Books
Quotes - Every night, I have to read a book
“I
often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a
blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the
feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the
narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of
his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served
its purpose.”
―
Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
“Every
night, I have to read a book, so that my mind will stop thinking about things
that I stress about.”
―
Britney Spears
“She
talked like a woman who knew more books than people.”
―
Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood
“I
am clumsy, drop glasses and get drunk on Monday afternoons. I read Seneca and
can recite Shakespeare by heart, but I mess up the laundry, don’t answer my
phone and blame the world when something goes wrong. I think I have a dream,
but most of the days I’m still sleeping. The grass is cut. It smells like
strawberries. Today I finished four books and cleaned my drawers.
Do
you believe in a God? Can I tell you about Icarus? How he flew too close to the
sun?
I
want to make coming home your favourite part of the day. I want to leave tiny
little words lingering in your mind, on nights when you’re far away and can’t
sleep. I want to make everything around us beautiful; make small things mean a
little more. Make you feel a little more. A little better, a little lighter.
The coffee is warm, this cup is yours. I want to be someone you can’t live
without.
I
want to be someone you can’t live without.”
―
Charlotte Eriksson, He loved me some days. I'm sure he did: 99 essays on growth
through loss
“Do
you shovel to survive, or survive to shovel?”
―
Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes
“Some
say they get lost in books, but I find myself, again and again, in the pages of
a good book. Humanly speaking, there is no greater teacher, no greater
therapist, no greater healer of the soul, than a well-stocked library.”
―
L.R.Knost
“An
emotion clamped down on her heart. It squeezed her into a terrible silence. But
he said nothing after that, only her name, as if her name were not a name but a
question. Or perhaps that it wasn’t how he had said it, and she was wrong, and
she’d heard a question simply because the sound of him speaking her name made
her wish that she were his answer.”
―
Marie Rutkoski, The Winner's Crime
“He
wasn't an alchemist, or a hero. He was a librarian, and a dreamer. He was a
reader, and the unsung expert on a long-lost city no one cared a thing about.”
―
Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer
“It
looked like the sort of book described in library catalogues as 'slightly
foxed', although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it
had been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.”
―
Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic
“Haven't
you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had,
some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely
your most subtle feelings?”
―
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
“Bloodthirsty
little beasts. Never trust a duck.”
―
Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel
“Master
those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate
you. Read and reread them…digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse
a good book several times and make notes and analyses of it. A student will
find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly
mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed. Little learning and much
pride comes from hasty reading. Some men are disabled from thinking by their
putting meditation away for the sake of much reading. In reading let your motto
be ‘much not many.”
―
Charles H. Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students
“This
is how I lived back then– through books. I locked myself into their stories,
dreamt of their characters at night, pretended to be them. They were my armour
against the hard edges of reality. I carried them with me wherever I went, like
a talisman in my pocket, thinking of them as almost more real than the people
around me, who spoke and lived in denial, destined, I thought, to never do
anything worth recounting.”
―
Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark
“Was
there ever a more horrible blasphemy than the statement that all the knowledge
of God is confined to this or that book? How dare men call God infinite, and
yet try to compress Him within the covers of a little book!”
―
Vivekananda, Raja Yoga
“If
books are not good company, where shall I find it?”
―
Mark Twain
“But
there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the
book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.”
―
G.K. Chesterton
“Your
house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy
in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a
distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges
you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that
you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.”
―
Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
“Reading
is important.
Books
are important.
Librarians
are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes
feral children raise themselves among the stacks.)”
―
Neil Gaiman
“Reading
is reading - no matter what the material.”
―
Giovanna Fletcher, Billy and Me
“Tis
the good reader that makes the good book.”
―
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The
imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation;
it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and
commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is
the phenomena of the library.”
―
Michel Foucault
