Quotes About Books

Pope had made it illegal across large parts of Europe for lay persons to possess any of the books of the Old and New Testament "with the exception of the Psalter, the Breviary and the Book of Hours of the Blessed Virgin.

And books, she knew by then, were one of the necessities, the rocks of her life.

His physical body, this physical body was not—could not be—in the past. But gravity could. Like Tars said, gravity cut across and through all of the dimensions. When he punched at one of them, what he was really doing was sending a pulse through space-time, a gravitic surge that was responsible for moving the books.

The written word is all that stands between memory and oblivion. Without books as our anchors, we are cast adrift, neither teaching nor learning. They are windows on the past, mirrors on the present, and prisms reflected all possible futures. Books are lighthouses erected on the dark sea of time.

Karl wondered how many scientists read this science fiction stuff. Maybe they couldn't get good books out in New Mexico?

The pages were dog-eared, and heavily annotated in Karla's own hand. (...) She consumed her books, I saw. She devoured her books, and was unafraid to mark them, even to scar them, with her own comments and system of references.

I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that's almost the same thing.

Aeroplanes interested me, and at the outbreak of the Second World War, I joined the RAF as a volunteer reservist. I took the opportunity of studying the books which the RAF made available for radio mechanics and looked forward to an interesting course in radio.

I actually love history. I've devoured book after book of stories from World War I and World War II. They're really two sections of world history that really interest me. I knew very extensively a lot about World War I.

History has been my primary intellectual passion ever since, as a boy in Southern California, I began reading books on World War II and the life of Winston Churchill.

When I was a kid, my mum had a lot of Dumas books in the house, and she's from France originally. My mother had one particular Dumas book that was a family heirloom - this old, beat-up 1938 edition of 'The Count of Monte Cristo' in French. She came to America after losing her parents in World War II as a little kid.

Sadly, there are many children who have not yet been given the chance to 'discover the magic of reading, or set foot in the worlds you can discover on bookshelves.

While books expand horizons by exposing us to worlds outside our own, children also need to see themselves, their experiences and their cultures reflected in books they read. Unfortunately, for too many children, this is not the norm.

I love building out the worlds of my fiction with fictional books.

I was a police reporter, so I got into the worlds that I write about, and I think many of the details in my books come from those days.

Children's books deal in idealized worlds, so they're a document of how our notion of ideal worlds has changed over time.

The world of children's books is a very friendly, decent place to be. It's full of people who are desperate to enlighten, interest and excite children in ideas, imaginary worlds and contemporary issues.

My worldview comes from a collection of the books I have read, the people I have met, and my conversations with my dad.

I am very happy when people write that they have worn out my books, or that they are held together by Scotch tape. I consider that the ultimate compliment.

I understand why parents worry about books - they're worried about their kids. They want to keep their kids safe. But parents aren't always realistic.

An idea has been running in my head that books lose and gain qualities in the course of time, and I have worried over it a good deal, for what seemed to be a paradox, I felt to be a truth.

I read a lot of comics growing up. My mom used to say, 'Would you please read a book?' She was worried where I was going in my life.

It just worries me that if we start trying to erase history that we can learn from, where does that end? Do you start taking away books people find offensive? It's just a path that seems very dangerous to me in this country.

For notes related to books I'm writing, I've wondered whether I should organize my notes better, but I do find that the action or scrolling through them and seeing odd juxtapositions of ideas helps to stimulate my own ideas and creativity. I worry that if I kept the notes in a highly-structured way, I might lose some of these benefits.