Books
Quotes - It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words
“To
live is to have worries and uncertainties. Keep them inside, and they will
destroy you for certain--leaving behind a person so callused that emotion can
find no root in his heart.”
―
Brandon Sanderson, Elantris
“The
only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take
no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to
your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to
put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to
fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can
possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of
Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play
than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit
authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them
tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to
destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.
Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions-there we have none.”
―
Virginia Woolf, The Second Common Reader
“One
of the disadvantages of almost universal education was the fact that all kinds
of persons acquired a familiarity with one's favorite writers. It gave one a
curious feeling; it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one's
dressing gown.”
―
Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm
“Ultimately,
the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.”
―
Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
“Should
it matter what genre it is if the book is good?”
―
Colleen Hoover, Hopeless
“It
also meant she thought of books as medication and sanctuary and the source of
all good things. Nothing yet had proven her wrong.”
―
Abbi Waxman, The Bookish Life of Nina Hill
“Books--oh!
no. I am sure we never read the same, or not with the same
feelings."
"I
am sorry you think so; but if that be the case, there can at least be
no
want of subject. We may compare our different opinions.”
―
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
“There
are books, that one has for twenty years without reading them, that one always
keeps at hand, that one takes along from city to city, from country to country,
carefully packed, even when there is very little room, and perhaps one leafs
through them while removing them from a trunk; yet one carefully refrains from
reading even a complete sentence. Then after twenty years, there comes a moment
when suddenly, as though under a high compulsion, one cannot help taking in
such a book from beginning to end, at one sitting: it is like a revelation. Now
one knows why one made such a fuss about it. It had to be with one for a long
time; it had to travel; it had to occupy space; it had to be a burden; and now
it has reached the goal of its voyage, now it reveals itself, now it
illuminates the twenty bygone years it mutely lived with one. It could not say
so much if it had not been there mutely the whole time, and what idiot would
dare to assert that the same things had always been in it.”
―
Elias Canetti, The Human Province
“It
is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't
have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap
its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in.”
―
Naomi Shihab Nye, I'll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK?: Tales of Driving and
Being Driven
“Hold
a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.”
―
Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
“Sidda
can't help herself. She just loves books. Loves the way they feel, the way they
smell, loves the black letters marching across the white pages...”
―
Rebecca Wells, Little Altars Everywhere
“The
library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on
any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest,
abandoning any that don't, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like,
and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own
self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a
test paper.”
―
Polly Horvath, My One Hundred Adventures
“A
war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won
without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising
range, and mount the most powerful guns.”
―
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
“The
other night we talked about literature's elimination of the unessential, so
that we are given a concentrated "dose" of life. I said, almost
indignantly, "That's the danger of it, it prepares you to live, but at the
same time, it exposes you to disappointments because it gives a heightened
concept of living, it leaves out the dull or stagnant moments. You, in your
books, also have a heightened rhythm, and a sequence of events so packed with
excitement that I expected all your life to be delirious, intoxicated."
Literature
is an exaggeration, a dramatization, and those who are nourished on it (as I
was) are in great danger of trying to approximate an impossible rhythm. Trying
to live up to Dostoevskian scenes every day. And between writers there is a
straining after extravagance. We incite each other to jazz-up our rhythm.”
―
Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
“I
always feel at home when I’m in the store. I could spend hours and hours in
here. There’s a comfort in being surrounded by walls of books.”
―
Dustin Thao, You've Reached Sam
