Quotes About Books

Lieutenant Trotta wasn't experienced enough to know that uncouth peasant boys with noble hearts exist in real life and that a lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written.

A lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written about.

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A great believer in precedent,' Della Street said. 'I think if he were ever confronted with a really novel situation he'd faint. He runs to his law books, digs around like a mole and finally comes up with case that's what he calls on all fours and was decided seventy-five or a hundred years ago.

The Facts were right there waiting for me,hidden in old books written by people who weren't afraid to be honest

The talk of the educated, the talk in books, confused him, as if on purpose, as if education itself were a conspiracy to make certain that the knowledge of the world was unavailable to him. And yet he believed in his own intelligence, took pride in the way his thoughts came together like the cocking of a revolver. But the words were never there to express the thoughts, and so his private stock of knowledge was forever his secret, sealed inside by his ignorance.

Nietzsche said without music, life would be a mistake. To me, without books, life would be a mistake.

Habent sua fata libelli et balli [Books and bullets have their own destinies]

Me ne stavo rinchiuso nell'infanzia per balia asciutta avevo la stanzetta dove dormivo sotto i castelli di libri di mio padre. Salivano da terra sul soffitto, erano torri, cavalli e fanti di una scacchiera messa in verticale. Di notte entravano nei sogni le polveri di carta. Nell'infanzia ai piedi dei libri, gli occhi non conoscevano le lacrime.

perché ogni copia di libro può appartenere a molte vite e i libri dovrebbero stare incustoditi nei posti pubblici e spostarsi insieme ai passanti che se li portano dietro per un poco...

Les livres sont la plus grande contradiction des barreaux. Ils ouvrent le plafond de la cellule du prisonnier allongé sur son lit.

Je prends le livre ouvert à la pliure, je me remets à son rythme, à la respiration d'un autre qui raconte. Si moi aussi je suis un autre, c'est parce que les livres, plus que les années et les voyages, changent les hommes.

I take the book stopped at a fold, deliver myself to its pace, to the breathing of the other storyteller. If I am someone else, it's also because books move men more than journeys or tears. After many pages you end up learning a variant, a different move than the one taken and thought inevitable. I break away from what I am when I learn to treat my own life differently.

Les livres gardent l'empreinte d'une personne plus que les vêtements et les chaussures.

Don Raimondo tells me what he can't tell them. "The emptiness on the surface of a wall left by a sold bookshelf is the deepest I know. I take away with me the banished books, I give them a second life. Like the second coat in painting, used for finishing, a book's second life is its best." He's rescued the library of a lover of American literature.

I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them--with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.

I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.

I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. Every book I seized on, from "Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-a-While" to "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn't nearly so important; it comes in its own time.

I was astonished to learn in one of these best-selling books (on church life) that the size of my church parking lot had far more to do with how things fared in my congregation than my choice of texts in preaching. I was being lied to and I knew it.

People who don't read are brutes.

Reading creates a sense of human fellowship. It is never (or rarely) a public activity, but in putting us in direct contact with other minds and sensibilities, it is a form of solitude which banishes loneliness. It can offer the consolation of knowing we are not alone, in our pleasures or in our suffering. It is in situations of deprivation that the value of reading – the deep need for books – becomes more vividly apparent.

Thousands of books are published every year in India, and it's becoming more difficult to stand out and get people to buy the books. The only way to get people notice the book is to create a buzz much before it's released.

I don't see that books can be written without political context - not if they're relevant and ambitious.

I believe that sometimes, when we talk about books, we're talking about the big picture - how they're relevant.