“The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one's soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule.”

Source: Winter's Tale

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Mark Helprin22

US author, journalist, commentator 1947

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“When I was a boy, the bestselling books were often the books that were on your piano teacher's shelf. I mean, Steinbeck, Hemingway, some Faulkner. Faulkner actually had, considering how hard he is to read and how drastic the experiments are, quite a middle-class readership. But certainly someone like Steinbeck was a bestseller as well as a Nobel Prize-winning author of high intent. You don't feel that now. I don't feel that we have the merger of serious and pop — it's gone, dissolving. Tastes have coarsened. People read less, they're less comfortable with the written word.”

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

Salon interview (2000)

“After I finished my books, I felt I had to do another one and I thought that if I were to choose a subject, it had to be mosques.”

Wahbi Al-Hariri (1914–1994) Artist, architect, author

Source: Lisa Kaaki (2002-01-25). Wahbi Al-Hariri - the last of the classicists http://www.webcitation.org/6HcrXOzJ5. Arab News. Saudi Research & Publishing Company.

“Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

“My books must be an absolute nightmare to translate. I wouldn't do it. I had a couple of them in Japanese some years ago and my wife met a Japanese woman who said that she had read the books. And she asked her what the translations were like. This woman said they were the worst translation she had ever read in her life. She said she didn't recognise the books when she finally read them in English.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville: Using words to paint pictures of "magical" Prague (2006)

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

Mortimer J. Adler (1902–2001) American philosopher and educator

Source: How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people's actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Galápagos

Galápagos (1985)
Context: Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people's actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be. So the Galapagos Islands could be hell in one moment and heaven in the next, and Julius Caesar could be a statesman in one moment and a butcher in the next, and Ecuadorian paper money could be traded for food, shelter, and clothing in one moment and line the bottom of a birdcage in the next, and the universe could be created by God Almighty in one moment and by a big explosion in the next — and on and on.

“When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
'His sins were scarlet, But his books were read.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

"On His Books"
Hilaire Belloc (1925)
Variant: When I am dead, I hope it may be said, 'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

“It’s hard to be wrongfully accused, but it’s worse when the people looking down on you are clods who have never read a book or traveled more than twenty miles from the place they were born.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Variant: It’s hard to be wrongfully accused, but it’s worse when the people looking down on you are clods who have never read a book or traveled more than twenty miles from the place they were born.
Source: The Name of the Wind (2007), Chapter 8, “Thieves, Heretics, and Whores” (p. 63)

“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. She read books as one would breathe ether, to sink in and die.”

Annie Dillard book The Living

Source: The Living

“Books, books, books. It was not that I read so much. I read and re-read the same ones. But all of them were necessary to me. Their presence, their smell, the letters of their titles, and the texture of their leather bindings.”

Colette (1873–1954) 1873-1954 French novelist: wrote Gigi

“The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one's soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule.”

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Mark Helprin22

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