Quotes About Books

Of all the things that the digital revolution has produced, once of the coolest, simplest ones is you can now contact people who write books that you read. You used to have to write a letter to the publisher and hope they passed it along, which they never did.

Colonel L., in whose eyes I was a first-rate Riot Acter or, worse, an intellectual—in his phrase, "someone who reads books"—the most damning appraisal that could be made of a junior lieutenant.

I read everything you're supposed to read in high school and college but never do, or if you do, you're so psyched to read to the test that you don't learn a damn thing. Am I learning anything now? Fuck no. The books pass through my consciousness like sunlight through glass. I don't care. They're in my cells now. I love them. Their impress has etched itself in some occult recess of my heart.

That's a worry, now you mention it. I'm not one for needlework, and you can only read so many books before your eyesight fails. Someone suggested volunteer work, but that's out of the question. I'm accustomed to being paid, and the idea of giving away my time and my skills is an affront. Braver women than I fought decades for equal compensation in the workplace, so why would I undo their accomplishments?

I stared at the trunks of books on the library floor, remembering the pangs I'd once had for a profession, for some purpose. The world had been such a beckoning place once.

Marija Gimbutas, who'd studied and written about the Goddess-worshiping, earth-centered cultures of prehistory,1 as well as other books I'd read

because commonsensically speaking, a room full of good books had to better for your health than a room with no books in it at all.

The Age of the Screen isn't going to go away; indeed it offers all kinds of wonderful possibilities, if it could just acquire a little more quality control. But there is one truth, one necessary dictum, that we must never forget: _Every child should be encouraged to read books, words on a page, for his or her own pleasure, in his own time, dreaming his own - and the author's - dream_. There is no substitute. None.

A book which is left on a shelf is a dead thing but it is also a chrysalis, an inanimate object packed with the potential to burst into new life.

Then I saw that all I really wanted was a room of my own lined with books, congenial work in pleasant surroundings, and a reasonable amount of civilized conversation with intelligent people.

She looked around and saw thousands of books in rows of shelves. There were posters on the wall and signs pointing to various sections. It was, well, a library. But when she turned to Jasper, she realized he saw something completely different. His gaze was slightly unfocused as if instead of books, he saw journeys and possibilities.

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the "real" everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.

I got through my childhood in a delirium of literary exaltations.

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence… a way of being fully human.

Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one.

I discovered a lot of writers in the Modern Library editions, which were sold in a Hallmark-card store, and I used to save up my allowance and would buy them all. I even bought real lemons like Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations [laughing]. I thought everything in the Modern Library must be great.

Se spariranno i libri, sparirà la storia, e spariranno anche gli esseri umani ... I libri non sono soltanto la somma arbitraria dei nostri sogni, e la nostra memoria. Ci offrono anche un modello di autotrascendenza. C'è chi pensa che la lettura sia soltanto una forma di evasione: un'evasione dal mondo «reale» di tutti i giorni, verso un mondo immaginario, il mondo dei libri. I libri sono molto di più. Sono una maniera per essere pienamente umani.

When she was very small, her mother used to tell her that books were alive in a special way. Between the covers, characters were living their lives, enacting their dramas, falling in and out of love, finding trouble, working out their problems. Even sitting closed on a shelf, a book had a life of its own. When someone opened the book, that was when the magic happened.

A book, too, can be a star . . . a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe. —Madeleine L'Engle

Unlike men, books were easy. They filled you with all the emotions in the world—joy, dread, fear, hurt, gratification—and then they came to an end. People were different. Unpredictable. Impossible to manage.

A fawn eats the equivalent of its body weight every twenty-four hours." "How do you know that?" "Read it in a book. I read sixty books last year." "Geez," he said. "Why?" "'Cause there wasn't time to read more," she said with a superior sniff. "Hard

Blythe's favorite shelf near the coffee area. She'd labeled it W.O.W. (WORDS OF WISDOM) and it was stocked with her perennial favorites with bookmarked passages. Natalie used to love browsing that shelf. A book would never betray you or change its mind or make you feel stupid. She took down The Once and Future King and found a marked passage: The best thing for being sad, replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails.

As a child, she'd been a great reader, finding the ultimate escape within the pages of a story. She learned that opening a book was like opening a set of double doors—the next step would take her inside to Neverland or Nod, Sunnybrook Farm or Mulberry Street.

Between the covers, characters were living their lives, enacting their dramas, falling in and out of love, finding trouble, working out their problems. Even sitting closed on a shelf, a book had a life of its own. When someone opened the book, that was when the magic happened.