Quotes from book

The Thirteenth Tale

“opening the book, i inhaled. the smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it.”

“I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy”

“There are times when the human face and body can express the yearning of the heart so accurately that you can, as they say, read them like a book. Do not abandon me.”

“To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see.”

“As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living.”

“Of course I loved books more than people.”

“One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.”

“Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so.”

“We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delinaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all.
I know, he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.”

“I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.”

“She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.”

“What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney?”

“When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic, yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.”

“Everybody has a story. It's like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you can't say you haven't got them. Same goes for stories.”

“In this cruel world kindness should always be repaid.”

“A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.”

“What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?”

“I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.”