Books
Quotes – Books are people who do not leave
“If
anything attacked us, we could just panic at it until it went away.”
―
Seanan McGuire, Rosemary and Rue
“So
here is my story, may it bring
Some
smiles and a tear or so,
It
happened once upon a time,
Far
away, and long ago,
Outside
the night wind keens and wails,
Come
listen to me, the Teller of Tales!”
―
Brian Jacques, Lord Brocktree
“There
are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
―
Joseph Brodsky
“The
best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it
suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes
of our hearts.”
―
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
“Even
if you are alone you wage war with yourself.”
―
Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
“But
maybe they understood more about life than I did. From an early age they knew
what little value the world placed in books, and so didn't waste their time
with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on
white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing, I might be
able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.”
―
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
“I
have all the books I could need, and what more could I need than books?”
―
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland - For a Little While
“You
have to learn to look at the whole of something, not just the parts.”
―
Marie Lu, Warcross
“The
rest of my room is book shelves. I hoard books. They are people who do not
leave.”
―
Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters
“The
more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper
sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn’t floating on my little raft in the
present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is
another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back
the things we need.
Literature
is common ground. It is ground not managed wholly by commercial interests, nor
can it be strip-mined like popular culture—exploit the new thing then move on.
There’s
a lot of talk about the tame world versus the wild world. It is not only a wild
nature that we need as human beings; it is the untamed open space of our
imaginations.
Reading
is where the wild things are.”
―
Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
“He
was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer
interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Julián was
living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for
his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design."
"You
say this as if you envied him."
"There
are worse prisons than words.”
―
Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
“Tis
the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in
every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all
else and unmistakably meant for his ear.”
―
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude
“No
matter how people mess with you or let you down, or how you let yourself down,
a good book means that when you get in bed that night, you have a good hour. I
feel like you pay all day for that hour. That's what books mean to me. I can
open this two-dimensional, flat white page with squiggly little black marks on
them, and someone has created this world that you're going to enter into ...”
―
Anne Lamott
“A
book had always been a door to another world... a world much more interesting
and fantastical than reality. But she had finally discovered that life could be
even more wonderful than fantasy.
And
that love could fill the real world with magic.”
―
Lisa Kleypas, Scandal in Spring
“A
book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead
symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the
poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to
life, and we have a resurrection of the word.”
―
Jorge Luis Borges
“I
long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is
my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time.”
―
Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman
“I
do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or
magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple
fonts, pictures where they shouldn't be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find
literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be
distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the
literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary,
and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything
satisfying. I do not like children's books, especially ones with orphans, and I
prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over
four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by
ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books,
sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes
without saying—vampires.”
―
Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
