c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Books. The reading, writing and cultivation of books is my form of meditation. The books in my life have brought me the closet to divinity.
— Casey  Carter
If you only read books, how will you read the scripture inside you?
— Tapan Ghosh, Faceless The Only Way Out
I walked around the library looking for books. I pulled them off the shelves, one by one. But they were all tricks. They were very dull. There were pages and pages of words that didn't say anything. Or if they did say something they took too long to say it and by the time they said it you already were too tired to have it matter at all. I tried book after book. Surely, out of all those books, there was one.
— Charles Bukowski
You know that feeling when you are reading a book, and you know that it is going to be a tragedy; you can feel the cold and darkness coming, see the net drawing close around the characters who live and breathe on the pages. But you are tied to the story as if being dragged behind a carriage, and you cannot let go or turn the course aside.
— Cassandra Clare
Only a reader can understand how a book with 100 pages can be too long and one with 1000 pages can be too short.
— Sofija
Something is wrong with me, it's something about me. it has to be me because all those people cannot have changed.
— Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman
He was letting you break your icons one by one. he was letting you reduce him to the status of a human being.
— Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman
when you're young you do think that things last forever unfortunately they don't Lyra.
— Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass
Books were cities I'd never visited, filled with pillars of great thoughts and streets of phrases, mazes of abstruse sentence structures and alleys of complicated syllables. They were stores that displayed a wide range of things, punctuation twinkling like the crest of a venerable family, sentences breathing peacefully, words whispering.
— Jung-Myung Lee, The Investigation
The clean book bill will be one of the most immoral measures ever adopted. It will throw American art back into the junk heap.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Amazing how money would simplify problems like ours. We wouldn't go wild at all, but write & travel & study all of our lives - which I hope we do anyway. And have a house apart, by the side of no road, with country about & a study & walls of bookcases.
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
If you want to know the place, Go see the local book store.
— Mahrukh
Even the most ill-formed words, set to paper, are a great blessing.
— Ruthanna Emrys, Winter Tide
I spent days and nights staring at the blank page, searching the deepest corners of my mind: who have I been, what have I seen, what did I learn? I thought about all the nights I've spent outside, all the times I laid down to cry and how I took a deep breath every morning and decided to simply go on. Because what else is there to do? Decide that this is it? I quit, I'm done? Oh if I could find words to justify those feelings I've carried. I could write the thickest of books with explosions of emotions from a young girl's lost heart. I could make you see, make you hear, make you feel, at least a tiny fragment  of what's out there.
— Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps
Standing in front of the white picket fence, I stared at the multitude of champagne roses weaving their hunter green vines gracefully through and around the fence. Soft hints of pink hues whispered from the centers of the blooms. Their petals covered the lush ground and rolled in a lazy dance with the warm summer breeze...
— Leah Lozano, Immortalis: The Guardian
The best and most exciting kind of love is the one that's so close to the heart and so real in the mind yet, truly never exists in reality -- it keeps the heart young and the mind believing!
— movingnotion
If books had not bound together the experiences of former generations, the shackles of later generations in their forgetfulness would not have been loosed.
— Mahbud
He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors. He felt as if he had left the great seance and all the murmuring ghosts. He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Trithemius' concern for conservation was rare, indeed, and is a lesson to modern library managers who discard printed volumes, believing that e-books are the only way of the future.
— Roderick Cave, The History of the Book in 100 Books: The Complete Story, From Egypt to E-Book
This is an instance of the truism that, when switching from one recording medium to another, there is always a considerable data loss. As the Roman empire declined, continuing preservation of early texts would be dependent on the efforts of the book copyists in the Middle Ages - and good luck. Are there any resemblances to our current digitization concerns?
— Sara Ayad, The History of the Book in 100 Books: The Complete Story, From Egypt to E-Book
The replacement of independent bookstores by firms such as Barnes & Noble, Waterstones or Borders superficially provided a wide range of reading, but their policies further limited choice.
— Sara Ayad, The History of the Book in 100 Books: The Complete Story, From Egypt to E-Book
It needs to be repeated that books are much more than merely vehicles for text. Awareness of the way a book is created, the materials of which it is made, flipping through the volume to see how it is arranged, the intended readership, the clues of the previous ownership and use, and potential problems in its conservation - all these become almost instinctive for experienced readers. (For rare-book custodians, such things as smelling a volume or shaking a leaf to hear the rattle provide further "forensic" information.) This is like an extension to the metadata (such as a book's Dewey class number), which is still largely absent from e-books.
— Roderick Cave & Sara Ayad, The History of the Book in 100 Books: The Complete Story, From Egypt to E-Book
A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well.
— G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study
Who can know when his world is going to change? . . . Who would suspect that in the morning a different child would wake? . . . Perhaps I should have at least known something, but maybe not; who can sense revelation in the wind?What happened was just this: I got hooked on the story.For the first time in my life, I became actively interested in a book. Me the sports fanatic, me the game freak, me the only ten-year-old in Illinois with a hate on for the alphabet wanted to know what happened next.
— William Goldman, The Princess Bride
There's no difference between pulp fiction and highbrow fiction, one is as good as the other, the only difference is the aura they have, and that's determined by the people who read the stuff, not by the book itself. There's no such thing as 'the book itself.
— Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5
Books connect us readers to what we cannot see but imagine, an intangible sort of wonder and magic.
— Stephanie Morales
These sciences are camel stallions — use books to line them up these couplets are runaways — use books for them as halters. 
— Unknown
I noticed you made a bee-line for their bookcases." It is the oldest and most incorrigible trait of the book-lover.
— Paul  Collins, Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books
It really is an APPALLING thing to think of the people who have no books...It is only by books that most men and women can lift themselves above the sordidness of life. No books! Yet for the greater part of humanity that is the common lot. We may, in fact, divide our fellow-creatures into two branches - those who read books and those who do not.
— Paul  Collins, Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books
Regina read all this, thinking with each sentence she'd put the book down. But a sentence became a paragraph, which flowed on into a page, two pages, a chapter, more.
— Deborah Johnson, The Secret of Magic
Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.
— Stéphane Mallarmé
Blessings be the inventor of the alphabet, pen and printing press! Life would be--to me in all events--a terrible thing without books.
— L.M. Montgomery
There are books which take rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
If I save my insight, I don’t attend to weakness of eyesight.
— Socrates
Sorrow's children were raised on books.
— Marty Rubin
You want weapons? We´re in a library! Books! The best weapons in the world! This room´s the greatest arsenal we could have.
— Doctor who
...but one can't be irredeemable who shows reverence for books.
— Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer
Think of these books as doors. Open them and let their ideas stir your mind. Study them and they become weapons.
— Anna K. Lane, Cursed Legacy
Child, all books are magic. Just think,' he said, 'about what books make people do. People go to war on the basis of what they read in books. They believe in "facts" just because they are written down. They decide to adopt political systems, to travel to one place rather than another, to give up their job and go on a great adventure, to love or to hate. All books have tremendous power. And power is magic.' 'But are these books really magic...?
— Scarlett Thomas
The Holy Bible is sacred book.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
It plumps up your thinker and fills up your heart. And where you end up is not where you start.
— Brynne Barnes, Books Do Not Have Wings
Books are the way to stretch out people's souls, and I won't have children with small souls.
— Jodi Lynn Anderson
The love of books was an instant connection, and a true boon for a girl who tended toward shyness, because it was a source of endless conversation.
— Tessa Dare, When a Scot Ties the Knot
It was, in many ways, her dream bookshop. Not least because all the books had already been read.Books that had already been read were the best.
— Katarina Bivald, The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend
This book is a story, and like all stories, it should be taken with a grain of salt.
— Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste
Books and workshops and gurus are great, but the very best teacher for your mind is, and will always be, your heart.
— Scott Stabile
It’s tough, but if you want to survive, sometimes you have to do the seemingly impossible.
— Adele          Rose, Shattered
I am a wall. I am a wall. I am a wall. I am a giant and I tower above you. I am a giant and I can't hear your voice. There is familiarity in this. I spent years like this growing up, my mother hovering over my every move, me responding monosyllabically, face blank, voice blank, heart blank. It is a coping mechanism and it is easy, if you are able to block out false promises of love with the understanding of what love has become.
— Tania De Rozario, And the Walls Come Crumbling Down
Why does the same book elicit such a range of responses? There must be something in the particular reader that leaps out to embrace the book. His life, his psychology, his image of himself. There must be something lurking deep in the mind—or, as this Freud says, the unconscious—that causes a particular reader to fall in love with a particular writer.
— Irvin D. Yalom, The Spinoza Problem
Yeah, I mean, most people want to escape. Get out of their heads. Out of their lives. Stories are the easiest way to do that.
— Victoria Schwab, This Savage Song
as a childthere was eitherbooksorpain.i chose books.-how i became a writer
— Nayyirah Waheed, Salt
I felt convinced that however it might have been in former times, in the present stage of the world, no man's faculties could be developed, no man's moral principle be enlarged and liberal, without an extensive acquaintance with books.
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Last Man
She died without us by her side, and now, we are left with the scars. In time, perhaps they will fade, but for now, they're still hauntingly there reminding us of the loss and pain.
— Sophie Palmer
You should read this book’ almost never simply means you should read this book. It is usually far more fraught. Telling someone what to read, even asking politely, can feel more like an entreaty or an implied judgment or a there’s-something-you-should-know than a straightforward proposal. If you read this book, then you love me. If you read this book, then you respect my opinions. If you read this book, you will understand what it is I need you to understand and can’t explain to you myself.
— Pamela Paul, My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues
Choosing a book is so gratifying, it’s worth dragging out the process, starting even before finishing the current one. As the final chapters approach, you can pile up the possibilities like a stack of travel brochures. You can lay out three books and let them linger overnight before making a final decision in the morning. You can Google the reviews; ask other people if they’ve read it, collect information. The choice may ultimately depend on the mood and the moment. ‘You have to read a book at the right time for you,’ Lessing also said, ‘and I am sure this cannot be insisted on too often, for it is the key to the enjoyment of literature.
— Pamela Paul, My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues
When I look through Bob, the actual stories between his mottled covers may have been written by others, but they belong to me now. Nobody else on the planet has read this particular series of books in this exact order and been affected in precisely this way. Each of us could say the same about our respective reading trajectories. Even if we don’t keep a physical Book of Books, we all hold our books somewhere inside us and live by them. They become our stories.
— Pamela Paul, My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues
Built-in shelves line my bedroom, adjacent to my Japanese platform bed, purchased for its capacious rim, the better to hold those books that must be immediately accessible. Yet still they pile on my nightstand, and the grid of shelves continues in floor-to-ceiling formation across the wall, stampeding over the doorway in disorderly fashion, political memoirs mixed in with literary essays, Victorian novels fighting for space with narrative adventure, the Penguin classics never standing together in a gracious row no matter how hard I try to impose order. The books compete for attention, assembling on the shelf above the sofa on the other side of the room, where they descend by the window, staring back at me. As I lie in bed with another book, they lie in wait.
— Pamela Paul, My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues
When I come home and look back through my Book of Books I see a personal narrative I didn’t recognize at the time. I went from escaping into books to extracting things from them, from being inspired by books to trying to do things that inspired me—many of which I first encountered in stories. I went from wishing I were like a character in books to being a character in my books. I went from reading books to wrestling with them to writing them, all the while still learning from what I read.
— Pamela Paul, My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues
Books will never die out as long as there are people around.
— Anthony T. Hincks
The more i read the less i know
— Unknown
Two by two, I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. Every book I seized on stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn't nearly so important; it comes in its own time. I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.
— Eudora Welty, On Writing
And books, she knew by then, were one of the necessities, the rocks of her life.
— Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday
Read the right books and we can be as wild and worry-free as we've ever wanted to be. No law can stop us reading.
— Carla H. Krueger
Throughout the history of mankind, there have been two kinds of people; those who write the books and those who burn them. The rest of us are only bystanders.
— M.Z.Riffi - The Queen of Granada
Browsing through the shelves in bookstores or libraries, I was completely happy.
— Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man
The book you read and read well, over and over again, lives in you, becomes your thought and thinking pattern, teaches you all the time and keeps reminding you about how to act and react towards things and occurrences’ in life!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
The least learned, for the most part, have been always most ready to write.
— Roger Ascham
Initially [my favorite books] seem to immerse me in another life, but ultimately they immerse me in me; I am looking through the window into another person’s home, but it is my face that I see in the reflection.
— Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
With its reverent silence the Library was as close to a religious experience as anything he had ever encountered. Its domed reading room was a thing of sheer beauty and wonder. It always inspired in him a childish desire to stand in the centre and spin round and round, making it appear as though the books spiralled into infinity.
— J.E.  Allen, Year of Fire and Ash
The Holy Bible is the best of all books.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Victor of course never failed to fire a monster joint on these underground missions. And there he would sit reading. He liked how those books made him feel, the books and the weed, his brain humming with knowledge, an odd and lovely sort of expansion feeling these threads of words that stretched across continents and decades, a sort of feeling that he, too, was stretched and flattened, his brain spread like a map across the world.
— Sunil Yapa, Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist
Michelle, since the first day I met you I knew you were the one for me. I knew that I would make you my wife. I love waking up to your beautiful face every morning and seeing you before I close my eyes each night. I love you with everything in me, and I promise to be the man that you need for the rest of our lifetime together. Would you do me the honor of being my wife?
— Blaque Diamond, His or Her Betrayal?
It is often much harder to get rid of books than it is to acquire them. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witnesses to a moment in our lives we will never see again. While they are still there, it is a part of us. I have noticed that many people make a note of the day, month, and year that they read a book; they build up a secret calendar. Others, before lending one, write their name on the flyleaf, note whom they lent it to in an address book, and add the date. I have known some book owners who stamp them or slip a card between their pages the way they do in public libraries. Nobody wants to mislay a book. We prefer to lose a ring, a watch, our umbrella, rather than a book whose pages we will never read again, but which retains, just in the sound of its title, a remote and perhaps long-lost emotion.
— Carlos María Domínguez, The House of Paper
You taught me to think, and you put ideas in my head. People read to forget. Books don't change the world, ji. You didn't tell me that. You talked of the dignity of the human spirit to a hijra.
— Faiqa Mansab, THIS House of Clay and Water
You can't have too much dog in a book.
— Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
There are people who read books, and then there are people who define their lives by the books they have read and by the books they will read. Their relationship with books is not one of gleaning information and then discarding. It is a friendship that is more akin to, if it were possible, putting an arm around the book and whispering to it, giggling and chuckling with shared knowledge, shared experiences. When you see someone grasp a book to their breast and close their eyes or hold the book to their nose and inhale the scent of the book, they are gently mad, but also they are not just a reader of books, but a lover of books.
— Jeffrey Keeten
What is so addictive about fiction is that it is the one reliable place in which we can apprehend and participate in - fully understand - the inward world of another person.
— Rick Gekoski, Outside of a Dog
... Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
In the meantime, there is not an hour to lose. I am about to visit the public library.
— Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth
Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
— Walter Benjamin, One Way Street And Other Writings
Good books often answer questions you didn't even know you wanted to ask
— Will Schwalbe, Books for Living
I thought of all the summer evenings I'd spent sitting in the chairs under the trees beside the trailer, reading books that helped me escape Creek View, at least for a little while. Magical kingdoms, Russian love triangles, and the March sisters couldn't have been further away from the trailer park.
— Heather Demetrios, I'll Meet You There
Books have been vastly important in my life - as both a reader and a writer. I've learned that the great gift of literature is that someone else's tale becomes a chapter of your story. And I still feel books are the best art form for making contact with another consciousness, which is why reading a good book by yourself never feels lonely.
— Bob   Smith, Treehab: Tales from My Natural, Wild Life
Villainessa Tittel was a hired killer, an assassin by trade. She had enjoyed the best education and had been trained by assassins who had (until then at least) been considered the best in the business. She had turned to ‘cleaning’ as an occupation because she really enjoyed endings more than beginnings – and anyway, she didn’t need to know her mark’s entire pedigree or life’s story, or to have some kind of facetious moral justification just to collect her fee. Unsurprisingly, when she did read – on those rare occasions – her books were always dog-eared from the back.
— Christina Engela
When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.
— Salman Rushdie
I get into beatific cornucopia when I delve into books, coffee, and wanderings!
— Avijeet Das
But it was different, somehow, to be reading it here, where the actual events had taken place all those hundreds of thousands of years ago. That was the thing about books, she was realizing; they could take you somewhere else entirely, it was true. But it wasn't the same thing as actually going there yourself.
— Jennifer E. Smith, The Geography of You and Me
Lucy happily settled down to work. First she sent for papyrus and handmade a book leaf by leaf, binding the leaves together between board covers. Then she filled each page from memory, drew English roses budding and Chinese roses in full bloom, peppercorn-pink Bourbon roses climbing walls and silvery musk roses drowsing in flowerbeds. She took every rose she'd ever seen, made them as lifelike as she could (where she shaded each petal the rough paper turned silken), and in these lasting forms she offered them to Safiye.
— Helen Oyeyemi, What is Not Yours is Not Yours
What is the purpose of history? It seeds only hate. All the history books should be burnt, so that we are no longer the peoples of our lands, but merely peoples...
— Claire North, The End of the Day
This book of mine has not been manufactured: it has been garnered.
— Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil
There is special power in that sword,' Ewer went on, 'the gem in the guard of the Ares holds the blood of the Creature that has been slain by it.
— S.C. Parris, The Two Swords
And I read something else," Jacob goes on. "There was this discussion of the story of Cain and Abel, from the Bible. After Cain kills his brother, God says, 'The bloods of your brother call out to me.' Not blood. Bloods. Weird, right? So the Talmud tries to explain it.""I can explain it," says William. "The scribe was drunk.""William!" cries Jeanne. "The Bible is written by God!""And copied by scribes," the big boy replies. "Who get drunk. A lot. Trust me."Jacob is laughing. "The rabbis have a different explanation. The Talmud says it's 'bloods' because Cain didn't only spill Abel's blood. He spilled the blood of Abel and all the descendants he never had.""Huh!""And then it says something like, 'Whoever destroys a single life destroys the whole world. And whoever saves a single life saves the whole world."There are sheep in the meadow beside the road. Gwenforte walks up to the low stone wall, and one sheep--a ram--doesn't run away. They sniff each other's noses. Her white fur beside the ram's wool--two textures, two colors, both called white in our inadequate language. Jeanne is thinking about something. At last, she shares it. "William, you said that it takes a lifetime to make a book.""That's right.""One book? A whole lifetime?"William nods. "A scribe might copy out a single book for years. An illuminator would then take it and work on it for longer still. Not to mention the tanner who made the parchment, and the bookbinder who stitched the book together, and the librarian who worked to get the book for the library and keep it safe from mold and thieves and clumsy monks with ink pots and dirty hands. And some books have authors, too, like Saint Augustine or Rabbi Yehuda. When you think about it, each book is a lot of lives. Dozens and dozens of them."Dozens and dozens of lives," Jeanne says. "And each life a whole world.""We saved five books," says Jacob. "How many worlds is that?"William smiles. "I don't know. A lot. A whole lot.
— Adam Gidwitz, The Inquisitor's Tale: Or, the Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog
He was a far more voracious reader than me, but he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least 30 years. "That's the only kind of book I can trust," he said."It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature," he added, "but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
For I need not remind such an audience as this that the neat sorting out of books into age-groups, so dear to publishers, has only a very sketchy relation with the habits of any real readers. Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table.
— C.S. Lewis, Of This and Other Worlds
As long as ignorance and misery exist in the world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless
— Victor Hugo
They were probably reading on their tablets,” said Nina loyally. She loved her e-reader, too. “Yes, I know,” said the man. “But I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see what they were reading or ask them if it was good, or make a mental note to look for it later. It was as if suddenly, one day, all the books simply disappeared.
— Jenny Colgan, The Bookshop on the Corner
I work backwards with the ending in mind as I create art, stories, poems and books. Always in a process of becoming.
— Jill Telford
A good reader should always have two books with him: one to read, the other one to lend.
— Gabrielle Dubois
Let's read as if books were to disappear tomorrow!
— Gabrielle Dubois
Give yourself unto reading. The man who never reads will never be read; he who never quotes will never be quoted. He who will not use the thoughts of other men’s brains, proves that he has no brains of his own. You need to read.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Books gnaw at me from around the edges of my life, demanding more time and attention. I am always left hungry.
— Pamela Paul, My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues
They both fell silent. For a while the only sound they could hear was the noise of books resting on shelves, which wasn’t really enough of a sound to distract them from the awkwardness of the moment.
— Gideon Defoe, The Pirates! In an Adventure with the Romantics
Before every elementary school classroom had a 'Drop Everything and Read' period, before parents and educators agonized more about children being glued to Call of Duty or getting sucked into the vortex of the Internet, reading as a childhood activity was not always revered. Maybe it was in some families, in some towns, in some magical places that seemed to exist only in stories, but not where I was. Nobody trotted out the kid who read all the time as someone to be admired like the ones who did tennis and ballet and other feats requiring basic coordination.While those other kids pursued their after-school activities in earnest, I failed at art, gymnastics, ice skating, soccer, and ballet with a lethal mix of inability, fear and boredom. Coerced into any group endeavor, I wished I could just be home already. Rainy days were a godsend because you could curl up on a sofa without being banished into the outdoors with an ominous 'Go play outside.'Well into adulthood, I would chastise myself over not settling on a hobby—knitting or yoga or swing dancing or crosswords—and just reading instead. The default position. Everyone else had a passion; where was mine? How much happier I would have been to know that reading was itself a passion. Nobody treated it that way, and it didn't occur to me to think otherwise.
— Pamela Paul, My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues
Even so-called 'short novels' are pretty long and can take several hours to read, so make sure you stay hydrated. I like to keep an isotonic sports drink handy if I'm going to be reading for any longer than forty minutes. I'll also take regular breaks and make sure I'm wearing loose-fitting clothing.
— Richard Ayoade, Ayoade on Ayoade: A Cinematic Odyssey
I was driven to go into book writing by the very nature of journalism and blogging. Both are ephemeral. Journalists and bloggers can have humongous egos. But in the end, what they write is really a passing show. I wanted something more lasting — a record of sorts, something people can look back to and relish again like hot, home–brewed coffee.
— Barista Uno
Men do everything that men do, from waging war to reading books, for one purpose only: to get laid.
— David Burr Gerrard, Short Century: A Novel
And thus it happens that the reader, the closer he comes to the novel's end, the more he wishes he were back in the summer with which it begins, and finally, instead of following the hero onto the cliffs of suicide, joyfully turns back to that summer, content to stay there forever.
— Franz Kafka, The Penal Colony and Other Stories
King Arthur's Knights had been the first book Arthur had read late at night under the covers with a torch...it was he supposed, thinking back on it, the first book that had showed him what reading was really all about.
— Charlie Lovett, The Lost Book of the Grail
Desire may cease once the desired person or object is acquired. The desire of reading doesn’t cease once a book is read, however extraordinary this one was.
— Gabrielle Dubois
She was a poetry book with the wrong dust jacket, shelved in the Reference section.
— Joyce Rachelle
Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book.
— Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays
I have lived in worlds beyond counting and countries as strange and wonderful as the dance of dust in sunbeams, because I have lived in books.
— Garon Whited
Dear books, please take me to the places where my feet can't take me.
— H. Midorikawa
If you write a kid's book only for kids, then you have failed.
— Don Roff
Oh let me live my own! and die so too! ("To live and die is all I have to do:") Maintain a poet's dignity and ease, And see what friends, and read what books I please.
— Alexander Pope, An Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot.
Whenever one of us introduced an old favorite, we savored the other's first delight like a shared meal eaten with a newly acquired gusto, as if we'd never truly tasted it before.
— Pamela Paul, My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues
All of us are writers reading other people's writing, turning pages or clicking to the next screen with pleasure and admiration. All of us absorb other people's words, feeling like we have gotten to know the authors personally in our own ways, even if just a tiny bit. True, we may also harbor jealousy or resentment, disbelief or disappointment. We may wish we had written those words ourselves or berate ourselves for knowing we never could or sigh with relief that we didn't, but thank goodness someone else has.
— Pamela Paul, By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from The New York Times Book Review
To whom do books belong? The books we read and the books we write are both ours and not ours. They're also theirs.
— Pamela Paul, My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues
I love lying here with you, under the books.
— Cath Crowley, Words in Deep Blue
We also wish to make it absolutely clear that Librarians should not attempt to use the Library to transport dinosaur eggs. And if they do disregard this rule, under no circumstances should they draw official in-world attention while doing so. In fact, we wish to remind all Librarians that they are here to collect books, not dinosaurs. Those Librarians who have problems distinguishing between the two should take a refresher course in Library basics.
— Genevieve Cogman, The Burning Page
[Kieran]his head propped on a stack of poetry books he’d brought from the library. Almost all of them had been inscribed on the inside cover by a James Herondale, who had neatly written out his favorite lines.
— Cassandra Clare, Lord of Shadows
It's stories that inspire people to change. It's stories that make them believe things can be better.
— Sebastien de Castell, Knight's Shadow
Books make the soul float.
— Alan Bradley, Speaking from Among the Bones
You shouldn't write about your personal life', says the one feeling threatened by the truth to the writer.
— Robin Sacredfire
The idea of the book that matters most," Kiki said. "Because i think it's like impossible to pick such a book. When you read a book, and who you are when you read it, makes it matter or not. Like if you're unhappy and you read, I don't know, On the Road or The Three Musketeers, and that book changes how you fell or how you think, then it matters the most. At that time.
— Ann Hood, The Book That Matters Most
Every book has to wait for the right time to be read and understood.
— Kamand Kojouri
Literature supplements the lives of people and enables us to feel connected with the world. Shared stories blunt a sense of tragic aloneness, and endow us with the tools to understand our humanness. Reading about the lives of other people acquaints us with the hardships of other people. The authorial voices of narrative prose express our shared feelings of deprivation
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
But suddenly, Pentunia spied the Book. The firecrackers had blown it open so that the pages showed. She had never seen them before. Now she saw that there was something written inside the Book which she could not read. So she sat down and thought and thought and thought, until at last she sighed, 'Now I understand. It was not enough to carry wisdom under my wing. I must put it in my mind and in my heart. And to do that I must learn to read.
— Roger Duvoisin, Petunia
The feeling inside that she experienced when she saw the books was akin to the hunger she felt as food was put on the table at the end of the working day. And she knew that she needed this sustenance as surely as her body needed its fuel.
— Jacqueline Winspear, Maisie Dobbs
Hey, pretty book, why don’t you lie in my lap awhile?
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
Why read the current generation of text books when you have the ability to research and write the next generation of text books.
— Steven Magee
Part of dedicating your life to studying literature is realizing that storytelling is more than just make-believe and that make-believe is far more important that we all pretend -- make believe -- it is. One way or another books tell the stories of their readers. But telling our lives is not the same as shaping them, whittling them away. Suddenly Jill had lost control. Her books had taken over and were in charge.
— Laurie Frankel, The Atlas of Love
Sleeping with books is a vicious affair, I do not believe it will ever stop.
— R. Y.S. Perez, I Hope You Fall in Love: Poetry Collection
Better watch her. She burns other people's books.
— Tsukumizu, Girls' Last Tour, Vol. 1
I reached out and placed my hand on the book and thought maybe someday I wouldn't need the bruises or the scars anymore. Maybe someday it would be all right for the scars to go away.
— Han Nolan, Dancing on the Edge
Books were everywhere, lined neatly on shelves that went from floor to ceiling. The ceiling was two stories high, with an upper balcony that provided access to a second-floor gallery. The dazzling array f red, gold, green, and brown bindings was a feast for the eyes, while the wonderful smells of vellum, parchment, and pungent leather almost caused Amanda to salivate. An exquisite waft of tea leaves lingered in the air. For anyone who enjoyed the pursuit of reading, this place surely was paradise.
— Lisa Kleypas, Suddenly You
Books were everywhere, lined neatly on shelves that went from floor to ceiling. The ceiling was two stories high, with an upper balcony that provided access to a second-floor gallery. The dazzling array of red, gold, green, and brown bindings was a feast for the eyes, while the wonderful smells of vellum, parchment, and pungent leather almost caused Amanda to salivate. An exquisite waft of tea leaves lingered in the air. For anyone who enjoyed the pursuit of reading, this place surely was paradise.
— Lisa Kleypas, Suddenly You
A poor man needs the escape far more than a wealthy man does.""Escape," Amanda repeated, having never heard a book described in such a way."Yes, something to transport your mind from where and who and what you are. Everyone needs that. A time or two in my past, it seemed that a book was the only thing that stood between me and near insanity. I-"He stopped suddenly, and Amanda realized that he had not meant to make such a confession. The room became uncomfortably quiet, with only the jaunty snap of the fire to intrude on the silence. Amanda felt as if the air were throbbing with some unexpressed emotion. She wanted to tell him that she understood exactly what he meant, that she, too, had experienced the utter deliverance that words on a page could provide. There had been times of desolation in her own life, and books had been her only pleasure.
— Lisa Kleypas, Suddenly You
I get so god damn lonely and sad and filled with regrets some days. It overwhelms me as I’m sitting on the bus; watching the golden leaves from a window; a sudden burst of realisation in the middle of the night. I can’t help it and I can’t stop it. I’m alone as I’ve always been and sometimes it hurts…. but I’m learning to breathe deep through it and keep walking. I’m learning to make things nice for myself. To comfort my own heart when I wake up sad. To find small bits of friendship in a crowd full of strangers. To find a small moment of joy in a blue sky, in a trip somewhere not so far away, a long walk an early morning in December, or a handwritten letter to an old friend simply saying ”I thought of you. I hope you’re well.”No one will come and save you. No one will come riding on a white horse and take all your worries away. You have to save yourself, little by little, day by day. Build yourself a home. Take care of your body. Find something to work on. Something that makes you excited, something you want to learn. Get yourself some books and learn them by heart. Get to know the author, where he grew up, what books he read himself. Take yourself out for dinner. Dress up for no one but you and simply feel nice. it’s a lovely feeling, to feel pretty. You don’t need anyone to confirm it.I get so god damn lonely and sad and filled with regrets some days, but I’m learning to breathe deep through it and keep walking. I’m learning to make things nice for myself. Slowly building myself a home with things I like. Colors that calm me down, a plan to follow when things get dark, a few people I try to treat right. I don’t sometimes, but it’s my intent to do so. I’m learning.I’m learning to make things nice for myself. I’m learning to save myself.I’m trying, as I always will.
— Charlotte Eriksson
It was impossible to feel alone in a room full of favorite books. I had the sense that they knew me personally, that they'd read me cover to cover as I'd read them.
— Riley Redgate, Noteworthy
I think part of why I have so many books around me and why I read every day is because I mythologize the writer. I don’t do that with any other artists.
— Philip Seymour Hoffman
Fictions exist because of this fact. Because we have only one life, and our desires and fantasies demand a thousand lives. Because the abyss between what we are and what we would like to be has to be bridged somehow. That was why fictions were born: so that, through living this vicarious, transient, precarious, but also passionate and fascinating life that fiction transports us to, we can incorporate the impossible into the possible and our existence can be both reality and unreality, history and fable, concrete life and marvellous adventure.
— Mario Vargas Llosa, The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and "Les Miserables"
In the books I find the thrum of everything unsayable. The characters weep the way I want to, love the way I want to, cry, die, beat their breasts, and bray with life.
— Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir
If a boy can manage to have coffee with me during the apocalypse, I know he cares. There’s not a speck of doubt in my mind. He must care.
— Caroline George, The Vestige
He pilfered a copy of Ulysses, but it was possibly the one book he did not finish. 'What's the point of it? I suspect it was a bit of a joke by Joyce. He just kept his mouth shut as people read into it more then there was. Pseudo-intellectuals love to drop the name Ulysses as their favorite book. I refused to be intellectually bullied into finishing it.
— Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
Self-Help books are for bitchesss
— Deyth Banger, Deeper Level C#N
He was a far more voracious reader than me, but he made it a rule to never touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least 30 years. "That's the only kind of book I can trust," he said."It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature," he added, "but I don't want to waste valuable time reading a book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
God's justice will always be found at the end of a pen.
— Shannon L. Alder
Oscar always said that books are truly our best friends. He said that they never think poorly of us and that they always have a shoulder for us to cry on or relieve stress. They take our minds away from the real world by telling us captivating stories. When we look back at our choice of books, we can nostalgically recall our younger years.
— Erica Sehyun Song
Feeling like she really was just seven or eight, Claire sat down on the floor, books all around her, and she opened the last one she’d picked up. Even though it was dark, and even though her eyes couldn’t see the words, she knew them.Knew the little prince’s story as well as her own.She closed her eyes. She leaned her head forward against the book. And she sobbed.
— Jennifer Lynn Barnes, Nobody
These scars that we have... they don't go away. They only fade with time, but they're still hauntingly there.
— Taylor Keys
On silent moonless nights, I don't feel lonely! I have my greatest friends - my books for company!
— Avijeet Das
He wanted to be stopped, to be dragged back, to be sent back home... But he was home. Hogwarts was the first and best home he had known. He and Voldemort and Snape, the abandoned boys, had all found home here...
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
I often buy print books only after I've read them in some digital form or other. It's my odd way of keeping the physical presence of the best among multitudes. And I only have one shelf.
— Joyce Rachelle
I meet people and they become chapters in my stories.
— Avijeet Das
Knight's disdain for Thoreau was bottomless - 'he had no deep insight into nature'...
— Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
You’re different, and I know that’s probably the most cliché response ever given, but it’s the truth. When I look at you, it’s as if I’m reading a novel. No matter how much time I spend studying your pages, there will always be more for me to learn, deeper layers of complexity to baffle me, and plot twists that’ll leave me speechless.
— Caroline George, The Vestige
The only book Knight didn't steal was the one he most often saw. 'I had no need for a Bible,' he said.
— Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.
— Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between
Nothing is more hallowing than the union of kindred spirits in art. At the moment of meeting, the art lover transcends himself. At once he is and is not. He catches a glimpse of Infinity... Freed from the fetters of matter, his spirit moves in the rhythm of things. It is thus that art becomes akin to religion and ennobles mankind. It is this which makes a masterpiece something sacred.
— Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea
Thank God for books, for validating your feelings, and letting you know you’re not alone.
— Paula Gruben, Umbilicus
Books can be the people we never get to meet, ancestors or far neighbors.
— Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck
See, the sad thing about a guy like you is, in 50 years you're gonna start doin' some thinkin' on your own and you're going to come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life: one, don't do that, and two, you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!
— Ben Affleck, Good Will Hunting
...I have big dreams, too. I used to think that made me different and strange. But when I came here and found all these books, I realized there are places in the world where I belong, even if I haven't found them yet.
— Walt Disney Company, Belle's Discovery
I never said you had to like it. You have to accept it. No regret. - Claire Harding - Boone Holler
— Lizzi Cruz
Books and bookcases cropping up in stuff that I've written means that they have to be reproduced on stage or on film. This isn't as straightforward as it might seem. A designer will either present you with shelves lined with gilt-tooled library sets, the sort of clubland books one can rent by the yard as decor, or he or she will send out for some junk books from the nearest second-hand bookshop and think that those will do. Another short cut is to order in a cargo of remaindered books so that you end up with a shelf so garish and lacking of character it bears about as much of a relationship to literature as a caravan site does to architecture. A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped to the foot.
— Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On
Books, in all their variety, offer the human intellect the means whereby civilization may be carried triumphantly forward.
— Winston S. Churchill
Only two classes of books have universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.
— Ford Maddox
Never worry about a book corrupting a child. Worry if your children are not getting ideas from books.
— Richard Peck
(...) and spend my days surrounded by wise books, - bright windows in this life of ours, lit by the shining souls of men.
— H.G. Wells