Quotes About Books

Librarians are serious people, seldomgiven to idle jocularity. The reason for this, I believe, is because we are overwhelmed by the enormous number of good books waiting to be read, leaving little time for frivolity. My personal list of must-read books presents a daunting challenge; I can't even imagine the pressure our head librarian must be under.

Despite the continuing popularity of biographies of famous people and books about major wars, history is in crisis and not just one of university budgets.

The books he had read, the people he had met, and the ideas in which he had steeped himself for three years had transformed him.

84 Charing Cross Road.)

I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?

Among some tossed-out books of my daughter's which I rescued...was one too awful to live. I returned it to the trash, resisting the urge to say a few parting words. All day long the thought of its mingling with chicken bones and olive pits nagged at me. Half a dozen times I removed it and replaced it, like an executioner with scruples about capital punishment. Finally I put it on a high shelf where I wouldn't have to see it. Life imprisonment.

I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills.

Reading. Reading was the stable backdrop against which my life was played.

Lying in the shadow of books, I brood on my reading habit. What is it all about? What am I doing it for? And the classic addict's question, What is it doing for me?

Nor can I throw a book away. I have given many away and ripped a few in half, but as with warring nations, destruction shows regard: the enemy is a power to reckon with. Throwing a book out shows contempt for an effort of the spirit. Not that I haven't tried.

By the transport of books, that which is most foreign becomes one's familiar walks and avenues; while that which is most familiar is removed to delightful strangeness; and unmoving, one travels infinite causeways; immobile and thus unfettered.

Anyone who tells you her life is like a book has either been reading some bad books or is not being straight with you or herself about her life.

The library at home when she was child had been her refuge. She gravitated to it. When she was anxious, just taking a book of a shelf calmed her. Opening the cover, feeling the paper's smoothness, smelling the sheets, the leather, even sometimes the ink, centered her.

By the transport of books, that which is most foreign becomes one's familiar walks and avenues; while that which is most familiar is removed to delightful strangeness; and unmoving, one travels infinite causeways; immobile and thus unfettered. There

By the transport of books, that which is most foreign becomes one's familiar walks and avenues; while that which is most familiar is removed to delightful strangeness; and unmoving, one travels infinite causeways; immobile and thus unfettered.

I wasn't a normal professor. I had worked in government. I hadn't written nine zillion books. I was a hands-on professor.

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

He remembered Bertolt Brecht: I would also like to be wise. In the old books it says what wisdom is: To shun the strife of the world and to live out Your brief time without fear All this I cannot do.

Bertolt Brecht: I would also like to be wise. In the old books it says what wisdom is: To shun the strife of the world and to live out Your brief time without fear

She lives so completely in books that I don't think she takes anything that happens in the real world very seriously. She

Learning to decipher words had only added to the pleasures of holding spines and turning pages, measuring the journey to the end with a thumb-riffle, poring over frontispieces. Books! Opening with a crackle of old glue, releasing perfume; closing with a solid thump.

He was a wanderer by nature, and even if England and the nearer East were closed to him, the world was wide, the sun shone in many places, the stars wheeled over one, books could be read, women had beauty, flowers scent, tobacco its flavour, music its moving power, coffee its fragrance, horses and dogs and birds were the same seductive creatures

Variety's the source of joy below, From whence still fresh-revolving pleasures flow, In books and love the mind one end pursues, And only change the expiring flames renews.