Books
Quotes - Books are the carriers of civilization
“Books
are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature
dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books,
the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of
change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the
sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures
of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
[Bulletin
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Nov. 1980), pp.
16-32]”
―
Barbara Tuchman
“A
library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people.
It is a never failing spring in the desert.”
―
Andrew Carnegie
“She
didn't read books so she didn't know that she was the world and the heavens
boiled down to a drop.”
―
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
“those
of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores
the way some people feel about jewelers...”
―
Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life
“Reading,'
Ead said lightly. 'A dangerous pastime.”
―
Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree
“I
cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so
since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history
– true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience
of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one
resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination
of the author.”
―
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
“With
my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep
inside me. This was enough to make me happy. ”
―
Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
“In
a word, literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the
senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They
talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. The things I have learned and
the things I have been taught seem of ridiculously little importance compared
with their "large loves and heavenly charities.”
―
Helen Keller, The Story of My Life
“Of
course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope
to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on
a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of
intellectual wallpaper.”
―
David Quammen, The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder
“A
woman's destiny, they say, is not fulfilled until she holds in her arms her own
little book.”
―
Caroline Mytinger, Headhunting in the Solomon Islands: Around the Coral Sea
“And
this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the
running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. I would not change
it.”
―
William Shakespeare, As You Like It
“How
is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we
come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending
customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses,
and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway
between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.”
―
Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life
“You
are a total stranger and you want to take my library book.”
―
Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian
“And
I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is
all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be
proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as
though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your
posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together
with the earthly globe.”
―
Anton Chekhov
“Never
put off till tomorrow the book you can read today.”
―
Holbrook Jackson
“The
point is, it didn’t really matter what the book was about. It was what it meant
that was important.”
―
Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
“I've
developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had
time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful
from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books.”
―
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
“I
hate when people ask what a book is about. People who read for plot, people who
suck out the story like the cream filling in an Oreo, should stick to comic
strips and soap operas. . . . Every book worth a damn is about emotions and
love and death and pain. It's about words. It's about a man dealing with life.
Okay?”
―
J.R. Moehringer
“Leisure
without books is death, and burial of a man alive.”
―
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
