c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
On to the library. And all through his time at the card catalog, combing the shelves, filling out the request cards, he danced a silent, flirtatious minuet of the eyes with a rosy-cheeked redhead in the biology section, pages of notes spread before her. All his life, he had had a yen for women in libraries. In a cerebral setting, the physical becomes irresistible. Also, he figured he was really more likely to meet a better or at least more compatible woman in a library than in a saloon. Ought to have singles libraries, with soups and salads, Bach and Mozart, Montaignes bound in morocco; place to sip, smoke, and seduce in a classical setting, noon to midnight. Chaucer's Salons, call them, franchise chain.
— Stephen Minkin, A no doubt mad idea
In 1994, the average person spent $79 on books as compared to $56 on recorded music.
— Richard L. Brandt
If you want to reduce the rats, use the cats! If you want to reduce the fools, use the books!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
In order to keep liking Nick (as opposed to loving him which was completely non-negotiable) Alice sometimes had to look at him obliquely or with her eyes half closed or through a pin hole on a piece of cardboard. Straight on would burn her retinas.
— Carol Anshow
It's much more entertaining to live books than to write them.
— Jean Webster, Daddy-Long-Legs
The irritating question they ask us -- us being writers -- is: "Where do you get your i
— Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
You never forget the books you loved as a kid. You never forget the poems you memorized, the first book you read until the cover fell off, the book you read hidden from your mother. What an honor to hold hands with a child's imagination in this way.
— Meg Medina
A book is much more than a delivery vehicle for its contents.
— Allison Hoover Bartlett, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession
When you buy a jacket, it’s important the pockets are big enough for a paperback!
— Daniel Pennac, Comme un roman
He couldn't seem to get his teeth into anything. Except books. The things in books was darn near more real to him than the things breathing and eating.
— Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion
...this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings.
— Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water
Write It, Work It, Publish
— Cherry-Ann Carew, Whisper of Lies
My depth of purse is not so greatNor yet my bibliophilic greed,That merely buying doth elate:The books I buy I like to read:Still e'en when dawdling in a mead,Beneath a cloudless summer sky,By bank of Thames, or Tyne, or Tweed,The books I read — I like to buy.
— A. Edward Newton, The Amenities of Book Collecting and Kindred Affections
…secondhand bookstores have pilgrims. The words out of print are a call to arms for those who seek a Holy Grail made of paper and ink.
— Kathleen Tessaro, Elegance
Brrr, who had never admired books particularly...didn't remember that a mere book might reek of sex, possibility, fecundity. Yet a book has a ripe furrow and a yielding spine, he thought, and the nuances to be teased from its pages are nearly infinite in their variety and coquettish appeal. And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.
— Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men
Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can't expect an angel to look out.
— B.C. Forbes
A book a week I heave a sigh;That Slogan's peremptory cryI will not hear, I will not heed.How can They say that I should needThe book They bid me weekly buy?But Slogans change, as days go by;My Psyche listens, fluttering shy,To newer message "Come and ReadA book a week."To read! to read! O wings that flyO'er sun-kissed lands, through clouded skyThat bear us on where Great ones lead!I too must follow, so I pleadFor magic wings. I'll read (or try)A book a week!
— Alexander Ireland, The Book-Lovers Enchiridion: Thoughts on the Solace and Companionship of Books
No matter how many compromises were made along the way, no matter what happens in the future, a book is a thing to behold.
— Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees
I asked her what a true story was because I thought that all stories were made up. She said a true story was called fact, and a made-up story was called ficton. Auntie May said a made-up story is a bit like telling lies, only the people who read them knew that already and so it didn’t matter
— Rebecca Lloyd
Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.
— Michael Ondaatje
Oscar was raised to believe that if he stayed in his room reading about made up worlds it meant he didn't appreciate the life he had, the possessions his parents had worked hard for, like the TV and the video and the newly turfed back garden.
— Benjamin Wood, The Bellwether Revivals
Somewhere there must be women reading books,and talking of chicken rissoles to their cooks …(from,‘Somewhere in England’)
— Virginia Graham, Consider the Years
She fancied herself superiour to her surroundings: surely there were higher things to live for. Yet the ugliness of this room was but a part of what she felt to be the dreariness of all life outside of books.
— Helen Dawes Brown, Two College Girls
It would be curious to discover who it is to whom one writes in a diary. Possibly to some mysterious personification of one's own identity.
— Beatrice Potter Webb
Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
— Victor Hugo
We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
— Ayn Rand
Books tell you more about their owners than the owners do.
— A.M. Homes
It's time for bed. And here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to get in bed, and I don't have anyone to sleep with now, so what I do is I sleep with my books. And I know that's kind of weird and solitary and pathetic. But if you think about it, it's very cozy. Over a period of four, five, six, seven, nine, twenty nights of sleeping, you've taken all these books to bed with you, and you fall asleep, and the books are there.***Some of the books are thick, and some are thin, some of the books are in hardcover and some in paperback. Sometimes they get rolled up with the pillows and the blankets. And I never make the bed. So it's like a stew of books. The bed is the liquid medium. It's a Campbell's Chunky Soup of books. The bed you eat with a fork.
— Nicholson Baker
In this way, I was able to place my own concerns aside and curl myself up in the cocoon of somebody else's imagination. My life was suspended - I was in neither one place nor the other.
— Kate Kerrigan, Ellis Island
Let the readers do some of the work themselves
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
In the end Navidson is left with one page and one match. For a long time he waits in darkness and cold, postponing this final bit of illumination. At last though, he grips the match by the neck and after locating the friction strip sparks to life a final ball of light.First, he reads a few lines by match light and then as the heat bites his fingertips he applies the flame to the page. Here then is one end: a final act of reading, a final act of consumption. And as the fire rapidly devours the paper, Navidson's eyes frantically sweep down over the text, keeping just ahead of the necessary immolation, until as he reaches the last few words, flames lick around his hands, ash peels off into the surrounding emptiness, and then as the fire retreats, dimming, its light suddenly spent, the book is gone leaving nothing behind but invisible traces already dismantled in the dark.
— Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
No matter how people mess with you or let you down, or how you let yourself down, a good book means that when you get in bed that night, you have a good hour. I feel like you pay all day for that hour. That's what books mean to me. I can open this two-dimensional, flat white page with squiggly little black marks on them, and someone has created this world that you're going to enter into ...
— Anne Lamott
Everyone’s talking about the death and disappearance of the book as a format and an object. I don’t think that will happen. I think whatever happens, we have to figure out a way to protect our imaginations. Stories and poetry do that. You need a language in this world. People want words, they want to hear their situation in language, and find a way to talk about it. It allows you to find a language to talk about your own pain.If you give kids a language, they can use it. I think that’s what these educators fear. If you really educate these kids, they aren’t going to punch you in the face, they are going to challenge you with your own language.
— Jeanette Winterson
Learn as much as you can. Take every opportunity to learn about writing, whether it’s through classes, workshops, whatever is available to you. This may be difficult, because things like classes, workshops, writing programs, require time and money. But I say this honestly and somewhat harshly – if you’re not willing to prioritize your writing, perhaps you should do something else?
— Theodora Goss
I generally give the title-page a fair chance," Roger said. "Once can't always judge books merely by the cover.
— Charles Williams, Shadows of Ecstasy
Sulphurous wind gusted in his wake the dust of the street swirled and the folds of his black coat flapped against his thin body. 
— A.F. Stewart, Killers and Demons
From books, I winnowed the glue that held together my psyche as it struggled to stay whole. It was from stories and myths that I learned to dream, to imagine a different life, to realize potentials and probabilities other than those of the painful, poverty-mired existence I found myself in as a child. With a book I could hide in a corner, safe from the heavy hand and belt of my stepfather, and for a while not worry about where our next meal would come from, or where we would be sleeping that night, or when my mother would break and have to be sent yet again to the mental institution. Books, for me, we tiny life rafts that I clung to desperately.
— J. Don Cook, Shooting from the Hip: Photographs and Essays
...we have, each of us, a story that is uniquely ours, a narrative arc that we can walk with purpose once we figure out what it is. It's the opposite to living our lives episodically, where each day is only tangentially connected to the next, where we are ourselves the only constants linking yesterday to tomorrow. There is nothing wrong with that, and I don't want to imply that there is by saying how much this shocked me -- just that it felt so suddenly, painfully right to think that I have tapped into my Long Tale, that I have set my feet on the path I want to walk the rest of my life, and that it is a path of stories and writing and that no matter how many oceans I cross or how transient I feel in any given place, I am still on my Tale's Road, because having tapped it, having found it, the following is inevitable....
— Amal El-Mohtar
In fiction, I exercise my nosiness. I am as curious as my cats, and indeed that has led to trouble often enough and used up several of my nine lives. I am an avid listener. I am fascinated by other people's lives, the choices they make and how that works out through time, what they have done and left undone, what they tell me and what they keep secret and silent, what they lie about and what they confess, what they are proud of and what shames them, what they hope for and what they fear. The source of my fiction is the desire to understand people and their choices through time.
— Marge Piercy, Braided Lives
Life is wonderful and strange...and it’s also absolutely mundane and tiresome. It’s hilarious and it’s deadening. It’s a big, screwed-up morass of beauty and change and fear and all our lives we oscillate between awe and tedium. I think stories are the place to explore that inherent weirdness; that movement from the fantastic to the prosaic that is life....What interests me—and interests me totally—is how we as living human beings can balance the brief, warm, intensely complicated fingersnap of our lives against the colossal, indifferent, and desolate scales of the universe. Earth is four-and-a-half billion years old. Rocks in your backyard are moving if you could only stand still enough to watch. You get hernias because, eons ago, you used to be a fish. So how in the world are we supposed to measure our lives—which involve things like opening birthday cards, stepping on our kids’ LEGOs, and buying toilet paper at Safeway—against the absolutely incomprehensible vastness of the universe? How? We stare into the fire. We turn to friends, bartenders, lovers, priests, drug-dealers, painters, writers. Isn’t that why we seek each other out, why people go to churches and temples, why we read books? So that we can find out if life occasionally sets other people trembling, too?
— Anthony Doerr
Why is it that if you say you don’t enjoy using an e-reader, or that you aren’t going to get one till the technology is mature, you get reported as “loathing�
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Reading a book is something you do to yourself.
— Last Man Standing
Mad! Quite mad!' said Stalky to the visitors, as one exhibiting strange beasts. 'Beetle reads an ass called Brownin', and M'Turk reads an ass called Ruskin; and-' 'Ruskin isn't an ass,' said M'Turk. 'He's almost as good as the Opium-Eater. He says we're "children of noble races, trained by surrounding art." That means me, and the way I decorated the study when you two badgers would have stuck up brackets and Christmas cards. Child of a noble race, trained by surrounding art, stop reading or I'll shove a pilchard down your neck!
— Rudyard Kipling, The Complete Stalky and Co.
I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was.
— G.K. Chesterton
Afterwards, in bed with a book, the spell of television feels remote compared to the journey into the page. To be in a book. To slip into the crease where two pages meet, to live in the place where your eyes alight upon the words to ignite a world of smoke and peril, colour and serene delight. That is a journey no one can end with the change of a channel. Enduring magic.
— Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books.
— C.S. Lewis
That was the trouble with moving houses; no matter how carefully you packed the books, they never ended up on the new shelves in quite the right place.
— Val McDermid, The Torment of Others
The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just as Kevin (Kelly) suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what's important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book.The Bible can serve as a prototypical example. Like Wikipedia, the Bible's authorship was shared, largely anonymous, and cumulative, and the obscurity of the individual authors served to create an oracle-like ambience for the document as "the literal word of God." If we take a non-metaphysical view of the Bible, it serves as a link to our ancestors, a window. The ethereal, digital replacement technology for the printing press happens to have come of age in a time when the unfortunate ideology I'm criticizing dominates technological culture. Authorship - the very idea of the individual point of view - is not a priority of the new ideology. The digital flattening of expression into a global mush is not presently enforced from the top down, as it is in the case of a North Korean printing press. Instead, the design of software builds the ideology into those actions that are the easiest to perform on the software designs that are becoming ubiquitous. It is true that by using these tools, individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. The efforts of authors are appreciated in a manner that erases the boundaries between them.The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals it is bankrupting. Some believe it will be better; others, including me, believe it will be disastrously worse. As the famous line goes from Inherit the Wind: 'The Bible is a book... but it is not the only book' Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available.
— Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone,and the meaning has to go find an author again.- The Trouble With Reading
— William Stafford
We are very fond of books. You can learn nearly everything from them that rabbits can't teach you.
— Alan Snow, Here Be Monsters!
To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.
— Nelson Algren
Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy's souls reside there, too.
— James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
They spent pork-barrel money like a tidal-wave sea, but no funds trickled down far enough to reach me. Our books numbered few and were falling apart, and I sat mending pages with a crestfallen heart.
— David Davis, Librarian's Night Before Christmas
God bless ladies with costly, tasteful clothes and touching, dirty fingernails that champion gifted, foreign poets and decorate the library in beautiful, melancholy fashion! My God, this universe is nothing to snicker at!
— J.D. Salinger, Hapworth 16, 1924
It takes a great reader to make a great book.
— Orna Ross
I try to find the books that I lost or forgot more than 30 years ago on another continent, with the hope and dedication and bitterness of those who search for their first lost books, books that if found I wouldn't read anyway, because I've already read them over and over, but that I would look at and touch just as the miser strokes the coins under which he's buried...Books are like ghosts
— Roberto Bolaño, Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003
It was not merely that his brother was dead. His brain, too young to realize the full paradox, wondered with an obscure self- pity why it was that the pulse of his brother's fear went on and on, when Francis was now where he had always been told there was no more terror and no more--darkness.
— Graham Greene, The End of the Party
He said that the principal function of music was to organize the details into harmonies that were intended to make us forget that there was randomness all around us. The same, he said, could be said for great books.
— Selden Edwards
Once more, he was immersing himself in books, reaching the end of long articles, even going back over paragraphs to make sure he'd grasped things. How much more satisfying it was than all that skimming, all that jumping around. At present, he was working his way, deliciously, through a book on Mendel, the father of genetics. A man who might not have spend seven years watching peas, if he'd had the internet.
— Julie Highmore, The Message
If Fran Lebowitz and Ian Fleming had blessed the world with a love child it would have been author J. Fields Jr.
— Edward Medina
Ah, Sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form.
— Stendhal, The Red and the Black
I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them particularly-- almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man-- no man short of a sensual savage--will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes.
— Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
[J]ust the sight of this book, even though it was of no authority, made me wonder how it happened that so many different men – and learned men among them – have been and are so inclined to express both in speaking and in their treatises and writings so many wicked insults about women and their behaviour. Not only one or two ... but, more generally, from the treatises of all philosophers and poets and from all the orators – it would take too long to mention their names – it seems that they all speak from one and the same mouth. Thinking deeply about these matters, I began to examine my character and conduct as a natural woman and, similarly, I considered other women whose company I frequently kept, princesses, great ladies, women of the middle and lower classes, who had graciously told me of their most private and intimate thoughts, hoping that I could judge impartially and in good conscience whether the testimony of so many notable men could be true. To the best of my knowledge, no matter how long I confronted or dissected the problem, I could not see or realise how their claims could be true when compared to the natural behaviour and character of women.
— Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies
I've never understood the desire for books with matched bindings. You don't go through life looking for sets of matched people, and books are just as individual.
— Susan Lendroth
Sometimes, when I couldn’t afford to pay the utility bill at the end of the month, I was forced to read by the light of the stories themselves.
— Steve Stern
There are a good many books, are there not, my boy?” said Mr. Brownlow, observing the curiosity with which Oliver surveyed the shelves that reached from the floor to the ceiling.“A great number, sir,” replied Oliver; “I never saw so many.”“You shall read them if you behave well,” said the old gentleman kindly; “and you will like that, better than looking at the outsides, - that is, in some cases, because there are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.
— Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our sense of understanding and discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty , and understanding. Like literature generally, fiction is a form of discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty, and understanding. If it is all these things, the question of whether it is a legitimate use of time should not even arise.
— Leland Ryken, Realms of Gold: The Classics in Christian Perspective
‎Books admitted me to their world open-handedly, as people for their most part, did not. The life I lived in books was one of ease and freedom, worldly wisdom, glitter, dash and style.
— Jonathan Raban
Hugh Laurie (playing Mr. Palmer) felt the line 'Don't palm all your abuses [of language upon me]' was possibly too rude. 'It's in the book,' I said. He didn't hit me.
— Emma Thompson, The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film
There had been a computer he had also built himself on the farthest corner of the room, but he had sold that a couple of months ago to buy me a necklace. I wore it then, it was two silver hearts linked as one. That’s what he and I were, we we’re one.
— Natalie Valdes, Pinky Promise?
Their conversation ceased abruptly with the entry of an oddly-shaped man whose body resembled a certain vegetable. He was a thickset fellow with calloused and jaundiced skin and a patch of brown hair, a frizzy upheaval. We will call him Bell Pepper. Bell Pepper sidled up beside The Drippy Man and looked at the grilled cheese in his hand. The Drippy Man, a bit uncomfortable at the heaviness of the gaze, politely apologized and asked Bell Pepper if he would like one.  “Why is one of your legs fatter than the other?” asked Bell Pepper.	  The Drippy Man realized Bell Pepper was not looking at his sandwich but towards the inconsistency of his leg sizes.  “You always get your kicks pointing out defects?” retorted The Drippy Man. “Just curious. Never seen anything like it before.” “I was raised not to feel shame and hide my legs in baggy pants.” “So you flaunt your deformity by wearing short shorts?” “Like you flaunt your pockmarks by not wearing a mask?” Bell Pepper backed away, kicking wide the screen door, making an exit to a porch over hanging a dune of sand that curved into a jagged upward jab of rock. “He is quite sensitive,” commented The Dry Advisor. “Who is he?” “A fellow who once manipulated the money in your wallet but now curses the fellow who does.
— Jeff Phillips, Turban Tan
I think you’ve forgotten that this place holds a lot more than justbetraying Hobgoblins. Call upon the spirits, summon fairies, raise thedead! My brother, you have the power to do so--now get off of your buttand use it!
— Richard P. Denney, The Immortalists
[A]ll who are smitten with the love of books think cheaply of the world and wealth; as Jerome says to Vigilantius: The same man cannot love both gold and books... The hideousness of vice is greatly reprobated in books, so that he who loves to commune with books is lead to detest all manner of vice. The demon, who derives his name from knowledge, is most effectually defeated by the knowledge of books, and through books his multitudinous deceits and the endless labyrinths of his guile are laid bare to those who read...
— Richard de Bury
All souls can earn IMMORTALITY.The Creators have IMMORTALITY.The Creators are the' ONLY' ONES'To award IMMORTALITY...FROM MY BOOK: War between Souls over First Universe Justice Awaits
— Tiffany Thompson
My plan is to continue teaching many more years than the 32 years I've already enjoyed and continue writing, and promoting my books and websites if it's God will.
— Ana Monnar
the art of reading, it occupies your mind no matter at any situation or mood you're in..bringing you to completely different world, the enchanting world of the characters..giving you the best feeling after reading it..the art of writing, it shows who you are, what are your real passions, what you've been through..inviting other people to see and experience your own world..hoping they have the best feeling that you have when writing it. As much as the feeling you always have when you read the books you've read before..
— Asrie Budiasriati
Write what you know best. If you can't survive a cross-examination from a lawyer on the subject, you won't survive an interview with a journalist or anchorperson." Linda Radke, President of Five Star Publications.
— Linda F. Radke
Unoka went into an inner room and soon returned with a small wooden disc containing a kola nut, some alligator pepper and a lump of white chalk. "I have kola," he announced when he sat down, and passed the disc over to his guest. "Thank you. He who brings kola brings life. But I think you ought to break it," replied Okoye passing back the disc. "No, it is for you, I think," and they argued like this for a few moments before Unoka accepted the honor of breaking the kola. Okoye, meanwhile, took the lump of chalk, drew some lines on the floor, and then painted his big toe.
— Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
No book is really worth reading at the age of 10 which is not equally worth reading at the age of 50.
— Gladys M. Hunt, Honey for a Child's Heart
My books are a word feast.
— Lori R. Lopez
Perhaps the perusal of such works may, without injustice, be compared with the use of opiates, baneful, when habitually and constantly resorted to, but of most blessed power in those moments of pain and of langour, when the whole head is sore, and the whole heart sick. If those who rail indiscriminately at this species of composition, were to consider the quantity of actual pleasure it produces, and the much greater proportion of real sorrow and distress which it alleviates, their philanthropy ought to moderate their critical pride, or religious intolerance.
— Walter Scott
And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.
— George Orwell
Without books, God is silent, justice dormant, natural science at a stand, philosophy lame, letters dumb, and all things involved in darkness.
— Thomas Bartholin
In books I meet the dead as if they were alive,in books I see what is yet to come...All things decay and pass with time...all fame would fall victim to oblivionif God had not given mortal men the book to aid them.
— Richard de Bury
Art, he said, was a controlled madness...He said that books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.
— Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter
If you grew up in a rural area, you have seen how farmhouses come and go, but the dent left by cellars is permanent. There is something unbreakable in that hand-dug foundational gouge into the earth. Books are the cellars of civilization: when cultures crumble away, their books remain out of sheer stupid solidity.
— Paul  Collins, Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books
that the grace of fable stirs the mind"...and..."that the perusal of excellent books is, as it were, to interview with the noblest men of past ages
— René Descartes
Spray a book with insect spray, drop it in a bag, add some mothballs and seal it. Put it in another bag and seal it. Another. The packages piled up on the floor, each a book sealed in four plastic envelopes.
— Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer
You know how dey say some people “devour” books? Not in da way ME do! Me REALLY devour books!
— Mike Pantuso
Archie Henderson has won no awards, written no books and never played any representative sport. He was an under-11 tournament-winning tennis player as a boy, but left the game when he discovered rugby where he was one of the worst flyhalves he can remember. This did not prevent him from having opinions on most things in sport.His moment of glory came in 1970 when he predicted—correctly as it turned out—that Griquas would beat the Blue Bulls (then still the meekly named Noord-Transvaal) in the Currie Cup final. It is something for which he has never been forgiven by the powers-that-be at Loftus. Archie has played cricket in South Africa and India and gave the bowling term military medium a new and more pacifist interpretation. His greatest ambition was to score a century on Llandudno beach before the tide came in.
— Archie Henderson
Perhaps a book becomes a classic in proportion to how broadly its characters can be scavenged, how many readers find within it something they experience as desirable or even intimately necessary.
— Janna Malamud Smith
Even in the hottest fire there's a bit of water. my The Opposite Of Magic.
— Ivan Stoikov
I recall once seeing a commentary advertised as having been written in prison without recourse to other commentaries and by reliance on the Holy Spirit alone. I doubt whether those last two phrases are complementary. If God has set teachers in the church (1 Cor. 12:28; Eph. 4:11) and many have written books, can good come out of ignoring them, let along parading that ignorance as glorifying God? God's work is never a one-man show. The one who represents the visible part of the iceberg must ever ackowledge his or her debt to others. I like to remember that the First Epistle to the Corinthians was from Paul and Sosthenes (1 Cor. 1:1) and that the Epistle to the Colossians was from Paul and Timothy.
— Leslie Allen, 1, 2 Chronicles
The title of the work, its place in the collective library, the nature of the person who tells us about it, the atmosphere established in the written or spoken exhange, among many other instances, offer alternatives to the book itself that allow us to talk about ourselves without dwelling upon the work too closely.
— Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of concealment. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter!
— Roberto Bolaño, 2666
An acquaintanceship with the literature of the world may be won by any person who will devote half an hour a day to the careful reading of the best books. The habit of reading good books is one that gives great comfort in all the stages and among all the vicissitudes of life. The man who has learned to love good reading is never alone. His friends are the great ones of human history, and to them he may always go for stimulating and helpful communion. --GQ 71 (GQ is A Guide for Quorums of the Melchizedek Priesthood, 3rd Edition, 1930)
— John A. Widtsoe, Priesthood and Church Government
Desire overwhelmed me once she had gone. But it was not a desire for Homer. I had to return to the library. I could already smell the books' muskiness and in my mind turned over pages with as many differing textures as a forest; pages that were brittle and fragile which had to be coaxed to turn; pages that were soft and scented, presenting their words as if the were a gift in the palm of a hand, and pages that fell open heavily of their own accord as if weighted by the importance of their message. But more than anything else I was compelled by their mystery, by all the stories they had yet to tell me.'I have to go to the library, Homer. I have to be with the books.
— Christine Aziz
One can fight money only with money! from my Tale Of The Rock Pieces.
— Ivan Stoikov
I've received two key pieces of advice in regard to my books. The first is, "You should lay off the f-bombs." The other is, "You should add more f-bombs.
— Lincoln Park
Each of them is a book through which other books dream. (referring to Nodier's SMARRA and TRILBY)
— John Clute
Living your life is a long and doggy business. . . . And stories and books help. Some help you with the living itself. Some help you just take a break. The best do both at the same time.
— Anne Fine, Goggle-Eyes
I will gladly accept any and all books, however. A person can never have too much reading material. Especially on a fall or winter evening. If you’re feeling extra generous, you may include tea. I love a unique blend.
— Kerri Maniscalco, Hunting Prince Dracula
Books long to be read as we humans long to be loved.
— Keira Michelle Telford, The Housemistress
There is no literature anymore, there are just single books that arrive in bookstores, just as letters, newspapers, advertising pamphlets arrive in mailboxes.
— Tõnu Õnnepalu, Border State
I wish I had a dollar for every hour I've spent in the library," he always says. I have to agree- we'd probably never have to worry about money again.
— Gary Paulsen, Notes from the Dog
If you want to be a good actor or director, firstly see life, secondly see films and thirdly read books!
— Md. Ziaul Haque
I love the echoes of a home filled to the rim with poetry, books and art.
— Melody  Lee, Moon Gypsy
...and he glanced at the backs of the books, with an awakened curiosity that went below the binding. No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.
— Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
Don't look at me like that," said Ruza."Like what?""Like I'm a beautiful book you're about to open and plunder with your greedy mad eyes.
— Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer
The 'one book' which hasn't been written yet, even thenpersistent a book is being written by me, and might never end!While, I survive inside my brain with someone.
— Moheen Reeyad
Experience is the catalyst for all great stories.
— Richelle E. Goodrich
Despite the rising popularity of the downloadable e-text, I still care about physical books, gravitate to handsome editions and pretty dust jackets, and enjoy seeing rows of hardcovers on my shelves. Many people simply read fiction for pleasure and nonfiction for information. I often do myself. But I also think of some books as my friends and I like to have them around. They brighten my life.
— Michael Dirda, Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting and Living with Books
Luckily for me, I loved books. Books can enlighten but can also benight, but at least one can play one off against another.
— Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer's Awakening
dianemoorewriter.comFebruary 11, 2015 · From Love Thy Neighbor" On journalism and news purists as well as why I pursued print instead of TV journalism/news at the No. 1 journalism school in the country: news reporters are willing to take risks "so that people can base their lives on a foundation of truth not lies. That's why I do it -- to be the one responsible voice in the crowd." Page 105' "Love Thy Neighbor
— Diane Moore
The Kraken was somewhat obsessed with posture. As for Lily, she barely gave it a second thought. In her opinion it was better to read books than balance them. That’s what they were designed for, after all. And if you wanted to wear something on your head there was a perfectly good item designed for that too: it was called a hat.
— Peter Bunzl, Cogheart
If someone had asked him, “Ben, are you lonely? , ” he would have looked at that someone with real surprise. The question had never even occurred to him. He had no friends, but he had his books and his dreams;
— Stephen King, It
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Books, I think, are what magic smells like.
— Millie Florence, Honey Butter
Reading a book is like living a deep and fulfilling life. Watching a movie is like being a paralyzed person: watching others live their lives while you observe from the sidelines.
— Charbel Tadros
Thus far, the only people who can grant you immortality are not scientists, but writers. By writing you into their books, they may not only immortalize you, but also grant you superpowers.
— Charbel Tadros
If someone had asked him, “Ben, are you lonely? , ” he would have looked at that someone with real surprise. The question had never even occurred to him. He had no friends, but he had his books and his dreams...
— Stephen King, It
Warning...well-loved stories are habit forming...
— Nanette L. Avery
Her skin smells of vintage books and pale moonlight, exotic things, forbidden loves and rainy nights.
— Melody  Lee, Moon Gypsy
Books have given me a magic portal to connect with people of the past and the present. I know I shall never feel lonely or powerless again.
— Lisa Bu
Reading is all about losing and finding yourself.
— Mahrukh
You can’t give what you don’t have. To write, you must read. To write well, read well.
— Israelmore Ayivor, How You Can Write Your Dream Book
You don’t become a good writer overnight. It takes persistence and repetition to gain mastery.
— Israelmore Ayivor, How You Can Write Your Dream Book
You may receive a pie, eat it and forget. You may receive champagne, drink it and forget. But when you receive a book, you can open it again and again.
— Israelmore Ayivor, 101 Keys To Everyday Passion
A library is a sacred place where the voices of the ancients can still be heard if we but give them the required silence.
— James Rozoff
Once I am at leisure, said Salvatore, I take refuge in prose as one might in a boat. All day long I am surrounded by the clamour on the editorial floor, but in the evening I cross over to an island, and every time, the moment I read the first sentences, it is as if I were rowing far out on the water. It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.
— W.G. Sebald, Vertigo
More peoples getting satisfaction in wealth but real wealth is knowledge, knowledge is organized in books and books are available in the libraries.
— Abid Hussain Library Officer
I'm always amazed that people will stand around books for hours and only look at the spine. I think I should write a book called "the power of having a spine" - #metaphor
— Richie Norton
Fictional characters exert a great deal of influence over our choices in love by representing inaccessible ideals to which we try to make others conform, usually without success. But more subtly, too, the books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role.
— Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
Our relation to books is a shadowy space haunted by the ghosts of memory, and the real value of books lies in their ability to conjure these specters.
— Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
In the end he read everything that came his way, and he did not have a favorite author but rather many who had been favorites at different times.
— Gabriel García Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth
You don't have books?!' Rose almost sat up and banged her head on the roof rafters. That made the rats jump. 'How can you live without reading?''Pretty well so far.' I laughed. 'Stories are just made-up stuff anyway.''Says who? I think they're a different way of telling the truth.' Then, 'Seriously - no books? Oh, Ella, you have no idea what you've been missing! Stories are food and drink and life...I mean, haven't you heard the story about a girl who made a gown out of starlight?''A gown out of starlight? How could you even do that...?''Well,' said Rose. 'Once upon a time...'And that was that. No sleep for me till Rose wrapped up with a triumphant The End.
— Lucy Adlington, The Red Ribbon
Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books.
— Thomas Carlyle
What would you do if you were a goddess, Cotswold?"Her maid, who had been pulling Eleanor's covers up the bed, stilled her motion. Her expression drew together, as though she were considering it."I suppose I would find the most handsome man in the world and make him my... my..." She waved her hand to indicate the word she shouldn't be saying."Cotswold!" Eleanor exclaimed, delightedly. "That sounds scandalous!""Wouldn't it be what you did?"Eleanor shrugged. "I was thinking more along the lines of being able to have and read all the books I wanted to."Cotswold returned to her task. "Choosing a book over a handsome man." She shook her head, mock ruefully. "And here you were wanting to do something scandalous."The honest part was, it would be scandalous.If it were possible to not be a duke's daughter and be someone else, she would choose to work in a bookshop. Not one that sold the material it seemed Lord Alexander wanted to purchase; one with fairy tales and mythological books and any kind of literature where it was just as likely a dragon would drag you off somewhere as a viscount."I just might," Eleanor said in a defiant tone, making her maid snort.
— Megan Frampton, Lady Be Bad
She marched to the door and said, "if I ever marry, Patrick O'Sullivan, I shall make sure that my mate for life is a decent woman, or even, maybe, a book.
— Joanna Trollope, The Rector's Wife
God, I don't love much but I love words.
— Stephanie Butland, Lost For Words
What's life without a little risk?
— Jk Rowling
Never a day without a line.
— Anonymous
Delighted," Jess said. "I think all houses should be stuffed with books. It makes them--""Homes?" the doctor finished. "You are quite the heretic, for someone in a Library uniform.""Guilty.
— Rachel Caine, Ash and Quill
You'll find magic everywhere, even in dark, dusty corners, if you stop searching with your limited human eyes and instead feel with your naked soul.
— Melody  Lee, Moon Gypsy
When the corpses of [Sir John] Franklin's officers and crew were later discovered, miles from their ships, the men were found to have left behind their guns but to have lugged such essentials as monogrammed silver cutlery, a backgammon board, a cigar case, a clothes brush, a tin of button polish, and a copy of "The Vicar of Wakefield." These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen.
— Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
He loved her like a roaring lion, even when she was most unlovable, and there's a lot to be said for that...that kind of fierce, raging, omnipotent love.
— Melody  Lee, Moon Gypsy
He saw a square room furnished as a library. The entire section of the walls which he could spy was covered from floor to ceiling with books. There were volumes of every size, every shape, every colour. There were long, narrow books that held themselves like grenadiers at stiff attention. There were short, fat books that stood solidly like aldermen who were going to make speeches and were ashamed but not frightened. There were mediocre books bearing themselves with the carelessness of folk who are never looked at and have consequently no shyness. There were solemn books that seemed to be feeling for their spectacles; and there were tattered, important books that had got dirty because they took snuff, and were tattered because they had been crossed in love and had never married afterwards. There were prim, ancient tomes that were certainly ashamed of their heroines and utterly unable to obtain a divorce from the hussies; and there were lean, rakish volumes that leaned carelessly, or perhaps it was with studied elegance, against their neighbours, murmuring in affected tones, "All heroines are charming to us.
— James Stephens, The Demi-gods
I'm all right, Nic," Wolfe said, and finally looked at him. "We walked through the dungeons under Rome, survived Philadelphia, and this perfumed cage won't bring us to our knees. We're all stronger than that.""All right," Santi said. "But don't ask me to stop standing next to you. Because you know I will, however much you shout about it.
— Rachel Caine, Ash and Quill
The house is seventies modern with sliding windows, gas-effect and a giant TV in the living room. There are almost no books. I'm not making any judgement. It's just the sort of thing I can't help but notice.
— Anthony Horowitz, Magpie Murders
I knew all about reading a lot. About how it could take you to a world what was better than the real one. A world where there were adventures and mysteries and magic. Except, of course, books ended eventually, and then you had to go back to being yourself.
— Chelsea Sedoti, The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett
Never give up! And write for yourself first and foremost.
— Aminah Iman, Revelation: The Vamperial
There are many books, but One holy book, the HOLY BIBLE.
— Lailah Gifty, Akita