Books Quotes - Wear the old coat and buy the new book
“I
thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the
beauty of language.”
―
Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
“It
is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about.
Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding
and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.”
―
Agatha Christie, The Clocks
“As
long as you have any floor space at all, you have room for books! Just make two
stacks of books the same height, place them three or four feet apart, lay a
board across them, and repeat. Voila! Bookshelves!”
―
Jan Karon
“Wear
the old coat and buy the new book.”
―
Austin Phelps
“Books
may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not
tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield
us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities:
the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.”
―
Alberto Manguel
“Do
not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it
into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much
reality but the epiphany of truth.”
―
Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
“Censorship
is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.”
―
Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
“Her
reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of
a goddess in an epic.”
―
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
“We
need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the
death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests
far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea
inside us.”
―
Franz Kafka
“A
good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured
up on purpose to a life beyond life.”
―
John Milton, Areopagitica
“I
had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw
the library as a temple.”
―
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre
“A
story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and
stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like
and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world
outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor,
the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is
ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished.
You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more
than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built
out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.”
―
Alice Munro, Selected Stories
“I
believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has
only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails,
anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body
and the soul.”
―
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
“Experience
is the best teacher.”
―
Penelope Douglas, Bully
“She
closed the book and put her cheek against it. There was still an odor of a
library on it, of dust, leather, binding glue, and old paper, one book carrying
the smell of hundreds.”
―
Shannon Hale, The Goose Girl
“It
had filled my time - given me quiet, steadfast company with those characters,
who did not exist and never would, but somehow made me feel less ... alone.”
―
Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury
“Libraries
raised me.”
―
Ray Bradbury
“It
is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part.”
―
Voltaire
“Some
say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”
―
Ruth Rendell, A Judgement in Stone
“Thus
I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and
again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that
has already been told.”
―
Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose
“I
pull my foot back again, but Four's hands clamp around my arms, and he pulls me
away from her with irresistible force. I breathe through gritted teeth, staring
at Molly's blood-covered face, the color deep and rich and beautiful, in a way.
She groans, and I hear a gurgling in her throat, watch blood trickle from her
lips. "You won," Four mutters. "Stop." I wipe the sweat
from my forehead. He stares at me. His eyes too wide; they look alarmed.
"I think you should leave," he says. "Take a walk." I'm
fine," I say. "I'm fine now," I say again, this time for myself.
I
wish I could say I felt guilty for what I did.
I
don't.”
―
Veronica Roth, Divergent
“The
book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That's why we go to
movies and say, "Oh, the book is better.”
―
Paulo Coelho
