Quotes About Books

reading their books on electronic gizmos

The human being has reason. This enables him to conceive of truth- yet what he says or writes in learned books is always but a thrust in the direction of truth, it ever falls short of truth itself.

I want the kids to enjoy reading not only today but for the rest of their lives.

By virtue of some of the ways the game is played, in terms of message discipline, in terms of access for reporters, and especially in the way that sources and subjects, especially famous subjects, treat the media, almost by default there's more news that's falling into books.

Trump doesn't read.

Steep curving stone stairs led to a square library on the floor above. The 4,000 books in the library were mostly collected between 1710 and 1730. ... For a moment I was tempted to ask to be locked in. If I could skim ten books a day for a year, I would be able to get a sense of most of what David Hume might have read in 1730 -- an age when it still might just have been possible to read everything.

Todos estos libros, lo noto, me están cambiando por dentro. Yo no podía imaginarme que esto de leer era como vivir.

Para mí, los libros son verdaderos talismanes. Me parece que, si tengo algo a mano para leer, puedo ser capaz de aguantar casi todo. Son un antidoto para el dolor, un calmante para la desesperación, un excitante contra el aburrimiento. Nunca me siento sola ni existen horas perdidas cuando puedo sumergirme en un texto.

What a happy woman I am, living in a garden, with books, babies, birds and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above all my fellows in being able to find happiness so easily." (Quoted from Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim)

In The Sentence, books are matters of life and death, and readers reach through unknowable realms to maintain some connection to the written word. So with the bookstore.

Books. Why? So I can talk to other humans without having to meet them. Fear of boredom. So what I will never be alone.

Alongside my bed there is always a Lazy Stack and a Hard Stack.

Dennis Lehane, Donna Tartt, Stephen Graham Jones, Marcie R. Rendon, Kate Atkinson. She gave me The Death of the Heart

Alongside my bed there is always a Lazy Stack and a Hard Stack. I put Flora's book onto the Hard Stack, which included Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande, two works by Svetlana Alexievich, and other books on species loss, viruses, antibiotic resistance, and how to prepare dried food. These were books I would avoid reading until some wellspring of mental energy was uncapped. Still, I usually managed to read the books in my Hard Stack, eventually.

the great de-Kindling, which started when people realized their e-readers were collecting data on their reading habits, like what page they stopped on. Jackie thinks people miss turning real pages. Gruen says it's note taking, marking up the books, that people miss.

I used to escape into books. I'd hear my father yelling, and I'd open my book and dive in. I don't know what I would have done without reading.

A broken heart in real life isn't half as dreadful as it is in books. It's a good deal like a bad tooth, though you won't think THAT a very romantic simile. It takes spells of aching and gives you a sleepless night now and then, but between times it lets you enjoy life and dreams and echoes and peanut candy as if there were nothing the matter with it.

As we expand our knowledge of good books, we shrink the circle of men whose company we appreciate.

But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn't know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved.

Lessi così di tutto un po', disordinatamente; ma libri, in ispecie, di filosofia. Pesano tanto: eppure, chi se ne ciba e se li mette in corpo, vive tra le nuvole.

Ma i libri [...] pesano tanto: eppure, chi se ne ciba e se li mette in corpo, vive tra le nuvole.

if all else fails you can read

you know those self-help books that give you permission to love yourself? This one gives you permission to love punctuation.

I saw a sign for Book's with an apostrophe in it, and something deep inside me snapped; snapped with that melancholy sound you hear in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, like a far-off cable breaking in a mine-shaft.