Books Quotes - I think of life as a good book
“....a
good book can teach you about the world and about yourself. You learn more than
how to read better; you also learn more about life. You become wiser. Not just
more knowledgeable - books that provide nothing but information can produce
that result. But wiser, in the sense that you are more deeply aware of the
great and enduring truths of human life.”
―
Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
“I
think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins
to make sense.”
―
Harold Kushner
“When
you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.
There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech
patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding
of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are
not separate but symbiotic.”
―
Julian Barnes, A Life with Books
“We
have everything we need to be happy but we aren't happy. Something is
missing...
It is
not books you need, it's some of the things that are in books. The magic is
only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together
into one garment for us.”
―
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
“A
big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to
stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can
be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy
book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.”
―
Mark Twain
“Some
like to believe it's the book that chooses the person.”
―
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
“He'll
be down with the books. My old septon used to say books are dead men talking.
Dead men should keep quiet is what I say. No one wants to hear a dead man's
yabber.”
―
George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
“Never
did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper
when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book. People who are fond
of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a
moment. The temptation to be unreasonable and snappish is one not easy to
manage.
"It
makes me feel as if something had hit me," Sara had told Ermengarde once
in confidence. "And as if I want to hit back. I have to remember things
quickly to keep from saying something ill-tempered.”
―
Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess
“I'm
pretty sure my addiction to reading has just reached a whole new level.”
―
Colleen Hoover, Hopeless
“I
only read biographies, metaphysics and psychology. I can dream up my own
fiction.”
―
Mae West
“There
never yet have been, nor are there now, too many good books.”
―
Martin Luther
“I
love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story,
the delicious ache of a last page.”
―
Naomi Shihab Nye
“Books
took me to places I could never go otherwise. They shared the confessions of
people I'd never met and lives I'd never witnessed. The emotions I could never
feel, and the events I hadn't experienced could all be found in those volumes.”
―
Won-pyung Sohn, Almond
“In
the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were
looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the
shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at
you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never
allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the
Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books
Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read
Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then
you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One
Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered.
With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books
You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too
Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They
Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That
Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults,
you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding
out:
the
Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages,
the
Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success,
the
Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment,
the
Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case,
the
Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,
the
Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,
the
Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified,
Now
you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that
is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this
relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago
Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have
Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.”
―
Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
