Books
Quotes - Books, the children of the brain
“Nobody
steals books but your friends.”
―
Roger Zelazny, The Guns of Avalon
“When
male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.”
―
Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Ain't She Sweet?
“Often
on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read.”
― Virginia
Woolf, Between the Acts
“Books...
are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of
'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.”
―
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
“The
unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader,
reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.”
―
Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women,
Places
“Keep
good company, read good books, love good things and cultivate soul and body as
faithfully as you can.”
―
Louisa May Alcott, Rose in Bloom
“It's
a strange grief… to die of nostalgia for something you will never live.”
―
Alessandro Baricco, Silk
“I
love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense
of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone
has called my attention to.”
―
Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road
“My
youngest brother had a wonderful schtick from some time in high school, through
to graduating medicine. He had a card in his wallet that read, ‘If I am found
with amnesia, please give me the following books to read …’ And it listed half
a dozen books where he longed to recapture that first glorious sense of needing
to find out ‘what happens next’ … the feeling that keeps you up half the night.
The feeling that comes before the plot’s been learned.”
―
Guy Gavriel Kay
“I
can imagine no greater bliss than to lie about, reading novels all day.”
―
Julia Quinn, Ten Things I Love About You
“We
lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and
part of a more expansive world.”
―
Judith Butler
“I'm
trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief... I'm not in the business of
offending people. I find the books upholding certain values that I think are
important, such as life is immensely valuable and this world is an
extraordinarily beautiful place. We should do what we can to increase the
amount of wisdom in the world.
[Washington
Post interview, 19 February 2001]”
―
philip pullman
“She
turned to look at him, and he was already looking at her. “I’m going to miss
you when I wake up,” she whispered, because she realized that she must have
fallen asleep under the sun. Arin was too real for her imagination. He was a
dream.
“Don’t
wake up,” he said.”
―
Marie Rutkoski, The Winner's Crime
“I
never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.”
―
Samuel Johnson, Johnsonian Miscellanies - Vol II
“Just
the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes
that day happier. ”
―
Kathleen Thompson Norris, Hands Full of Living
“You
don't put your life into your books, you find it there.”
―
Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
“I
have gone to [this bookshop] for years, always finding the one book I wanted -
and then three more I hadn’t known I wanted.”
―
Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
“Reading
is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else
direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways
there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you
followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up,
which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to
banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy
ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or
engravings of landscapes.”
―
Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms
“Books,
the children of the brain.”
―
Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub and Other Writings
“I
know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to
understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.”
―
Diane Setterfield
“Books
are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.”
―
James Russell Lowell
“Anyone
who thinks one book has all the answers hasn't read enough books.”
―
Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Volume 6
“Buying
books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them; but as
a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their
contents.”
―
Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims
“Men
have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been
theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not
allow books to prove anything.”
―
Jane Austen, Persuasion
“A
motion picture, or music, or television, they have to maintain a certain
decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience. Other forms of mass media
cost too much to produce a risk reaching only a limited audience. Only one
person. But a book. . . . A book is cheap to print and bind. A book is as
private and consensual as sex. A book takes time and effort to consume -
something that gives a reader every chance to walk away. Actually, so few
people make the effort to read that it's difficult to call books a "mass
medium." No one really gives a damn about books. No one has bothered to
ban a book in decades.”
―
Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted
