Quotes About Books

Hojear libros es parte de la tradición de una libreria -le dijo Florence-. Debes dejar que se queden y toquen los libros.

I can admire, but I no longer covet. Books of course are another matter; books are not acquisitions, they are necessities.

Early reading is serendipitous, and rightly so. Gloriously so. Libraries favor serendipity, invite it; the roaming along a shelf, eyeing an unfamiliar name, taking this down, then that--oh, who's this? Never heard of her--give her a go? That is where, and how, you learn affinity and rejection. You find out what you like by exploring what you do not.

Books are the mind's ballast, for so many of us--the cargo that makes us what we are, a freight that is ephemeral and indelible, half-forgotten but leaving an imprint. They are nutrition, too. My old age fear is not being able to read--the worst deprivation. Or no longer having my books around me: the familiar, eclectic, explanatory assemblage that hitches me to the wide world, that has freed me from the prison of myself, that has helped me to think, and to write.

And when you and I talk about history we don't mean what actually happened, do we? The cosmic chaos of everywhere, all time? We mean the tidying up of this into books, the concentration of the benign historical eye upon years and places and persons. History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.

Charlotte misses her books. Her familiar walls, lined with language.

Helen, marvelling at Joyce's capacity for self-protection, often wondered at her choice of career. It had something to do with order, she decided; Joyce mistrusted books for their content, but liked the way they could be marshalled. The readers were simply an unlooked-for hazard.

Reading in old age for me is doing what it has always done--it frees me from the closet of my own mind.

Helen read a great deal. The feel of a book in her hands was an ancient solace -- not, originally, because of what lay between the covers but as a screen, a defence, a shield.

Yes, books are dangerous. They should be dangerous—they contain ideas.

There is a camaraderie that grows up among those who work with old books and old papers, largely, I suspect, because we understand that we are at odds with the rest of the world: we are travelling backwards, while all those around us are still moving forward.

what think you of that, Nick, since you allwaies have your Head stuck in old Books? And I said nothing, for who can speak of the Mazes of the Serpent to those who are not lost in them?

House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored

Percy Buckle looked around his little room and knew he never had to weigh a pound of flour again in his life. I can read all day. Even as a grocer he had been a bookish fellow. All his life it had been the same -- even when he was too tired to manage more than half a page of Ivanhoe in a night, even when he smelt inescapably of sprats and mackerel, he had been a member of a lending library, and a regular attendant at the Workingman's Institute.

Watch some television programs, or read some books in which vampyres are heroic and charming and sparkle in the daylight, and then return here and brace yourself for a return to a time that vampyres were things that went bump in the night.

library! Oh, I forgot. Same thing.

used to write her books.

Anyway, I thought I might go. You never know, the murderers might turn up to pay their respects, like they do in books.

He adored talking about the rich…. But his real wealth was literary. He had read many thousands of books. He said that history was a nightmare during which he was trying to get a good night's rest. Insomnia made him more learned.

Books have led some to learning and others to madness.

Gold, silver, jewels, purple garments, houses built of marble, groomed estates, pious paintings, caparisoned steeds, and other things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure; books give delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.

Here's a typical list: Song of Solomon (for Michael Jordan), Things Fall Apart (Bill Cartwright), Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (John Paxson), The Ways of White Folks (Scottie Pippen), Joshua: A Parable for Today (Horace Grant), Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (B.J. Armstrong), Way of the Peaceful Warrior (Craig Hodges), On the Road (Will Perdue), and Beavis & Butt-Head: This Book Sucks (Stacey King). Some players read every

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, A History of Nazi Germany, by William L. Shirer, Simon and Schuster, 1960, New York; Hitler, a Study in Tyranny, by Alan Bullock, Harper, 1953, New York;

Hay muchos libros vivos. No de un modo metafórico.