Quotes Tagged "books"

Most books are so well written they barely have any effect on the reader’s senses

....her life would be a giddy crossword, working down from some clues and across from others.

Books were her salvation. As a child, she’d had a shelf of childhood favorites that she loved enough to read over and over again. But after, during the hospital stay and the long voyage and the cold days in Idlewild’s dreary hallways, books became more than mere stories. They were her lifeline, the pages as essential to her as breathing.

But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.

[A]s Agatha Swanburne once said, 'To be kept waiting is unfortunate, but to be kept waiting with nothing interesting to read is a tragedy of Greek proportions.

Ereaders were a great convenience, but nothing could beat the smell of a library and old books.

There's a book for everyone, even if they don't think there is. A book that reaches in and grabs your soul.

And Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book.

Perhaps that is the best way to say it: printed books are magical, and real bookshops keep that magic alive.

Yes, we'll have to put a stop to this bookworming. No future in that.

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. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books.

We read in slow, long motions, as if drifting in space, weightless. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling gaps, mending faults. And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder... as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us--the recognition of something we never knew was there...

I kiss her. I kiss her and kiss her. I try not to bite her lip. She tastes like vodkahoney.

The waltz held the feeling you get when you finish a well-loved book. It left me longing for something I couldn't name.

Its better to hold a book between your Fingers than to Hold a Cigarette.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.

I doubt if ever one ceases to love, but one can cease to be in love as easily as one can outgrow an author one admired as a boy.

The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.

I am often asked a stock question: 'Have you actually read all those books?' To this I have my answer ready: 'Is there anybody who has read all the books in his library?' That would be like claiming to enjoy the incredible luxury and good fortune of being able to accomplish everything in this life that one would wish.