Experience is the best teacher.
When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.
I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.
There is something wonderful about a book. We can pick it up. We can heft it. We can read it. We can set it down. We can think of what we have read. It does something for us. We can share great minds, great actions, and great undertakings in the pages of a book.
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.
Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.
The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one's soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule.
I wanted to live among books.
I only want power so I can get books.
A stereotype becomes a stereotype when a significant percentage of the population appears to conform to it.
What is the quality you most like in a man? The ability to return books.
Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.
I even love the smell of books.
I have a realistic grasp of my own strengths and weaknesses. My mind is my weapon. My brother has his sword, King Robert has his warhammer, and I have my mindβ¦ and a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge. Thatβs why I read so much, Jon Snow.
Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity.
It's a strange grief⦠to die of nostalgia for something you you will never live.
