Quotes About Books

I looked at the book lying on a table. Though not a great reader myself, I knew that those who were - even Nora - could grow testy when one came between them and their books.

Suggested Reading Louis Bayard, The Black Tower; Sarah Blake, Grange House; F. G. Cottam, The House of Lost Souls; Michael Cox, The Glass of Time; Mark Frost, The List of Seven; John Harwood, The Ghost Writer; Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale.

There are truths found in books or films when some writer puts exactly the right words together and it's like their pen turned sword and pierced you right through the heart.

I can always be tempted by a library.

All of Uncle Fred's books on undertaking are lined up like soldiers on the bookshelves in his office. It isn't that hard to understand how something works. You just need to know which book to open and read the words inside it.

I can imagine a future in which real books will exist but in a more limited, particular way.

Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It's like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture's books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.

I loved the fresh alkaline tang of new ink and paper, a smell that never emanated from a broken-in library book. I loved the crack of a newly flexed spine, and the way the brand-new pages almost felt damp, as if they were wet with creation.

Once words and thoughts are poured into them, books are no longer just paper and ink and glue: They take on a kind of human vitality.

A book feels like a thing alive in the moment, and also alive on a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writer's mind to the moment it sprang off the printing press - a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it, and it continues on, time after time after time.

In total, four hundred thousand books in Central Library were destroyed in the fire. An additional seven hundred thousand were badly damaged by either smoke or water or, in many cases, both. The number of books destroyed or spoiled was equal to the entirety of fifteen typical branch libraries. It was the greatest loss to any public library in the history of the United States.

I am happy if I can give them away or donate them. But I can't throw a book in the trash, no matter how hard I try.

World War II destroyed more books and libraries than any event in human history. The Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books during their twelve years in power.

A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also on a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writers mind to the moment it sprang off the printing press - a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it. Once words and thoughts are poured into them, books are no longer just paper and ink and glue: they take on a kind of human vitality. The poet Milton called this quality in books "the potency of life.

I wanted to have my books around me, forming a totem pole of the narratives I'd visited.

It is as if the city has a bloodstream flowing through it, oxygenated by books.

The books burned while most of us were waiting to see if we were about to witness the end of the world.

The Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books during their twelve years in power.

Apparently, everyone in Los Angeles gets on the computer right after Thanksgiving dinner and makes requests for diet books.

We were very much a reading family, but we were a borrow-a-book-from-the-library family more than a bookshelves-full-of-books family. My parents valued books, but the grew up in the Depression, aware of the quicksilver nature of money, and they learned the hard way that you shouldn't buy what you could borrow. Because of that frugality, or perhaps independent of it, they also believed that you read a book for the experience of reading it.

World War II destroyed more books and libraries than any event in human history. The Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books during their twelve years in power. Book burning was, as author George Orwell remarked, "the most characteristic [Nazi] activity.

There are so many things in a library, so many books and so much stuff, that I sometimes wondered if any one single person could possibly know what all of it is. I preferred thinking that no one does - I liked the idea that the library is more expansive and grand than one single mind, and that it requires many people together to form a complete index of its bounty.

If you developed diphtheria, spotted fever, or the plague while you were in possession of a library book, you were required to inform the library, and the book had to be fumigated before it was put back in circulation, but the library covered the cost. Three

A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also alive on a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writer's mind to the moment it sprang off the printing press—a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it, and it continues on, time after time after time. Once words and thoughts are poured into them, books are no longer just paper and ink and glue: They take on a kind of human vitality.