm?"I said. To myself.”

“It's not what you will get out of the books that is so enriching - it is what the books will get out of you that will ultimately change your life”

“My books promised me that life wasn’t just made up of workday tasks and prosaic things. The world is bigger and more colorful and more important than that.”

“My own great-grandfather, who said simply enough, "No wicked man could write such a book as this; and no good man would write it unless it were true and he were commanded of God to do so.”

“Everybody thinks I'm this delicate little girl. But you can't tell a book by it's cover.' To which she added a momentary smile.”

“Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. The things I have learned and the things I have been taught seem of ridiculously little importance compared with their "large loves and heavenly charities."”

“When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.”

“If I'd learnt one thing from travelling, it was that the way to get things done was to go ahead and do them. Don't talk about going to Borneo. Book a ticket, get a visa, pack a bag, and it just happens.”

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.”

“Religious moderation is the direct result of taking scripture less and less seriously. So why not take it less seriously still? Why not admit the the Bible is merely a collection of imperfect books written by highly fallible human beings.”

“I enjoy books as misers enjoy treasures, because I know I can enjoy them whenever I please.”

“We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.”

“I'm not an angel, Jace," she repeated. "I don't return library books. I steal illegal music off the internet. I lie to my mom. I am.”

“When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.”

“It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”

“A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.”

“Prometheus, thief of light, giver of light, bound by the gods, must have been a book.”

“If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?”

“More like the movie where the guy meets a smart girl who wears a lot of sweaters and drinks cocoa. They talk about books and issues and kiss in the rain.”

“Of course. You get everything from books.”

“If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you don't already possess”

“There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.”

“It must be remembered that we have only heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.”

“But Neve, you can’t start a book and leave it halfway through,’ he’d said implacably. ‘It’s almost as bad as turning down the corner of the page, instead of using a bookmark.”

“OKAY. So I was going to the library every Saturday. So what? So what? It's not like I was reading books or anything.”

“I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.”