Books
Quotes - In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own
“Being
a writer is a good, good thing.”
―
Shannon Hale
“I
was thinking, "So, I’m Emperor, am I? What nonsense! But at least I'll be
able to make people read my books now.”
―
Robert Graves, I, Claudius
“I
believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in
tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate,
we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our
language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can
open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.”
―
Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
“Before
she came ill, David's mother would often tell him that stories were alive. They
weren't alive in the way that people were alive, or even dogs or cats. (...)
Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human
voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by torch light
beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world. (...) They lay
dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them,
they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and
transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read, David's mother would whisper.
They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into
ours. They wanted us to give them life.”
―
John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things
“Reading
is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase
to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds
oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel
like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension
of life itself.”
―
Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch
“Do
you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality.
And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has
pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life
under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more
truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of
paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway. Telling
detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run
a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. So
now you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of
life.”
―
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
“The
taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight
by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to
serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house
down with a tinder.”
―
Virginia Woolf, Orlando
“For
books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.”
―
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas
“To
build up a library is to create a life. It's never just a random collection of
books.”
―
Carlos MarÃa DomÃnguez, The House of Paper
“In
books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who
I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to
dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the
"shalt nots" of the Ten Commandments, I learned the difference
between good and evil, right and wrong. A Wrinkle in Time described that evil,
that wrong, existing in a different dimension from our own. But I felt that I,
too, existed much of the time in a different dimension from everyone else I
knew. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a
kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a
universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My
real, true world. My perfect island.”
―
Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life
“A
lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much
other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely
composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are
judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are
judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read
just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost
Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.”
―
The Economist
“Be
as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep; for your habits
and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter.”
―
Paxton Hood
“Few
pleasures, for the true reader, rival the pleasure of browsing unhurriedly
among books: old books, new books, library books, other people's books, one's
own books - it does not matter whose or where. Simply to be among books,
glancing at one here, reading a page from one over there, enjoying them all as
objects to be touched, looked at, even smelt, is a deep satisfaction. And
often, very often, while browsing haphazardly, looking for nothing in particular,
you pick up a volume that suddenly excites you, and you know that this one of
all the others you must read. Those are great moments - and the books we come
across like that are often the most memorable.”
―
Aidan Chambers
