Quotes about books

page 4

“Thinking. This book contains some. Whether you try it at home is up to you.”

“The erosion of our confidence in the future is threating to destroy the Social and the Political fabric of America. The confidence that we have always had as a people, is not simply some romantic dream, or a proverb in a dusty book, that we read, just on the Fourth of July. It is the idea of which founded our nation and has guided us in our development as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else. We've always believed in a thing called, progress. We've always had a faith, that the days of our children, would be better than our own. Our people are losing that faith. Fopr the first time in the history of our country, a majority of our people believe, that the next five years, will be worse than the past five years. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the presidency as a place of honor, unitl the shock of Watergate. We've got to stop crying and start sweating. Stop talking and start walking. Working together, with our common faith, we cannot fail.”

“When you read a book as a child, it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your whole life does.”

“There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”

“Books have led some to learning and others to madness, when they swallow more than they can digest.”

“I own a book,' he thought, delighted (Paolini 291).”

“What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support,
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men. 1
Paradise Lost. Book i. Line 22.”

“Those who don't read good books have no advantage over those who can't.”

“My books piled up before me for my use waiting in space where I placed them, they haven't disappeared, time's left its remnants and qualities for me to use -- my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves.”

“I don't want no better book than what your face is.”

“Love's stories written in love's richest books.
To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes.”

“There is nothing in our book, the Qur'an, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone lays a hand on you, send him to the cemetery. That's a good religion.”

“The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.”

“No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.”

“As we expand our knowledge of good books, we shrink the circle of men whose company we appreciate.”

“One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.”

“You and I will always be friends."

"Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that.”

“Lord Illingworth: The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden.
Mrs. Allonby: It ends with Revelations.”

“Reading is my favourite occupation, when I have leisure for it and books to read.”

“A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition”

“A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful.”

“I want to talk to her. I want to have lunch with her. I want her to give me a book she just read and loved. She is my phantom limb, and I just can’t believe I’m here without her.”- on losing her best friend”

“I'm writing this book because we're all going to die”

“Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.”

“Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.”

“I see, these books are probably law books, and it is an essential part of the justice dispensed here that you should be condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance.”

“Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.”

“He helped the Librarian up. There was a red glow in the ape's eyes. It had tried to steal his books. This was probably the best proof any wizard could require that the trolleys were brainless.”

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”

“Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.”

“A thousand times good night. A thousand times the worse, to want thy light. Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books, but love from love, toward school with heavy looks.”

“The librarians were mysterious. It was said they could tell what book you needed just by looking at you, and they could take your voice away with a word.”

“When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.”

“To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.”

“Pay attention to what's happening around you. Read the book before you see the movie. Remember, though you, alone, are responsible for your own happiness, its still okay to feel responsible for someone else's. Liveto learn.”

“Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent.”

“I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.”

“Good books tell the truth, even when they're about things that never have been and never will be. They're truthful in a different way.”

“Let's buy books so as not to read them; let's go to concerts without caring to hear the music or see who's there; let's take long walks because we're sick of walking; and let's spend whole days in the country, just because it bores us.”

“Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.”

“You're either reading a book or you're not.”

“You can never, never have too many books”

“drama is a good book”

“Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way.”

“I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces.”

“The words in this book are all phooey. When you say them, your lips will make slips and back flips and your tongue may end up in Saint Looey!”

“There's no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.”

“Read day and night, devour books — these sleeping pills — not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.”

“Love's mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.”

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.”

“I decided that my existence would be one of books and silence.”

“When you sell a man a book you don't sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.”

“The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.”

“I put things down on sheets of paper and stuff them in my pockets. When I have enough, I have a book.”

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”

“For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.”

“Only my books anoint me,
and a few friends,
those who reach into my veins.”

“Quite often somebody will say, 'What year do your books take place?' and the only answer I can give is, in childhood.”

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”

“I while yet a youth wrote in a quite large volume three books of magical things, which I calledin which whatever was then erroneous because of my curious youth, now, more cautious, I wish to retract by this recantation, for formerly I spent much time and goods on these vanities.”

“A book,
a book full
of human touches,
of shirts,
a book
without loneliness, with men
and tools,
a book
is victory.”

“The book trade invented literary prizes to stimulate sales, not to reward merit.”

“Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it.”

“And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.”

“Books are a narcotic.”

“I can see he's not in your good books,' said the messenger.
'No, and if he were I would burn my library.”

“Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men.”

“That's why I call this place the Haunted Bookshop. Haunted by the ghosts of the books I haven't read. Poor uneasy spirits, they walk and walk around me. There's only one way to lay the ghost of a book, and that is to read it.”

“… a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.”

“Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone.”

“I opened a book and in I strode. Now nobody can find me.”

“The hotel shop only had two decent books, and I'd written both of them.”

“No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books.”

“In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.”

“I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to "I hate to read new books," and I hollered "Comrade!" to whoever owned it before me.”

“It's strange because sometimes, I read a book, and I think I am the people in the book.”

“My soul would sing of metamorphoses.
But since, o gods, you were the source of these
bodies becoming other bodies, breathe
your breath into my book of changes: may
the song I sing be seamless as its way
weaves from the world's beginning to our day.”

“Books must be treated with respect, we feel that in our bones, because words have power. Bring enough words together they can bend space and time.”

“Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader ("Good Readers and Good Writers", p. 3).”

“I cannot choose one hundred best books because I have only written five”

“We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

“And what of Nature itself, you say – that callous and cruel engine, red in tooth and fang? Well, it is not so much of an engine as you think. As for "red in tooth and fang," whenever I hear the phrase or its intellectual echoes I know that some passer-by has been getting life from books.”

“Books are the most wonderful friends in the world. When you meet them and pick them up, they are always ready to give you a few ideas. When you put them down, they never get mad; when you take them up again, they seem to enrich you all the more.”

“When reading a book, be very certain that you never go past a word you do not fully understand. The only reason a person gives up a study or becomes confused or unable to learn is because he or she has gone past a word that was not understood.”

“There is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.”

“There was a time in my demented youth
When somehow I suspected that the truth
About survival after death was known
To every human being: I alone
Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy
Of books and people hid the truth from me.”

“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”

“I love everything that's old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines.”

“I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.”

“I want to do something splendid…
Something heroic or wonderful that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead…
I think I shall write books.”

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”

“All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing.”

“I leafed through the pages, inhaling the enchanted scent of promise that comes with all new books, and stopped to read the start of a sentence that caught my eye.”

“Your face, my thane, is as a book where men
May read strange matters. To beguile the time,
Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye,
Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower,
But be the serpent under't.”

“The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.”

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”

“The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That's why we go to movies and say, "Oh, the book is better.”

“When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.”

“Some like to believe it's the book that chooses the person.”