Quotes About Books

Habla el autor] A los cuatro años descubrí que sabía leer. (...) No aprendí a escribir hasta mucho después, cumplidos los siete años. Quizá pudiese vivir sin escribir. No creo que pudiera vivir sin leer. (...)

What we put into words are the shadows of shadows, and every book confesses the impossibility of holding fully onto whatever it is that our experience seizes. All our libraries are the glorious records of that failure.

Los regímenes demagógicos exigen que olvidemos y, por tanto, estigmatizan los libros como un lujo superfluo; los regímenes totalitarios quieren que no pensemos y, por consiguiente, prohíben y amenazan y censuran; ambos, en general, necesitan que nos volvamos estúpidos y que aceptemos con mansedumbre nuestra degradación y por eso alientan el consumo de productos vacuos. En circunstancias como ésas, los lectores no pueden más que ser subversivos.

The idea persists even today: our books will bear witness for or against us, our books reflect who we are and who we have been, our books hold the share of pages granted to us from the Book of Life. By the books we call ours we will be judged.

Kitaplarla ÅŸaÅŸk?na dönmüÅŸ Don Quijote ve hac yolcusu Dante, öÄŸrendikleriyle felce uÄŸrayan Prens Hamlet, okuduklar?yla yaÅŸamak istediÄŸi hayat? birbirine kar??t?ran Emma Bovary..

It is possible to argue that the really influential book is not that which converts ten millions of casual readers, but rather that which converts the very few who, at any given moment, succeed in seizing power. Marx and Sorel have been influential in the modern world, not so much because they were best-sellers (Sorel in particular was not at all a widely read author), but because among their few readers were two men, called respectively Lenin and Mussolini.

No, give me the past. It doesn't change; it's all there in black and white, and you can get to know about it comfortably and decorously and, above all, privately - by reading. … As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.

That was the chief difference between literature and life. In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low.

Life was so short, and books so countlessly many.

As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.

Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment and because books were scarce and difficult to reproduce...As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.

You couldn't have lower-caste people wasting the Community's time over books, and that there was always the risk of their reading something which might undesirably decondition one of their reflexes.

As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium. At present people in search of pleasure naturally tend to congregate in large herds and to make a noise; in future their natural tendency will be to seek solitude and quiet. The proper study of mankind is books.

The really influential book is not that which converts ten millions of casual readers, but rather that which converts the very few who, at any given moment, succeed in seizing power.

Books, he said—books. One reads so many, and one sees so few people and so little of the world. Great thick books about the universe and the mind and ethics. You've no idea how many there are. I must have read twenty or thirty tons of them in the last five years. Twenty tons of ratiocination. Weighted with that, one's pushed out into the world.

They'll grow up with what the psychologists used to call an "instinctive" hatred of books and flowers. Reflexes unalterably conditioned.

Crecerán con lo que los psicólogos solían llamar un odio instintivo hacia los libros y las flores. Reflejos condicionados definitivamente. Estarán a salvo de los libros y de la botánica para toda su vida. -El director se volvió hacia las enfermeras-. Llévenselos

Those who detect no meaning in the world generally do so because, for one reason or another, it suits their books that the world should be meaningless.

Kitaplara bakarken, Uzaysal iliÅŸkilerde durum ne? diye sordu araÅŸt?rmac?. /.../ Uzay hâlâ oradayd?, ama üstünlüÄŸünü kaybetmiÅŸti. /.../ Yeterince var gibi görünüyor. AraÅŸt?rmac? zaman hakk?nda ne hissettiÄŸimi sorduÄŸunda bütün söyleyebileceÄŸim buydu.

There is a logic [to my reading], but I can't define it. I like reading impulsively. I collect books, I have a lot of them, but most of them I have not read yet. I'll read them when they call me from the shelf.

vždy mal na sebe sako a kravatu, lebo tvrdil, že knihy treba reÅ¡pektovaÃ…Â¥, vÅ¡etky, aj tie mizerné.

Leemos libros porque nos cambian la vida, porque nos conducen a la verdad. Leemos libros porque aprendemos muchas cosas. Pero escribimos libros con otra idea. Cuando escribimos, lo que hacemos es elegir entre lo más raro que hay en nuestro universo y entre lo más querido que hay en nuestro ánimo.

He was always reading. With his street kid clients, the popular belief was that he was searching for an elusive gap that existed somewhere in his books, hidden between lines or letters. One that would allow him, once and for all, to crawl inside the pages and disappear.

Nobody went to bed at seven in Paris, even French children. Les enfants stayed up late at night, he had heard, eating with the adults, sipping red wine, and discussing the latest books and films.