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Alice Hoffman 85
Novelist, young-adult writer, children's writer 1952Related quotes
“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Variant: Books are a uniquely portable magic
“Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
42 min 33 sec
Variant: A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
Source: Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), The Persistence of Memory [Episode 11]
Context: What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
“Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.”
Source: The Shadow of the Wind
“A book may only be judged for what it is, not what you'd like it to be.”
7 January 2007
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2007
Source: A Stranger in Olondria (2013), Chapter 8, “The Tower of Myrrh” (p. 92)