Quotes about books
page 54

“I think TV series, games, and general media have changed the way we tell stories. But books will remain. Technology has changed all the others arts: painting, theater, dancing, cinema, music. But literature is an absolutely intimate process between the writer’s voice and the reader’s mind, it is something so natural and strong that the only thing that technology could change is its support, its format, for example, if we read from a book or from an e-reader. But that doesn’t change the heart of literature.”

Samanta Schweblin (1978) Argentine writer

On the staying power of literature in “Samanta Schweblin on Revealing Darkness Through Fiction” https://lithub.com/samanta-schweblin-on-revealing-darkness-through-fiction/ in LitHub (2017 Jan 12)

Painting, Reading, Strong, Game

“I began to think about its double nature: on the one hand you have an organ in your body and on the other you have a symbol of love. From that time I started to pursue the image of a heart crossing the night from one body to another. It is a simple narrative structure but it’s open to a lot of things. I had the intuition that this book could give form to my intimate experience of death.”

Maylis de Kerangal (1967) French writer

On the heart as the focus for her book Mend the Living in “‘What is a heart? You have an organ in your body and you have a symbol of love’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/28/maylis-de-kerangal-interview-wellcome-prize-writing in The Guardian (2017 Apr 28)

Time, Night, Making love, Heart

“Boredom often stems from the lack of desire to reinvent oneself. To become a Renaissance man or woman, for instance, can take an eternity. Understandably, not everyone wants to be a polymath, but there are so many great books to read, places to visit, ideas to share, new hobbies to discover, and charities to volunteer for – the bucket list is practically endless.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

The Transhumanism Handbook, 2019

Idea, Reading, Understanding

“I never intended to write solely about Arab characters, or even primarily about them, but because they were such a big part of my first two novels and my memoir, people reckoned that was my main literary terrain. It wasn’t really a deliberate decision to move away from Arab characters in my later books, but more a desire to paint on a broader canvas, one that was closer to my day-to-day experience.”

Diana Abu-Jaber (1960) Novelist, short story writer, teacher

On character writing in “‘America is not the Final Word:’ An Interview with Diana Abu-Jaber” https://solsticelitmag.org/blog/america-not-final-word-interview-diana-abu-jaber/ in Solstice

Painting, People, Decision, Parting

“The streak of rationality and questioning tradition too came early to him. Once a multicoloured book on the shelf at home caught his attention and he decided to read it, despite it being in Sanskrit, of which he understood very little. When Damodarpant discovered that his young son was reading the Aranyaka s he was enraged. There was a superstition that reading the Aranyaka s at home forebodes evil for the reader’s worldly life and they needed to be read in seclusion in the woods. This left a lasting question in Vinayak’s mind. How could someone as intelligent as his father believe in such superstitions?, he wondered. Mocking the belief, he continued reading the book without anyone’s knowledge and proved to himself that this was just a fanciful and concocted tale.”

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) Indian pro-independence activist,lawyer, politician, poet, writer and playwright

Vikram Sampath - Savarkar, Echoes from a Forgotten Past

Home, Reading, Question, Intelligence

“I went vegetarian at about 5 years old when I visited a Dude Ranch with my family and saw a rodeo. It was traumatizing and I made a conscious decision at that age to never eat animals again. When I started middle school, I read a book that exposed a lot of the truth about the food industry and encouraged a healthful lifestyle through a guide to living vegan. It was a mostly simple transition that made me feel so much better about myself, inside and out. … For as long I can remember, acting and animal activism have made me feel alive and purposeful … I would love to see more organizations coming together. Sometimes it’s tricky to understand everyone’s opinions. We all have so many of the same intentions, it’d be awesome to see more support for one another amongst the community.”

Daniella Monet (1989) American actress, singer and dancer

"Celebs Who Love Veg: Our Interview with Daniella Monet", LoveVeg.com (1 March 2019) https://loveveg.com/celebs-who-love-veg-our-interview-with-daniella-monet/.

School, Family, Reading, Food

“It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books; I wish I had enough sense to see ahead thirty years ago, and like some of the Elizabethans, not signed them. It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Letter to Malcolm Cowley (11 February 1949), quoted in William Faulkner : A Critical Essay (1970) by Martin Jarrett-Kerr, p. 46; also published in Selected Letters of William Faulkner (1978) by Joseph Blotner, p. 286

History, Sense, Life, Effort

“When we appreciate how natural it is for man to strive to be a hero, how deeply it goes in his evolutionary and organismic constitution, how openly he shows it as a child, then it is all the more curious how ignorant most of us are, consciously, of what we really want and need. In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it. Tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush. We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope. Occasionally someone admits that he takes his heroism seriously, which gives most of us a chill, as did U.S. Congressman Mendel Rivers, who fed appropriations to the military machine and said he was the most powerful man since Julius Caesar. We may shudder at the crassness of earthly heroism, of both Caesar and his imitators, but the fault is not theirs, it is in the way society sets up its hero system and in the people it allows to fill its roles. The urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it honest. For everyone to admit it would probably release such pent-up force as to be devastating to societies as they now are.”

Ernest Becker book The Denial of Death

The Recasting of Some Basic Psychoanalytic Ideas
The Denial of Death (1973)

Home, Time, Children, People

“The impact of Jesus on human history is so obvious and so enormous that few people would question his placement near the top of this list. Indeed, the more likely question is why Jesus, who is the inspiration for the most influential religion in history, has not been placed first. There is no question that Christianity, over the course of time, has had far more adherents than any other religion. However, it is not that relative influence of different religions that is being estimated in this book, but rather the relative influence of individual men. Christianity, unlike Islam, was not founded by a single person but by two people —Jesus and St. Paul— and the principal credit for its development must, therefore, be apportioned between those two figures.”

Michael H. Hart book The 100

about Jesus, The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History, p.17

Religion, Time, History, Question

“Alas, is it your fault, or that of the Creator? Why were you made the angel with the infallible gaze, by whose aid I should make the universe submit? Why is it that you are the one to read a soul through its bodily envelope as one may read a book through a glass! Because you are an angel of purity, Lorenza, and nothing throws a shadow upon your soul. In your radiant and immaculate bosom the divine spark may be enshrined, a place without sullying where it may fitly nestle. You are a seer because you are blameless, Lorenza.”

Alessandro Cagliostro (1743–1795) Italian occultist

Balsamo the Magician (or The Memoirs of a Physician) by Alex. Dumas (1891)

Soul, Reading, Universe, Angels

“By the time I get to coloring it’s usually the last step and I’m a little creatively tapped out. So I don’t spend a ton of time building a concept for the coloring, but I do love seeing things take final form. A lot of it is thinking about the scene, what the mood is, and how to light it. By that point I’ve spent enough time with the book I already know what I want to achieve when I get to it.”

Jen Wang (1984) American comics artist

On putting the final touches to her images in “The Prince and the Dressmaker’s Jen Wang Talks High-School Habits, Sensitive Storytelling & Her Favorite Princesses” https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/02/the-prince-and-the-dressmakers-jen-wang-talks-high.html in Paste Magazine (2018 Feb 13)

Time, Light, Thinking, Color

“I wrote this book for my teenage self, so it’s all about themes that were important to my young self: questioning your identity and gender, but also your creative aspirations and the person you want to be.”

Jen Wang (1984) American comics artist

On her graphic novel The Prince and the Dressmaker in “Exclusive Interview & Graphic Novel Excerpt: Jen Wang’s The Prince and the Dressmaker” https://www.bookish.com/articles/jen-wang-prince-dressmaker/ in Bookish (2018 Feb 8)

Self-confidence, Personality, Question

“BERISH: I distrust miracles. They exist only in books, and books say anything.”

Elie Wiesel The Trial of God

Act I (p. 40)
The Trial of God (1979)

“I always used to say strongly that I was not an autobiographical writer, so strongly it was clearly suspicious…Even without this book, I can now say that is just a lie.”

Yiyun Li (1972) Chinese American writer

On her book Dear Friend in “Yiyun Li: ‘I used to say that I was not an autobiographical writer – that was a lie’” https://www.thenation.com/article/laila-lalami-interview-the-other-americans/ in The Guardian (2017 Feb 24)

Lie

“I feel it is something that I have to do for my children, to be able to give them a book that has kids like them in it, just incidentally. They are not the side character, they are not there as a novelty, they are just the characters. It shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is. People need to see themselves reflected in the culture around them.”

Diana Evans (1971) British novelist

On what she aims to convey in her writings in “Diana Evans: 'There's a ruthlessness in me towards writing'” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/19/diana-evans-interview-ordinary-people in The Guardian (2018 Mar 19)

Feeling, Children, People

“I always enjoyed doing monster books. Monster books gave me the opportunity to draw things out of the ordinary. Monster books were a challenge — what kind of monster would fascinate people? I couldn’t draw anything that was too outlandish or too horrible. I never did that. What I did draw was something intriguing. There was something about this monster that you could live with. If you saw him you wouldn’t faint dead away. There was nothing disgusting in his demeanor. There was nothing about him that repelled you. My monsters were lovable monsters.”

Jack Kirby (1917–1994) American comic book artist, writer and editor

1990, Gary Groth interview

Drawing, People, Dead

“How I began to write is different than how I became a writer. They are two different things. Many people write but they do not become writers. To become a writer is a job. It involves planning and it affects all parts of your life. Even what you eat—being a writer means not eating food with too much rich sauce to avoid taking a long afternoon nap! It’s like being a professional athlete. And a writer must choose between being a sprinter who writes a book, and being a writer who creates an oeuvre. If you want to create an oeuvre, you have to be careful not to put all your energy into the first book. You have to have a vision for the long term...”

Dany Laferrière (1953) Haitian Canadian novelist and journalist

On how he became a writer in “An Interview with Dany Laferrière” https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/an-interview-with-dany-laferriere-jessie-chaffee (WWB Daily, 2016)

Food, People, Life, Parting

“The relationship between reader and writer in fiction is steeped in vulnerabilities. It really does require trust and faith because some books have the power to transform people. You feel like you can never go back, look at the world in the same way again. And that grand ambition is what I hope to do with my books because at the heart of my writing is a passion for telling stories of the oppressed, the marginalized, and the misunderstood.”

Randa Abdel-Fattah (1979) contemporary Australian writer of novels for young adults

On being a writer in “Both Freedom and Constraint: An Interview with Randa Abdel-Fattah” https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/both-freedom-and-constraint-an-interview-with in Words Without Borders (May 2015)

Faith, Hope, Heart, People

“As writers, of course we’re interested in human beings, human stories, human trauma, and all that is very compelling for readers. But when we write these powerful stories about individual people, we have the illusion that we’ve made a difference. And of course we have—people read the books, they’re touched emotionally by these kinds of stories, and that’s great. But to the extent that the stories that we’re telling are about people who are weaker, in some way—they come from a small country, or a forcibly removed population, they’re underrepresented collectively—individual stories don’t change the conditions that produce those refugees in the first place…”

Viet Thanh Nguyen (1971) American author of fiction

On writers overestimating the difference that their writings make in “An interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen” https://www.asymptotejournal.com/interview/an-interview-with-viet-thanh-nguyen/ in Asymptote Magazine

Reading, Country, People, Way

“I never taught of book burning, no matter how they were silly, mendacious or propaganda-like because I guide myself by the principle that every book burning was just an introduction to burning (of people) at the stake.”

Ivica Šola (1968) Croatian theologian, communication scientist, columnist and university professor.

Quoted in column "O Bleiburgu i Titu očito može i bez fusnota: pa nećemo se valjda zamarati tamo nekim izvorima" https://www.slobodnadalmacija.hr/misljenja/agora/clanak/id/597177/o-bleiburgu-i-titu-ocito-moze-i-bez-fusnota-pa-necemo-se-valjda-zamarati-tamo-nekim-izvorima in Slobodna Dalmacija, 4th April 2019.

People

“As I have already mentioned in the introduction to this volume, this handbook is not destined to be the steppingstone in the search after wealth and honor, but it has to serve the purpose of studying Man the microcosm in relation to the macrocosmic Universe together with their laws... He who stands upon the purely materialistic position, an unbeliever in religious matters, ignoring supernatural phenomena and only concerned in material interests, undoubtedly will regard this book as sheer nonsense, and I am not purposed to convert such people to any faith or to change their ideas. This work has exclusively been written for those who seek...”

Franz Bardon book Initiation Into Hermetics

Source: Initiation Into Hermetics (1956), p. 169.

Faith, Study, Law, Search

“In the first days of psychic training, let us deal with the practical part of introspection or self-knowledge. Arrange for a magic diary and enter all the bad sides of your soul into it. This diary is for your own use only, and must not be shown to anybody else. It represents the so-called control book for you. In the self-control of your failures, habits, passions, instincts and other ugly character traits, you have to observe a hard and severe attitude towards yourself. Be merciless towards yourself and do not embellish any of your failures and deficiencies. Think about yourself in quiet meditation, put yourself back into different situations of your past and remember how you behaved then and what mistakes or failures occurred in the various situations. Make notes of all your weaknesses, down to the finest nuances and variations. The more you are discovering, all the better for you. Nothing must remain hidden, nothing unrevealed, however insignificant or great your faults or frailties may be...”

Franz Bardon book Initiation Into Hermetics

Source: Initiation Into Hermetics (1956), p. 35

Soul, Past, Bad luck, Knowledge

“There have been many complaints of people interested in the occult sciences that they had never got any chance at all to be initiated by a personal master or leader (guru). Therefore only people endowed with exceptional faculties, a poor preferred minority seemed to be able to gain this sublime knowledge. Thus a great many of serious seekers of the truth had to go through piles of books just to catch one pearl of it now and again. The one, however, who is earnestly interested in his progress and does not pursue this sacred wisdom from sheer curiosity or else is yearning to satisfy his own lust, will find the right leader to initiate him in this book. No incarnate adept, however high his rank may be, can give the disciple more for his start than the present book does. If both the honest trainee and the attentive reader will find in this book all they have been searching for in vain all the years, then the book has fulfilled its purpose completely.”

Franz Bardon book Initiation Into Hermetics

Introduction p. 8.
Initiation Into Hermetics (1956)

Chance, Search, Personality, People

“The Dream, as I now know, is not best served by making parodies of it, and it does not greatly matter after all whether a book be an epic or a directory. What really matters is that there is so much faith and love and kindliness which we can share with and provoke in others, and that by cleanly, simple, generous living we approach perfection in the highest and most lovely of all arts.... But you, I think, have always comprehended this.”

James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) American author

"Auctorial Induction"
The Certain Hour (1916)

Faith, Dreams, Art, Perfection

“A line by Thomas à Kempis which perhaps could be used as a motto sometime. He says of Paul: Therefore he turned everything over to God, who knows all, and defended himself solely by means of patience and humility.... He did defend himself now and then so that the weak would not be offended by his silence. Book III, chapter 36, para. 2, or in my little edition, p. 131.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

JP X2A 167
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s

Patience, Silence, God

“Let us note finally that on this issue, Audrey’s book is representative of a wider concern to whitewash Aurangzeb. In their all-out war on Hinduism and specific Hindu ideas, the South Asia scholars tend to practise Groupthink; there is rarely anything original, they only outdo each other in how daring they can make their own articulation of ever the same position.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2010s, Hindu Dharma and the Culture Wars (2019)

War, Idea, Making love

“Since quoting the Quran may get this book banned, I will merely give the verse numbers…”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

1990s, Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society (1991)

Quotes

“Books are the true levelers. They give to all who will faithfully use them the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race. No matter how poor I am. No matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling. If the Sacred Writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof, … I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Self-Culture (1838)

Time

“Christian, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ so long as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.”

Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Life, Christ

“Piketty ends Capital in the Twenty-First Century with a call to arms — a call, in particular, for wealth taxes, global if possible, to restrain the growing power of inherited wealth. It’s easy to be cynical about the prospects for anything of the kind. But surely Piketty’s masterly diagnosis of where we are and where we’re heading makes such a thing considerably more likely. So Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an extremely important book on all fronts. Piketty has transformed our economic discourse; we’ll never talk about wealth and inequality the same way we used to.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

"Why We’re in a New Gilded Age", The New York Review of Books (May 8, 2014)
The New York Review of Books articles

Way, Wealth, Making love

“Chârvâkas, a very ancient sect in India, were rank materialists. They have died out now, and most of their books are lost. They claimed that the soul, being the product of the body and its forces, died with it; that there was no proof of its further existence. They denied inferential knowledge accepting only perception by the senses.”

Charvaka An unorthodox school of Hindu philosophy

Swami Vivekananda as recorded in the complete works of Swami Vivekananda https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Complete_Works_of_Swami_Vivekananda/Volume_7/Inspired_Talks/Friday,_July_5.

Knowledge, Soul, Sense

“An array of puns, asides and (sometimes off-key) jokes makes the book more bulky and somewhat anecdotal, but also entertaining to read.”

Wendy Doniger (1940) American Indologist

Shome, Shubhodeep (2012), "Review of The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger", South Asia Research, 32: 77–79
The Hindus' (2009), About her book 'The Hindus

Reading, Making love

“Long before Doniger’s book was pulped, an event which the secularists have eagerly highlighted, her book was replied to in detail by Vishal Agarwal… He showed that she was either wrong or unmistakably biased in hundreds of passages. For a lifelong tenant of a very prestigious Indology chair, it is shameful that she could deliver such substandard work. But the fact that her work was anything but scholarly, has been carefully hidden by the secularists, including in the present article. Yet the fact that such a bad book was universally applauded and even earmarked for an Indian award, tells you a lot about the power equation, with the anti-Hindu forces jubilantly on top.”

Wendy Doniger (1940) American Indologist

Koenraad Elst, On Modi Time : Merits And Flaws of Hindu Activism In Its Day Of Incumbency – 2015 Ch 17
The Hindus' (2009), About her book 'The Hindus

Universe, Bad luck

“I like to meet as many fans as possible. A number of them have become personal friends. Without the convention I would never see them. I owe a lot to my fans, many of whom have bought my books and remained faithful to me over the years. So I like to put on an enjoyable day for all and I plan to continue with it for as long as possible.”

Guy N. Smith (1939–2020) British writer

DLS Reviews Interview https://www.dlsreviews.com/guy-n-smith-interview-001-march-2015.php (March 20, 2015)

Personality, Faith

“I have intentionally killed off a few people in my books, bullies who made life miserable for me in my schooldays and early teens when I couldn’t fight back. I have no plans to kill off any more – they are all dead now within my pages! However, I have a particular dislike of extremism. Everybody is entitled to their own opinion, right or wrong. When anybody tries to shove their opinion down my throat as though their beliefs are gospel, it makes me angry.”

Guy N. Smith (1939–2020) British writer

Booksqawk Interview https://www.guynsmith.com/2014/10/booksqawk-interview/ (October 31, 2014)

Dead, People, Fight, Life

“He could speak several Indian and foreign languages, he served under both Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv, as foreign, defence and home minister. His political activism dated back to the struggle for independence. also a poet and writer and after his retirement he wrote a book following the career of a person rising through the ranks of Indian politics.”

P. V. Narasimha Rao (1921–2004) Indian politician

BBC in: "Narasimha Rao - a reforming PM".

Home, Personality

“I want to write to the Guinness Book of World Records that Manmohan Singh is the only Prime Minister of India among the eleven Prime Ministers that the country had who has not won even a municipal election. What is he going to tell me? Manmohan Singh is a nominated Prime Minister. He is not a representative of the people of India.”

Manmohan Singh (1932) 13th Prime Minister of India

Natwar Singh, former External Affairs Minister, "Manmohan hasn't even won an election: Natwar" http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Manmohan-hasnt-even-won-an-election-Natwar/articleshow/1878602.cms, The Times of India (9 August 2009)

World, People, Country

“My brother was always glued to his books, an ardent reader and an educationist.”

Manmohan Singh (1932) 13th Prime Minister of India

Surjit Singh, his younger brother, as quoted in "Singh brothers see bright future for economy" http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2004-05-20/news/27389027_1_manmohan-singh-surjit-singh-big-brother, The Economic Times (20 May 2004)

“Deep in my psyche, I am no different than any American—I have a greater command of their language than they do. I am a composite of all of the heroines in the books I’ve read—legendary, mythological, fictional ones. I wonder if I am real? I want to be!”

Estela Portillo-Trambley (1936–1998) American writer

On how she would describe herself (as quoted in the book Chicana Ways: Conversations with Ten Chicana Writers https://books.google.com/books?id=yq0PkmCGWoEC&pg=PA205&lpg=PA205&dq)

Reading

“Compressing 13,000 years of history on all continents into a 400-page book works out to an average of about one page per continent per 150 years, making brevity and simplification inevitable. Yet the compression brings a compensating benefit: long-term comparisons of regions yield insights that cannot be won from short-term studies of single societies.”

Jared Diamond book Guns, Germs, and Steel

Source: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), p. 408

Study, History, Making love

“I had been reading Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow, which talks about mass incarceration and mass incarceration being the new Jim Crow. But I really believe education is also the new Jim Crow right now because there is so much segregation in education, and there’s an excessive system of have and have-nots. So I was first and foremost interested in exploring the school-to-prison pipeline because of how personally it affected some people in my life.”

Dominique Morisseau (1978) actor and playwright

On how she believes the educational system echoes some of the points that Michelle Alexander raised in “An Interview with Dominique Morisseau” https://www.theintervalny.com/interviews/2017/07/an-interview-with-dominique-morisseau/ in The Interval (2017 Jul 25)

School, Reading, Personality, People

“I believe it’s something that happens when one is around art, and when one is close to books: they seep into your system, into your blood, and start to activate something in your life. We start living in the way that some of these characters live, with some sense of their sensibility. It’s almost as if the reader becomes the writer and the writer becomes the reader…”

Nilo Cruz (1960) American playwright

On how a written work may speak to you in “Nilo Cruz by Emily Mann” https://bombmagazine.org/articles/nilo-cruz/ in BOMB Magazine (2004 Jan 1)

Art, Sense, Way, Life

“Unlike other comic book creators who were given either stateside or way-behind-lines assignments, and perhaps because Kirby understood Yiddish, the Jewish German dialect spoken by his family, he was sent as a scout behind enemy lines to draw maps. He endured and survived many harrowing violent experiences during his service, almost losing his feet to trench foot. He had no time for fascists or racists.”

Jack Kirby (1917–1994) American comic book artist, writer and editor

Randolph Hoppe, as qtd in Arturo Garcia, "Would Captain America’s Co-Creator Punch Nazis?" https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/01/24/captain-americas-co-creator-punch-nazis/, Snopes, (24 January 2017). About

Family, Drawing, Time, Scouting

“Suppose a nation in some distant region should take the Bible for their only law book and every member should regulate his conduct by the precepts there exhibited.... What a Eutopia - What a Paradise would this region be!”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

22 February 1756
1750s, Diaries (1750s-1790s)

Distant, Law

“Needless to say, adventure characters should be just one facet of videogaming. In the same way a painting allows us to gaze upon the faces and souls of people from another age, or a book permits us to linger on the thoughts of great figures from history and fiction, videogames can expand our awareness of the world as it is, was, or might be.”

Adam West (1928–2017) American actor

"The Keyboard: Guest Editorials", Videogaming Illustrated, (July 1983), p. 6

Soul, Painting, History, People

“They’re outside the Nicene Creed and they’re not actually Christians, although they think they are—like the Mormons. But while the Book of Mormon is just a nineteenth-century fabrication there’s stuff in here that’s, uh, disturbing. Very disturbing, Bob.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012), Chapter 12, “With a Bible and a Gun” (p. 240)

Thinking

“Ray is clearly anguished, Persephone realizes; he believes this stuff with all his soul and all his guts. He believes in the viral metaphor of a bronze-age rabble-rouser from the Levant, as interpreted by his syncretist followers scattered throughout the Roman Empire. He believes in heaven and hell as real, literally existing destinations you can book an airline ticket to. He believes salvation is a deterministic, card-punching exercise in holding faith in the right god; believes that there’s a coming End of Time in which his godhead will return to Earth, reading minds and separating the sheep from the goats. No need to ask why his God might prescribe eternal torture for the unbelievers, no need to engage with the problem of free will—Schiller’s eschatology is either brutally truncated or sublimely simple, depending on viewpoint. One thing it isn’t is nuanced.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012), Chapter 9, “Speaking in Tongues” (p. 159)

God, Faith, Time, Soul

“We’re living through the end times, but not in any Biblical sense—the religions of the book have got their eschatology laughably wrong.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012), Chapter 6, “Jet Lag” (p. 110)

Religion, Sense, Time

“Writing for TV was a huge influence on this book, partly because you realize in casting what a vast gap there was between who people are and who they play. You sometimes see Shakespearan trained actors playing janitors. And at the same time, I’ve seen actresses who are really well known for playing wealthy, super cultured women come in and they are well, let’s just say the exact opposite.”

Veronica Chambers (1970) writer

On how writing for television influenced her novel The Go-Between in “Author Interview: Veronica Chambers questions Mexican immigrant stereotypes in ‘The Go-Between’” https://www.hypable.com/author-interview-veronica-chambers-the-go-between/ in Hypable (2017 May 9)

Time, People, Training, Women

“I wrote the book just after Zimbabwe’s independence to encourage young Zimbabweans to develop themselves in spite of the challenges they would face doing so. There was also a lot of talk after independence of going back to one’s cultural roots. I wanted to interrogate that idea by examining aspects of the culture we were being told to go back to that affected women in my environment negatively. I was a newly minted feminist at the time and very eager. I also wanted to look at the ongoing effects of colonialism in the new dispensation. At the same time, I hoped to write a book that would be eminently readable, with recognizable characters.”

Tsitsi Dangarembga (1959) Zimbabwean author and filmmaker

On what she had hoped to convey with her first novel Nervous Conditions in “A Crisis of Personhood: Tsitsi Dangarembga by Bhakti Shringarpure” https://bombmagazine.org/articles/tsitsi-dangaremgba/ in BOMB Magazine (2019 Sep 27)

Time, Hope, Idea, Women

“The skills I had learned for prose didn’t work in film. Those telling details, they’re completely different. Or the fact of these inner monologues in which you can write a whole book. Whereas prose is teasing out, film is stripping down, concentrating and compacting. I found I could not learn the one while doing the other. So it was a big struggle, actually. It took me years.”

Tsitsi Dangarembga (1959) Zimbabwean author and filmmaker

On adjusting to film writing in “An Interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga: An excerpt” https://brickmag.com/an-interview-with-tsitsi-dangarembga/ in Brick Magazine (December 2012)

Learning

“The reason why so few good books are written is, that so few people who can write know anything. In general an author has always lived in a room, has read books, has cultivated science, is acquainted with the style and sentiments of the best authors, but he is out of the way of employing his own eyes and ears. He has nothing to hear and nothing to see. His life is a vacuum.”

Walter Bagehot (1826–1877) British journalist, businessman, and essayist

[Morgan, Forrest, Shakespeare—the Man, published in the Prospective Review, July 1853, The works of Walter Bagehot, vol. 1, 1891, Hartford, Connecticut, Travelers Insurance Company, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101064786716;view=1up;seq=373, 265–266 of 255–302]
Shakespeare—the Man (1853)

Reading, People, Way, Science

“I feared his visit. I was twenty-four, and the religious revival within myself was at its height. Earlier that summer, I had discovered Kierkegaard, and each week I brought back to the apartment one more of the Princeton University Press’s elegant and expensive editions of his works. They were beautiful books, sometimes very thick, sometimes very thin, always typographically exhilarating, with their welter of title pages, subheads, epigraphs, emphatic italics, italicized catchwords taken from German philosophy and too subtle for translation, translator’s prefaces and footnotes, and Kierkegaard’s own endless footnotes, blanketing pages at a time as, crippled, agonized by distinctions, he scribbled on and on, heaping irony on irony, curse on curse, gnashing, sneering, praising Jehovah in the privacy of his empty home in Copenhagen. The demons with which he wrestled—Hegel and his avatars—were unknown to me, so Kierkegaard at his desk seemed to me to be writhing in the clutches of phantoms, slapping at silent mosquitoes, twisting furiously to confront presences that were not there.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

The Astronomer by John Updike from Pigeon Feathers: and other stories p. 125 1959, 1962 Ballantine Books

Home, Time, Beauty, Universe

“The Venetians invented the income tax, statistical science, the floating of government stock, state censorship of books, anonymous denunciations (the Bocca del Leone), the gambling casino, and the Ghetto.”

Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) American writer

Source: Venice Observed (1956), Ch. 7

Science

“The Universal Kinship means the kinship of all the inhabitants of the planet Earth. Whether they came into existence among the waters or among desert sands, in a hole in the earth, in the hollow of a tree, or in a palace; whether they build nests or empires; whether they swim, fly, crawl, or ambulate; and whether they realise it or not, they are all related, physically, mentally, morally—this is the thesis of this book. But since man is the most gifted and influential of animals, and since his relationship with other animals is more important and more reluctantly recognised than any other, the chief purpose of these pages is to prove and interpret the kinship, of the human species with the other species of animals.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

The Universal Kinship (1906), Preface

Tree, Universe, Animals, Water

“Much of the vagueness of the human mind is due to the fact that the mind is largely composed of material derived second-hand from books. The ideas are not read.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"Human Nature is Defective", speech to the Young People's Socialist League, The Chicago Tribune, 20 Oct. 1910

Idea, Reading

“Your old friend Congressman Hartley of the Taft Hartley team … has written a book … The title of this book is Our New National Labor Policy, the Taft-Hartley Act and the Next Steps.”

Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)

Get that: "The Next Steps" … They're going even further! … The Republicans favor a minimum wage — the smaller the minimum the better.
Harry Truman at Akron (11 October 1948), Good Old Harry

“In economics, because everybody seemed to find it necessary to attack and condemn Karl Marx in their writings, I sought out his book, and although he kept me with a headache, I took him my authority. I was not prepared to understand him, but I was able to see in him a thoroughgoing critique of and condemnation of capitalism. It was like taking medicine for me to find that, indeed, American capitalism deserved all th hatred and contempt that I felt for it in my heart.”

Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998) American activist

"On Becoming"
1960s, Soul on Ice (1968)

Heart, Understanding

“From the cradle to the grave all our actions are guided by this principle. Open any book on sociology or jurisprudence, and you will find there the Government, its organization, its acts, filling so large a place that we ome to believe that there is nothing outside the Government and the world of statesmen.”

Peter Kropotkin book The Conquest of Bread

Source: The Conquest of Bread (1892), Ch. 3 : Anarchist Communism, p. 79

World

“All those movements which took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and which had the Reformation as their main expression and result should be analyzed as a great crisis of the Western experience of subjectivity and a revolt against the kind of religious and moral power which gave form, during the Middle Ages, to this subjectivity. The need to take a direct part in spiritual life, in the work of salvation, in the truth which lies in the Book—all that was a struggle for a new subjectivity.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Source: "The Subject and Power" (1982), p. 782

Truth, Age, Life, Parting

“Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came the human beings, they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate – for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.”

Albert Camus book The Fall

The Fall (1956)

Reading, Reality, Love, Life

“We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two elements, having two sets of faculties, the particular and the catholic. We adjust our instrument for general observation, and sweep the heavens as easily as we pick out a single figure in the terrestrial landscape. We are practically skilful in detecting elements, for which we have no place in our theory, and no name. Thus we are very sensible of an atmospheric influence in men and in bodies of men, not accounted for in an arithmetical addition of all their measurable properties. There is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society. England, strong, punctual, practical, well-spoken England, I should not find, if I should go to the island to seek it. In the parliament, in the playhouse, at dinner-tables, I might see a great number of rich, ignorant, book-read, conventional, proud men, — many old women, — and not anywhere the Englishman who made the good speeches, combined the accurate engines, and did the bold and nervous deeds. It is even worse in America, where, from the intellectual quickness of the race, the genius of the country is more splendid in its promise, and more slight in its performance.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Nominalist and Realist

Reading, Country, Strong, Women

“I therefore believe that the politics of the left and centre of this country are frozen in an out-of-date mould which is bad for the political and economic health of Britain and increasingly inhibiting for those who live within the mould. Can it be broken? … There was once a book, more famous for its title than for its contents, called the Strange Death of Liberal England.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

That death caught people rather unawares. Do not discount the possibility that in a few years time someone may be able to write at least equally convincingly of the strange and rapid revival of liberal social democratic Britain.
Speech to the Parliamentary Press Gallery (9 June 1980), quoted in The Times (10 June 1980), p. 2
1980s

Country, Bad luck, Health, Death

“Let us be on the side of those who want people to be free to live their own lives, to make their own mistakes, and to decide, in an adult way and provided they do not infringe the rights of others, the code by which they wish to live; and on the side of experiment and brightness, of better buildings and better food, of better music (jazz as well as Bach) and better books, of fuller lives and greater freedom. In the long run these things will be more important than the most perfect of economic policies.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

The Labour Case (Penguin, 1959), p. 146
1950s

Freedom, Food, People, Music

“The Bible is the best of all books, for it is the word of God and teaches us the way to be happy in this world and in the next.”

John Jay (1745–1829) American politician and a founding father of the United States

Continue therefore to read it and to regulate your life by its precepts.
Letter to Peter Augustus Jay, April 9, 1784.
1780s

World, God, Way, Happiness

“You teacher is a leftist? Tell her to read the book The Suffocated Truth.”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

Just read it. There are facts, not the blah blah blah of the left. Telling students to read a book by Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, dictatorship-era torturer, in Brasília, on 30 September 2019. Bolsonaro tells students to read book by dictatorship-era torturer https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/30/bolsonaro-tells-students-to-read-book-by-dictatorship-era-torturer. The Guardian (30 September 2019).

Truth, Reading, Teachers

“Around the time that I recorded the first Foo Fighters tape, I was reading a lot of books on UFO’s. … So, since I had recorded the first record by myself, playing all the instruments, but I wanted people to think that it was a group, I figured that FOO FIGHTERS - WW2 term for UFO’s - might lead people to believe that it was more than just one guy. Silly, huh? Had I actually considered this to be a career, I probably would have called it something else, because it’s the stupidest fucking band name in the world.”

Dave Grohl (1969) American rock musician, multi-instrumentalist, and singer-songwriter

Quoted in Clash Music, "Foo Fighters on Their Band Name" http://www.clashmusic.com/news/foo-fighters-on-their-band-name Clash Music (2010-01-11)

Time, Reading, People, Thinking

“I’m not here to tell you my troubles with the administration or — I’m happy to be on the program, because I’ve already read 96 percent of the book, and we’re investigating, but for me to start telling you what might be available and what the problems are and what the challenges are going to be, I think, is very unprofessional in an investigation of this seriousness… It’s under investigation and consideration right now. But the importance of this discussion today is critical not only to the committees — there are four committees, and how they relate to each other will come forward very shortly — but there is also the question of the media, the Fourth Estate, the press. This is now public information that, it seems to me, shouldn’t be great breaking news over a progressive news program, but this has to be investigated by the rest of the media, unless they consider this to be irrelevant or too late, or whatever reasons are, that they’re coerced or afraid themselves, too timid… I consider the relationship of the committees on the subject matter, the responsibility of the media, and the American people being brought into this discussion as the citizens, that in a representative democracy, that’s what all of us are supposed to be working on.”

John Conyers (1929–2019) American politician from Michigan

After Ron Suskind Reveals Bush Admin Ordered Iraq-9/11 Fakery, House Judiciary Chair John Conyers Opens Congressional Probe https://www.democracynow.org/2008/8/14/after_ron_suskind_reveals_bush_admin, DemocracyNow! (14 August 2008)

Democracy, Reading, Question, People

“He is one of Britain’s most successful travel writers, whose highly entertaining books elegantly combine scholarship and story-telling, trans-cultural investigations and romance.”

William Dalrymple (1965) author and historian

Jules Smith, in William Dalrymple: Critical Perspective http://literature.britishcouncil.org/william-dalrymple, 2007, British Council. About William Dalrymple

Travel, Success

“I am mimetic. If I write a book set in the seventeenth century, I write in a Baroque style. If I’m writing a book set in a newspaper office, I write in Journalese.”

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist

quoted in Marco Belpoliti, " Umberto Eco: How I Wrote my Books http://en.doppiozero.com/materiali/interviste/umberto-eco-how-I-wrote-my-books" (2015)

“The second doctrine of the Perennial Philosophy — that it is possible to know the Divine Ground by a direct intuition higher than discursive reasoning — is to be found in all the great religions of the world. A philosopher who is content merely to know about the ultimate Reality — theoretically and by hearsay — is compared by Buddha to a herdsman of other men’s cows. Mohammed uses an even homelier barnyard metaphor. For him the philosopher who has not realized his metaphysics is just an ass bearing a load of books. Christian, Hindu, Taoist teachers wrote no less emphatically about the absurd pretensions of mere learning and analytic reasoning.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Introduction to the Bhagavad-Gita (1944)

Religion, Learning, Teachers, Reality

“It’s kind of an old-fashioned book…It’s long; it has a lot of characters; it takes a big theme. It isn’t a navel-staring, dysfunctional-family thing that’s so beloved of most American writers. It’s different, but I think people probably miss those books that were written some time ago – the big book that was written with care.”

Annie Proulx (1935) American novelist, short story and non-fiction author

On her novel Barkskin in “Annie Proulx: ‘I’ve had a life. I see how slippery things can be’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/05/annie-proulx-ive-had-a-life-i-see-how-slippery-things-can-be in The Guardian (2016 Jun 5) Personal life and writing career

Family, Time, People, Thinking

“Where a story begins in the mind I am not sure—a memory of haystacks, maybe, or wheel ruts in the ruined stone, the ironies that fall out of the friction between past and present, some casual phrase overheard. But something kicks in, some powerful juxtaposition, and the whole book shapes itself up in the mind…”

Annie Proulx (1935) American novelist, short story and non-fiction author

On her writing process in in “An Interview with Annie Proulx” https://www.missourireview.com/article/an-interview-with-annie-proulx/ in The Missouri Review (1999 Mar 1) Personal life and writing career

Past, Memory

“The construction of short stories calls for a markedly different set of mind than work on a novel, and for me short stories are at once more interesting and more difficult to write than longer work. The comparative brevity of the story dictates more economical and accurate use of words and images, a limited palette of events, fewer characters, tighter dialogue, strong title and punctuation that works to move the story forward. If the writer is trying to illustrate a particular period or place, a collection of short stories is a good way to take the reader inside a house of windows, each opening onto different but related views—a kind of flip book of place, time and manners.”

Annie Proulx (1935) American novelist, short story and non-fiction author

On her short story collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories in “An Interview with Annie Proulx” https://www.missourireview.com/article/an-interview-with-annie-proulx/ in The Missouri Review (1999 Mar 1) Personal life and writing career

Time, Housing, Strong, Relation ships

“The rapid changes in the world of thought, arising from the nearness of the Coming of the World-Teacher, render useful some information as to a part of the world in which he lives, information which may, perhaps, to some extent prepare the public mind for his teachings.Be that as it may, I desire to associate myself with the statements made in this book, for the accuracy of nearly all of which I can personally vouch; and also to say on behalf of my colleague as well of myself, that the book is issued as a record of observations carefully made and carefully recorded, but not claiming any authority, nor making any demand for acceptance. It makes no claim to inspiration, but is only an honest account of things seen by the writer.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Annie Besant, Forward
The Masters and the Path (1925)

Personality, Teachers, World, Making love

“It is one of the most beautiful characteristics of Theosophy that it gives back to people in a more rational form everything which was really useful and helpful to them in the religions which they have outgrown… in this teaching as to the immortality of the soul and the life after death, Theosophy…does not put forward these great truths merely on the authority of some sacred book of long ago; in speaking of these subjects it is not dealing with pious opinions, or metaphysical speculations, but with solid, definite facts, as real and as close to us as the air we breathe or the houses we live in - facts of which many among us have constant experience - facts among which lies the daily work of some of our students, as will presently be seen.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: Invisible Helpers (1915), Ch. 1

Soul, Religion, Housing, Beauty

“According to Saeed Ramadan in his book Ḍawābiṭ al-Maṣlaḥ and Muslehuddin in The Philosophy of Islamic Law, any ruling that can be changed is restricted to custom.”

Said Ramadan (1926–1995) Egyptian political activist

22 October 2015, page 186 of Legal Maxims in Islamic Criminal Law: Theory and Applications https://books.google.ca/books?id=2bC8CgAAQBAJ&pg=PA186 by Luqman Zakariyah About

Law, Change

“The Great Approach: New Light and Life for Humanity is about the coming into the world of the Masters of Wisdom, with Their leader Maitreya, the Christ, as World Teacher; and about the implications for humanity, as well as for the Masters Themselves, of this great event. The book is divided into three independent but related parts. It includes articles from my Master, my own edited talks, and a very wide range of questions and answers arising from these talks.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

The Great Approach (2001)

Question, Light, Teachers, Christ

“Life after death — Life in the universe is absolute; in creation it is always relative. That is why people should not cry at death; it is not something horrible or ghastly. Their friends and loved ones have simply returned to their homeland. The books and writings received by writers through channelled sources are a sign that this message about life on the other side of death is beginning to get through to humanity.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Maitreya's Teachings - The Laws of Life (2005)

Making love, People, Universe, Cry

“When the history books are written about this tumultuous era, I want them to show that I was among those in the House of Representatives who stood up to lawlessness and tyranny.”

Elijah Cummings (1951–2019) U.S. Representative from Maryland

Official Twitter account (24 September 2019) https://twitter.com/repcummings/status/1176601699466776578?lang=en

Housing, History

“In my early twenties I read all Nietzsche—not just the main works but the minor works as well, all of them, and every scrap of published correspondence. Nietzsche alone of men out of books has a share in the loyalty and affectionate gratitude which otherwise belongs only to living teachers.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

'Thin But Thorough', The Times (27 September 1962), p. 15
1960s

Reading, Gratitude, Teachers, Loyalty

“The only excuse for this book is that it is an attempt to penetrate to that deeper meaning underlying the great events in the life of Christ, and to bring into renewed life and interest the weakening aspiration of the Christian. If it can be shown that the story revealed in the Gospels has not only an application to that divine Figure Which dwelt for a time among men, but that it has also a practical significance and meaning for the civilised man today, then there will be some objective gained and some service and help rendered…. A myth is capable of becoming a fact in the experience of an individual, for a myth is a fact which can be proven. Upon the myths we take our stand, but we must seek to re-interpret them in the light of the present. Through self-initiated experiment we can prove their validity; through experience we can establish them as governing forces in our lives; and through their expression we can demonstrate their truth to others. This is the theme of this book, dealing as it does with the facts of the Gospel story, that fivefold sequential myth which teaches us the revelation of divinity in the Person of Jesus Christ, and which remains eternally truth, in the cosmic sense, in the historical sense, and in its practical application to the individual. This myth divides itself into five great episodes: 1. The Birth at Bethlehem. 2. The Baptism in Jordan. 3. The Transfiguration on Mount Carmel. 4. The Crucifixion on Mount Golgotha. 5. The Resurrection and Ascension.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: From Bethlehem to Calvary (1937), Chapter One

Time, Light, Personality, Help

“The problem of religion and the problem of orthodox Christianity are not one and the same thing. Much that we see around us today of unbelief and criticism, and the negation of our so-called truths, is based upon the fact that religion has been largely superseded by creed, and doctrine has taken the place of living experience. It is this living experience which is the keynote of this book.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: From Bethlehem to Calvary (1937), Chapter One

Religion, Truth, Problem

“Book I The Problem of Union: AUM. The following instruction concerneth the Science of Union.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Light of the Soul (Yoga Sutras of Patanjali) (1927), p. 4

Problem, Science

“The books that I have written are sent out with no claim for their acceptance. They may, or may not, be correct, true and useful. It is for you to ascertain their truth by right practice and by the exercise of the intuition. Neither I nor A. A. B. is the least interested in having them acclaimed as inspired writings…”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Extract from a Statement by the Tibetan

Truth, Exercises

“Politically the Mukti Bahini count for nothing, lacking as they do any ideological preparation, any indoctrination, any discipline. Then socially speaking, they’re a disturbance—they only know how to fire in the air, frighten people, steal, yell Joi Bangla. And you can’t run a country by yelling Joi Bangla. The Bengali Maoists, on the other hand … well, they certainly don’t represent a very refined productat most they’ve read half of Mao’s little red book. But they’re an articulate force and don’t let themselves be used by the Indians, and I don’t even think they’re against the unity of Pakistan. They’ll end up having the upper hand.”

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1928–1979) Fourth President and ninth Prime Minister of Pakistan

Oriana Fallaci. Interview with Ali Bhutto in Karachi, April 1972

Reading, Country, People, Joy

“That it was common to observe that this was an enlightened Age; but he had thought it for a long time past an ignorant Age. Would you, said he, call a Circulating Library a good Library, because it contains so many books? This Age is much advanced in many useless sciences, & much more respect is shewn to Talent than to wisdom; but I consider our fore-fathers as deeper Thinkers than ourselves, because they set an higher Value on good sense than Knowledge in various Sciences, & this good sense was derived very often from as much study & more knowledge, though of another sort.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Present Age, p. 49
Table talk

Study, Time, Past, Knowledge

“I had completely forgotten about religion and in this respect had a savage ignorance of it. The first glimmer of truth came to me through an encounter with a great poet, who played a predominant part in the formation of my thinking and to whom I owe an eternal debt, Arthur Rimbaud. Reading Illuminations, then a few months later, Use Saison en Enfer was for me a capital event. For the first time, his books opened a crack in my materialist servitude and gave me a vivid and almost physical impression of the supernatural.”

Paul Claudel (1868–1955) French diplomat

J'avais complètement oublié la religion et j'étais à son égard d'une ignorance sauvage. La première lueur de vérité me fut donnée par la rencontre des livres d'un grand poète, à qui je dois une éternelle reconnaissance, et qui a eu dans la formation de ma pensée une part prépondérante, Arthur Rimbaud. La lecture des Illuminations, puis, quelques mois après, d'Une Saison en enfer, fut pour moi un événement capital. Pour la première fois, ces livres ouvraient une fissure dans mon bagne matérialiste et me donnaient l'impression vivante et presque physique du surnaturel.
"My Conversion," December 1886, as translated in Negritude and the Civilization of the Universal, p. 28

Religion, Time, Reading, Truth

“The Christ within who is our hope of glory is not a matter of theological debate or philosophical speculation. He is not a hobby, a part-time project, a good theme for a book, or a last resort when all human effort fails. He is our life, the most real fact about us. He is the power and wisdom of God dwelling within us.”

Brennan Manning (1934–2013) writer, American Roman Catholic priest and United States Marine

Source: 1990s, Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging (1994), p. 130

God, Time, Hope, Christ

“Sheer scholarship alone cannot reveal to us the gospel of grace. We must never allow the authority of books, institutions, or leaders to replace the authority of KNOWING Jesus Christ personally and directly. When the religious views of others interpose between us and the primary experience of Jesus as the Christ, we become unconvicted and unpersuasive travel agents handing out brochures to places we have never visited.”

Brennan Manning book The Ragamuffin Gospel

p. 30 https://books.google.com/books?id=sUTZCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA30 1990s, The Ragamuffin Gospel (1990)

Personality, Travel, Christ

“If I ever say something that contradicts the book of Allah and the Prophet(Peace be upon him) then leave my statement.”

Abu Hanifa (699–767) Founder of Hanafi school of thought

Peace

“Without criticising the liberal model, we cannot repair its faults or go beyond it. But please note that this book could have been written only when people are still relatively free to think what they like and to express themselves as they wish. If you value this book, you should also value the freedom of expression.”

Yuval Noah Harari book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Thinking, People, Freedom

“Years ago I read a man named Machado de Assis who wrote a book called Dom Casmurro.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Machado de Assis is a South American writer — black father, Portuguese mother — writing in 1865, say. I thought the book was very nice. Then I went back and read the book and said, Hmm. I didn’t realize all that was in that book. Then I read it again, and again, and I came to the conclusion that what Machado de Assis had done for me was almost a trick: he had beckoned me onto the beach to watch a sunset. And I had watched the sunset with pleasure. When I turned around to come back in I found that the tide had come in over my head. That’s when I decided to write.
Paris Review Interview (1990)

Reading

“The rifts between Shia and Sunni, Eastern Orthodox and Catholic, Israelis and Palestinians, Tibetans and Chinese, obviously have real political, theological, or economic substance behind them, but they are often reduced to symbolism. If you study the history of nationalism, it is often a story of symbols. What flag shall we fly? What icon shall we mount? What books will we revere — or burn?”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

"The Border Wall Is a Symbol of Our Symbolic Politics" https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/border-wall-immigration-debate-political-symbol/ (28 December 2018), National Review 2010s, 2018

Study, History, Flying

“I seek occasional relief in old books. They help me tell the transient from the enduring.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 16 “Niche” (p. 291)

Help

“When you understand the basic change taking place in any one major area, it is easier to make sense of the others. This discovery of a new pattern transcends explanation. The shift is qual-itative, sudden, the result of neurological processes too rapid and complex to be tracked by the conscious mind. Although logical explanations can be laid out up to a point, the seeing of a pattern is not sequential but all-at-once. If a new concept does not click into place for you on first encounter, read on. As you move through the book you will come upon many related ideas, connections, examples, metaphors, analogies, and illustrative stories. In time, patterns will emerge, the shifts will occur. From the new perspective, old questions may seem suddenly irrelevant.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter One, The Conspiracy

Time, Reading, Understanding, Question

“As we saw, there is a large class of personal names and name-elements common to the Late Books and hymns of the Rigveda (386 hymns in the Late Books of the Rigveda and 8 Late hymns in the earlier Books), and to the Avesta (the bulk of the names, right from the name of the first composer of the Avesta, and the names of his closest associates), the Mitanni (including every common name element known), and the Kassites (the only known name). These names and name-elements are fundamental to all four groups, but completely absent in the Early and Middle Books of the Rigveda (apart from the 8 Late hymns mentioned earlier). And all these names and name-elements are very common in post-Rigvedic texts.”

Shrikant Talageri (1958) Indian author

The Rigveda and the Avesta (2008)

Personality

“Sergent’s last thrust represents the unkindest cut in this whole smear campaign. It is not we who have avoided debate. It is these Western scholars who have chosen to conduct a spit-and-run campaign from a safe distance, while restricting their criticism of our theory (elaborated by us in our earlier book) to name-calling and label-sticking rather than to demolition of our arguments.”

Shrikant Talageri (1958) Indian author

The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis (2000), Chapter 9 : Michael Witzel - An Examination of Western Vedic Scholarship

“I have grown into a Bestsellasaurus Rex — a big, stumbling book-beast that is loved when it shits money and hated when it tramples houses… I started out as a storyteller; along the way I became an economic force.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

The Politics of Limited Editions essay in Newsletter, vol. 1, no. 6 (June 1985), republished in various real world publications, including The Stephen King Story (1992) by George W. Beahm, p. 112

Money, Hate, Housing, Way

“The sacred books of the East are the best evidence for the greatness of their authors, for who in later days or in modern times can even approach the spiritual sublimity of their religious thought, the intellectual splendour of their philosophy, the breadth and purity of their ethic? And when we find that these books contain teachings about God, man, and the universe identical in substance under much variety of outer appearance, it does not seem unreasonable to refer to them to a central primary body of doctrine. To that body we give the name Divine Wisdom, in its Greek form: THEOSOPHY.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Source: The Ageless Wisdom (1897)

God, Time, Universe, Appearance

Quotes about books page 54

Quotes about books
page 54