Quotes Tagged "books"

these books are my good friends

Goodhue wanted visitors to feel more than they were in a pretty building. He wanted them to feel they were part of a three-dimensional meditation on the power of human intellect and the potency of storytelling.

I'd recently finished reading a management tome which seemed to be aimed at psychopaths with no common sense (quite a dangerous combination).

I am not a goddess. I was human once. Millions of years of evolution introduced genetic changes into our species. We found a way to traverse time, to manipulate it, to inverse it. Before the universe went into the reverse crunch, we left our physical bodies. …

Greatness belongs to those who dare to reach for it.

I think fiction at its best can serve as a moment of induced bafflement that calls into question our usual relation to things and reminds us that our minds, as nice as they are, aren’t necessarily up to the task of living, and shouldn’t get cocky.

More and more, I have no idea what I think of anything. It’s as if the world were this very strange beast under a big tarp. Writing is a way of poking at the tarp. You can watch what the beast does during the poking and maybe surmise something about the sort of beast it is, but you also don’t want to be too confident in your theories. I really like the fact that, these days, I can’t say what writing is for, what it’s supposed to do, or how it’s supposed to affect us. I just like doing it.

these books are my good friends

A writer can create a more just world in books by shining a light on that injustice.

I think one should never be too busy to teach those who are anxious to learn.

The sun pressed down on his eyelids, a hot illumination that would soon make him feel drowsy. This must be the way blind people absorbed light into their heads: raising their faces to the sun, to Ra, god of the blind. Everyone needed real light, not just the artificial, thought-up light of the imagination.

Books tend to react with one another, creating randomized magic with a mind of its own.

Lost in a Quatrain - the state of being deep in thought, contemplative...

What if people don't like it? What if they don't even take the chance to read it, but they hate us for what's inside of it?

Los libros no quieren ser leídos por cualquier persona, quiere ser leídos por las mejores personas, por eso buscan a sus lectores.

Hicks szemügyre vette a könyveket, amiket Maura begyűjtött a polcokról: Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Joe Hill. - Ezek horrortörténetek! - kiáltott fel. - Hagyjuk, hogy az elítéltek ilyesmit olvassanak? - Csak ezt olvassák, meg a romantikus regényeket, uram - jelentette ki Maura (...).

I found out that, paradoxically, a book can be bigger than the internet. The very constraints of a book — its linearity, its lack of updates — are also its greatest strengths. I can be far more confident that each reader will have a roughly similar experience of a book, rather than spidering off in all directions as with hypertext. ....But with a book, I have the luxury of being able to take people through a sequence of chapters, letting ideas build on top of each other, developing a fuller argument. It’s a smaller space, but it can support bigger ideas.

All books have magical properties.

[...] if there was something that gave more power than merely destroying the word, it was owning and controlling it. There was a power in books. Words could act as weapons, resounding long after the rumbling of artillery had stopped. They are weapons not only as propaganda, but also in the form of memories. Whoever owns the word has the power not only to interpret it, but also to write history.

My father—who is a true scholar and not just a young lady with an ink pen and a series of things she has to say—puts it much better: “If we address stories as archaeological sites, and dust through their layers with meticulous care, we find at some level there is always a doorway. A dividing point between here and there, us and them, mundane and magical. It is at the moments when the doors open, when things flow between the worlds, that stories happen.