Quotes About Books

So I can understand the mad passion for travel books and their deceptiveness. They create the illusion of something which no longer exists but still should exist, if we were to have any hope of avoiding the overwhelming conclusion that the history of the past twenty thousand years is irrevocable.

Qué sería para ella "leer enfermizamente"? ¿Cuántas horas por día? ¿Cuántos libros por mes? ¿Sería consciente de que me lo estaba diciendo a mí, que soy librera?

A good read is one of the amazing pleasures offered to us by civilization.

As computers replace textbooks, students will become more computer literate and more book illiterate. They'll be exploring virtual worlds, watching dancing triangles, downloading the latest web sites. But they won't be reading books.

Weaned on educational games and multimedia encyclopedias, kids naturally seek out the trivial when forced to read books. While visiting a school librarian, I listened to a high school senior seek help with an assignment: "I'm writing a report about Napoleon," he said. "Can you find me a thin book with lots of pictures?

And every writer cherishes the dream of setting the young on fire, even if only by a cigarette butt tossed casually over the shoulder, and when we meet young people who say that they were inspired by what we said to rush off and read the books we were talking about, we can congratulate ourselves for all those guilty hours when, the last two left after a long lunch, we went on arguing about everything we knew.

We are often told that the next generation of literati won't have private libraries: everything will be in the computer. It's a rational solution, but that's probably what's wrong with it. Being book crazy is an aspect of love, and therefore scarcely rational at all.

row of damaged books which Davenport had failed to return to the London Library.

Sartre, who respected Aron's credentials—Aron, unlike Sartre, had always been the kind of star student who actually read the books—took particular care to discredit his opinions: a potent endorsement.)

Walking along the avenues, we had one of the so-called intellectual conversations, which consist a great deal in quoting names of books and authors.

methods of attack, however; whereas high culture expresses its disapproval of popular culture mainly in books and literary journals, popular culture publics also use the police, the pulpit, and the political arena to attack their enemies.

A library is thought in cold storage.

This life is slow suicide, unless you read.

Sleeplessness kept claiming her nights, and she used books as shields against the onslaught of her abstract terrors.

Since her marriage, she had been left free to pursue her love of literature, inherited

The great threat to the young and pure in heart is not what they read but what they don't read.

I was the subject of an experiment in love. I lived my life under her gaze, undergoing certain trials for her so that she would not have to undergo them for herself. But, how are our certainties forged, except by the sweat and tears of other people? If your parents don't teach you how to live; you learn it from books; and clever people watch you learn from your mistakes.

I had read all the books so hard that when I gave them back the print was faint and gray with exhaustion

There are more English books printed in Antwerp than in London, but those who print without a licence are branded, sometimes an eye is gouged out or a hand cut off. And informers are everywhere. Even, no doubt, amongst our own merchants.

My adrenaline started pumping anytime I was within a hundred yards of a bookshop. I loved books nearly as much as I loved clothes. And that's saying something. The feel of them and the smell of them. A bookshop was like like an Aladdin's Cave for me. Entire worlds and lives can be found just behind that glossy cover. All you had to do was look.

Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today.

Book-love, I say again, lasts throughout life, it never flags or fails, but, like Beauty itself, is a joy forever.

What an author doesn't know could fill a book.

Librarians are hot. They have knowledge and power over their domain...It is no coincidence how many librarians are portrayed as having a passionate interior, hidden by a cool layer of reserve. Aren't books like that? On the shelf, their calm covers belie the intense experience of reading one. Reading inflames the soul. Now, what sort of person would be the keeper of such books?