Quotes About Books

I personally own six or seven thousand books, so I - and I certainly don't want to see them go away.

When I was a boy, all the books I owned fit on a single shelf. Now I have several thousand stacked around the house.

Brighter Than a Thousand Suns' by Robert Jungk and 'Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman!' by Richard Feynman were both books my father purchased for me when I was in high school. Both left a lasting impression on me, because they chronicle the lives of some of the most creative scientists of the 21st century.

It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.

He felt about books as doctors feel about medicines, or managers about plays--cynical but hopeful.

Emery cut in impatiantly, "For crying out loud. Who do you think you are, Nancy Drew?" Hey," I snapped, because no one sniped at my sister but me, and Mark echoed with a stern "Chill, dude." Phin was unperturbed. "Those books were highly unrealistic. Do you have any idea how much brain damage a person would have if she were hit on the head and drugged with chloroform that often?

While running simple errands I often became hopelessly confused in the maze of crowded, filthy streets that began twenty paces beyond the north gate of the bridge, and as I limped back to my shelves of books I would feel as if I were returning from exile.

Italians were the largest producers, as indeed they had been for more than a century. The bibliographer Victor Scholderer once speculated that the printing press was invented and perfected in Germany because manuscripts were scarcer and less easily accessible in northern Europe than in Italy, prompting Gutenberg to contemplate a new and different means of producing books. 7

Vespasiano's biographies were crucial, therefore, to the formation of one of history's most famous and endearing (if sometimes misleading) narratives: how the rediscovery of ancient books refreshed and "rebirthed" a disoriented and moribund civilization.

Seneca the Younger, who condemned collectors for caring more about the outsides of books than their contents, and for using books "not as the tools of learning, but as decorations for the dining-room." Petrarch had likewise criticized collectors who hoarded manuscripts as ornaments for their homes. "There are those who decorate their rooms with furniture devised to decorate their minds," he sniffed, "and they use books as they use Corinthian vases." 36

The loss of so many ancient books could be blamed on something more than the apathy of feudal lords and the negligence and greed of unscrupulous monks. It could be blamed, too, on circumstances beyond the inevitable and indiscriminate destruction of floods and fires, or the pernicious appetites of mice, warble flies, and bookworms. All these things played their part, but there was another reason so few texts survived, and that was technology: how books were made.

The Latin verb "to fasten" was pangere, from which, via the Latin pagina, the word "page" descends. Suddenly it was possible to read a document by turning pages of parchment rather than unspooling a roll of papyrus.

And as I surveyed the clutter of his study I was pleased to see that he was a man after my own heart. All of his money appeared to have been spent on either books or shelves to hold them.

The soft throb and glow roused in my breast by the gilt letters of four or five different languages winking at me from scores of handsomely tooled bindings—the sight of so much knowledge so beautifully presented—swiftly flamed out.

The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.

The walls of books around me, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters. I hated to get up.

I think men that read books are the most attractive kind.

Because I wondered what it's like to be in love,' she said. 'I thought you might have been. I read about it in books, of course, but I just wonder what it's like.' 'Like butterflies and rainbows, I think,' I say. 'And feeling crazy and exhilarated and high, and sometimes terrible and sad.But mostly feeling like you and the person you love are part of your own little universe that just the two of you have made, and everyone else doesn't really matter. I think it's probably like that.

So slip on your goggles and your reading trunks, for the sun is high. Let me leave you with one more thought. In what season of the year do we find ourselves - I'm speaking for a moment in terms of the physical world - wading through things? Surf. Kelp. Books. Summer.

Un buen libro es el mejor de los amigos, lo mismo hoy que siempre.

a vida é brinquedo que para nada serve, a não ser para a alegria! Entregue-se, sem vergonha e sem sentimentos de culpa, às delícias do ócio. Aprenda a andar sem ter de chegar a lugar algum, simplesmente gozando o mundo que nos cerca! Faça o fantástico turismo gratuito dos livros.

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love of reading.

A book is the only immortality.