Quotes About Books

I look over my old books, happiest when I find a line it seems I could not have written.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

WHEN SCHOLARS TALK ABOUT THE SOURCES OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS, they almost always mean printed books like Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles

Life is sad enough without people writing sad books.

An elegant sufficiency, content,Retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books.

I read The Great Gatsby. It is one of my favorite books and I had taken it out of the library in hopes that it would cheer me up; of course, it only made me feel worse, since in my own humorless state I failed to see anything except what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself.

People have used these books for centuries. Their accuracy is beyond dispute." "Well, I have as much respect for ancient learning as you do, but I don't know that I'd want to stake my life on some home remedy from the Middle Ages." "Well, I suppose I can check it somewhere else," he said, without much conviction.

the only light came from a lamp which threw a sharp white circle on melted candles, computer cables, empty beer bottles and butane cans, oil pastels boxed and loose, many catalogues raisonnés, books in German and English including Nabokov's Despair

But who am I to give lessons? There are no real messages in my fiction. The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.

She'd heard the stories so often that she knew them by heart, could repeat them if she wanted, sometimes even dash in a detail or two neglected in the retelling [...]. The stories were familiar much as stories from her mother's girlhood were familiar, or stories from books. But none of them seemed connected with her in any fundamental way

Get the books, and read and study them," he told a law student seeking advice in 1855. It did not matter, he continued, whether the reading be done in a small town or a large city, by oneself or in the company of others. "The books, and your capacity for understanding them, are just the same in all places. . . . Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.

Yet, however dissimilar their upbringings, books became for both Lincoln and Roosevelt "the greatest of companions." Every day for the rest of their lives, both men set aside time for reading, snatching moments while waiting for meals, between visitors, or lying in bed before sleep.

The books, and your capacity for understanding them, are just the same in all places…. Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.

As ever, books remained a medium through which Theodore and Edith connected and interpreted larger world.

I find that without a place to work, it is difficult to work. I look forward with the greatest pleasure to the use of my books at night at home.

My library has been the greatest possible pleasure to me," he wrote to his parents during his freshman year, "as whenever I have any spare time I can immediately take up a book. Aunt Annie's present, the 'History of the Civil War,' is extremely interesting." From early childhood, he had regarded books as "the greatest of companions." And once encountered, they were never forgotten

I think imagination is one of the greatest blessings of life," Edith later wrote, "and while one can lose oneself in a book one can never be thoroughly unhappy.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.

She kept the books a week, and then returned them on a mail day with the postboy. She also sent a note saying: 'I wish you would let me have some books about the emancipation of women.' It was only after the man had left that the request struck her as naïve, a hopeless self-exposure; and she could hardly bear to open the parcel which was sent to her.

Aber ist es nicht außerordentlich merkwürdig, wie einem der Zufall Bücher in die Hände spielt, die etwas mit der eigenen Situation oder Lebensphase zu tun haben?

Books can offer a counter narrative—another story to the one we think we know.

The books still weren't real, but maybe they were written about city women, television women, Yankee women—just about as strange as Zeus had always been and Jesus was getting to be.

What I loved were books that heightened the sense of life's wonders without denying the complexity and horror that sometimes accompanied those wonders.

Books can offer a counter narrative—another story to the one we think we know. Story is told in a voice. The voice of Bastard Out of Carolina is that of a young girl who has just lost her mother and her sense of any real hope or justice. You don't know who she is until the story ends, and I always intended for the ending to make the reader angry.