Quotes About Books

There was I, devouring books and yet allowing a man who had never read a book to walk me home for a bit of harmless fumbling on the front steps.

I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth a hundred 'great books' - and one brave deed is worth a thousand.

But hell, I do like to write letters. Much easier than writing books.

I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the people, and obtainable only at an expenditure of time and red tape calculated to discourage any ordinary taste for literature.

Sono convinto che chi non legge resta uno stupido. Anche se nella vita sa destreggiarsi, il fatto di non ingerire regolarmente parole scritte lo condanna ineluttabilmente all'ignoranza, indipendentemente dai suoi averi e dalle sue attività.

I believe that anyone who doesn't read remains dumb. Even if they know how, failing to regularly ingest the written word dooms them to ignorance, no matter what else they have or do.

Convicts on the main line sent me books from the library. I've always been able to make it if I could read.

Still, even without the country or a lake, the summer was a fine thing, particularly when you were at the beginning of it, looking ahead into it. There would be months of beautifully long, empty days, and each other to play with, and the books from the library.

I learned much from my teachers, more from my books, and most from my mistakes.

Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.

TV. If kids are entertained by two letters, imagine the fun they'll have with twenty-six. Open your child's imagination. Open a book.

Book lovers never go to bed alone.

O que eu gostava de poder encher os livros de silêncio, e tender cada vez mais para o silêncio, e que as palavras estivessem carregadas de silêncio de maneira a que o leitor as pudesse encher como quisesse.

O que eu gostava de poder encher os livros de silêncio, e tender cada vez mais de silêncio, e que as palavras estivessem carregadas de silêncio de maneira a que o leitor as pudesse encher como quisesse.

Among the extremely diverse books lumped together as 'mysteries,' I shall try to judge each fairly according to the best standards of the type which the author intended to produce.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

All her life she has been led to believe that she is a child born at the end of things: the empire, the era, the reign of men on earth. But in the glow of the scribes' enthusiasm, she senses that in a city like Urbino, beyond the horizon, other possibilities might exist, and in daydreams she takes flight across the Aegean, through her spread fingers, until she alights in a bright clean palace, full of Justice and Moderation, its rooms lined with books, free to anyone who can read them.

So many windows are dark. It's as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language, the houses great shelves of illegible volumes, the lamps all extinguished. But there is a machine in the attic at work again. A spark in the night.

a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.

We live through books; we have adventures in them, we lead alternative lives through them. We expand our memories through them. And that sometimes art can offer us more intense experiences of the world than life itself can.

Day after day, the tall Italian said, year after year, time wipes the old books from the world.

Each of these books, child, is a door, a gateway to another place and time. You have your whole life in front of you, and for all of it, you'll have this. It will be enough, don't you think?

And yet by early autumn, once or twice a week, at certain moments of the day, sitting out in the Jardin des Plantes beneath the massive hedges or reading beside her father's workbench, Marie-Laure looks up from her book and believes she can smell gasoline under the wind. As if a great river of machinery is steaming slowly, irrevocably, toward her.

It's as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language.