Books
Quotes - I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious
pastime that humankind has yet devised
“And
most of all, books. They were, in and of themselves, reasons to stay alive.
Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state. Add
all the books together and you get the end sum of humanity. Every time I read a
great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure
I was being directed to was in actual fact myself.”
―
Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive
“I
understood books. I did not understand boys—especially alien boys.”
―
Jennifer L. Armentrout, Onyx
“Fiction
is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to
life at all four corners.”
―
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
“There
were valuable first editions of books in the enormous library, most of them had
been scribbled in by some idiot named Will H.”
―
Cassandra Clare, Lord of Shadows
“I
picked up one of the books and flipped through it. Don't get me wrong, I like
reading. But some books should come with warning labels: Caution: contains
characters and plots guaranteed to induce sleepiness. Do not attempt to operate
heavy machinery after ingesting more than one chapter. Has been known to cause
blindness, seizures and a terminal loathing of literature. Should only be taken
under the supervision of a highly trained English teacher. Preferably one who
grades on the curve.”
―
Laurie Halse Anderson, Twisted
“I
am a product [...of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and
never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the
drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on
the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the
cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my
parents' interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child
and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly
endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had
always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who
walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The
world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our
suffering.”
―
Tom Waits
“Nobody
has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I
have ever read.
If
you are offended it is your problem, and frankly lots of things offend lots of
people.
I
can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very
unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop
down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book
and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.
To
read a 600-page novel and then say that it has deeply offended you: well, you
have done a lot of work to be offended.”
―
Salman Rushdie
“Me,
poor man, my library
Was
dukedom large enough.”
―
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
“Generally,
by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes
drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things
don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to
people who don't understand.”
―
Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit
“I'm
old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that
humankind has yet devised.”
―
Wislawa Szymborska, Nonrequired Reading
“We
owe it to each other to tell stories.”
―
Neil Gaiman
“Marginalia
Sometimes
the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes
against the author
raging
along the borders of every page
in
tiny black script.
If I
could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard,
or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they
seem to say,
I
would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other
comments are more offhand, dismissive -
Nonsense."
"Please!" "HA!!" -
that
kind of thing.
I
remember once looking up from my reading,
my
thumb as a bookmark,
trying
to imagine what the person must look like
who
wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside
a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students
are more modest
needing
to leave only their splayed footprints
along
the shore of the page.
One
scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another
notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty
times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or
they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands
cupped around their mouths.
Absolutely,"
they shout
to
Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
Yes."
"Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check
marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain
down along the sidelines.
And
if you have managed to graduate from college
without
ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a
margin, perhaps now
is
the time to take one step forward.
We
have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and
reached for a pen if only to show
we
did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we
pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted
an impression along the verge.
Even
Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted
along the borders of the Gospels
brief
asides about the pains of copying,
a
bird singing near their window,
or
the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous
men catching a ride into the future
on a
vessel more lasting than themselves.
And
you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they
say, until you have read him
enwreathed
with Blake's furious scribbling.
Yet
the one I think of most often,
the
one that dangles from me like a locket,
was
written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I
borrowed from the local library
one
slow, hot summer.
I
was just beginning high school then,
reading
books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and
I cannot tell you
how
vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how
poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when
I found on one page
A
few greasy looking smears
and
next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a
beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom
I would never meet-
Pardon
the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.”
―
Billy Collins, Picnic, Lightning
