Books
Quotes - When was the last time you read a book?
“I'm
afraid I've degenerated into a bibliophile.”
―
Christopher Paolini, Eragon
“Like
flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of
nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a
kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. And
every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices
of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head.”
―
Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
“When
was the last time you read a book? The truth now. And picture books don't
count-I mean something with print in it.”
―
William Goldman, The Princess Bride
“Among
the many worlds which man did not receive as a gift of nature, but which he
created with his own mind, the world of books is the greatest. Every child,
scrawling his first letters on his slate and attempting to read for the first
time, in so doing, enters an artificial and complicated world; to know the laws
and rules of this world completely and to practice them perfectly, no single
human life is long enough. Without words, without writing, and without books
there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. And if anyone
wants to try to enclose in a small space in a single house or single room, the
history of the human spirit and to make it his own, he can only do this in the
form of a collection of books.”
―
Hermann Hesse, My Belief
“You
can’t enjoy art or books in a hurry.”
―
E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
“I
sat, a solitary man,
In
a crowded London shop,
An
open book and empty cup
On
the marble table-top.
While
on the shop and street I gazed
My
body of a sudden blazed;
And
twenty minutes more or less
It
seemed, so great my happiness,
That
I was blessed and could bless.”
―
W.B. Yeats, The Winding Stair And Other Poems
“When
you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink
and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and
ships at sea by night - there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I
mean.”
―
Christopher Morley, Parnassus on Wheels
“Printer's
ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is
handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a
second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the
gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on
exploding for centuries.”
―
Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop
“Now
and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent
pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear
and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the
dark—readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or
better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or
how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new,
never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was
always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always
known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised,
become fully cognisant of, our knowledge.”
―
A.S. Byatt, Possession
“Of
all the inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books are the nearest to us
for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our
illusions, our fidelity to the truth, and our persistent leanings to error. But
most of all they resemble us in their precious hold on life.”
―
Joseph Conrad
“My
life - my personality, my habits, even my speech - is a combination of the
books I choose to read, the people I choose to listen to, and the thoughts I
choose to tolerate in my mind”
―
Andy Andrews
Books
are the most tolerant of friends.”
―
Richard Paul Evans, The Gift
“Every
reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in
this sense, a ritual of rebirth.”
―
Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
“He
wanted to tell her she'd have more room if she'd just get rid of her books, but
he supposed that in her case, it would be like telling a mother she'd have more
room if she threw out her children.”
―
Cynthia Hand, My Lady Jane
“For
once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it
falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and
festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. ”
―
Virginia Woolf, Orlando
“My
books are friends that never fail me."
(Letter
to his mother, Margaret A. Carlyle; 17 March 1817)”
―
Thomas Carlyle
