Books
Quotes - Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again
“Life
was not easy, nor was it happy, but she did not expect life to be easy, and, if
it was not happy, that was woman's lot. It was a man's world, and she accepted
it as such. The man owned the property, and the woman managed it. The man took
credit for the management, and the woman praised his cleverness. The man roared
like a bull when a splinter was in his finger, and the woman muffled the moans
of childbirth, lest she disturb him. Men were rough of speech and often drunk.
Women ignored the lapses of speech and put the drunkards to bed without bitter
words. Men were rude and outspoken, women were always kind, gracious and
forgiving.”
―
Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
“For
masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many
years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the
experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”
―
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
“Some
books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again.”
―
Louisa May Alcott
“She'd
always been a little excitable, a little more passionate about books than your
average person, but she was supposed to be -- she was a librarian, after all.”
―
Sarah Beth Durst
“I
only want power so I can get books.”
―
Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
“Any
book worth banning is a book worth reading.”
―
Isaac Asimov
“Books
can truly change our lives: the lives of those who read them, the lives of
those who write them. Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew
about the world and about themselves.”
―
Lloyd Alexander, Time Cat
“What
is the quality you most like in a man?
The
ability to return books.”
―
David Bowie
“The
greatest gift is the passion for reading.
It
is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites,
it
gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind.
It
is a moral illumination.”
―
Elizabeth Hardwick
“The
shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and
remake one's soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule.”
―
Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
“She
read books quickly and compulsively, paperback after paperback, as if she might
drift away without the anchor of the printed page.”
―
Jane Hamilton
“Literature
can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so
many stories to be told.”
―
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
“To
feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready
always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.”
―
Gaston Bachelard
“The
books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if
we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came
through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own
past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the
thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their
worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a
flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a
country we have never yet visited.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“There
are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading,
the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on
living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one
has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the
same book?”
―
Marina Tsvetaeva
“In
the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has
once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.”
―
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“A
book is as private and consensual as sex.”
―
Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted
“There’s
nothing as cozy as a piece of candy and a book.”
―
Betty MacDonald, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Magic
“The
best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Reading
gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.”
―
Mason Cooley
“Why
does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it
never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to
rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that
everything is used and nothing is lost. Because it's something to do to pass
the time until she is old enough to experience the things she writes about.”
―
Nicole Krauss
