Best 19526 quotes in «book quotes» category

When the Irish novelist John McGahern was a child, his sisters unlaced and removed one of his shoes while he was reading. He did not stir. They placed a straw hat on his head. No response. Only when they took away the wooden chair on which he was sitting did he, as he puts it, 'wake out of the book'.

When the first list was being drawn up in the rock and roll book of Genesis, it would have been: In the beginning, God created Pink Floyd.

When the going gets tough, the tough get a librarian.

When the oldest Chatwin, melancholy Martin, opens the cabinet of the grandfather clock that stands in a dark, narrow back hallway in his aunt’s house and slip through into Fillory...it’s like he’s opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never ac tually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into something better.

When the print revolution occurred 400 years ago, human beings lost a certain mental capacity, including a sense of memory. In Africa today, you meet people who still carry everything in their heads, the way we used to. We rely on telephone books, address books. We have to look up everything.

When the mind stops searching, when it stops wanting refuge, when it no longer goes in search of security, when it no longer craves more books and information, when it ignores even the memory of desire, only then will Love arrive within.

When the record book on you is finished, let it show your wins and losses. But don't let it show you didn't try.

When there is war, the poet lays down the lyre, the lawyer his law reports, the schoolboy his books.

When the Supreme Court moved to Washington in 1800, it was provided with no books, which probably accounts for the high quality of early opinions.

When the wind is blowing and the sleet or rain is driving against the dark windows, I love to sit by the fire, thinking of what I have read in books of voyage and travel.

When they took a young man into Tellson's London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him. Then only was he permitted to be seen, spectacularly poring over large books, and casting his breeches and gaiters into the general weight of the establishment.

When was the last time you read a book? The truth now. And picture books don't count-I mean something with print in it.

When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness.

When today's generation reads Jack's books or they listen to the music created by some of us, I believe that they see there is a different way of approaching today's life and today's sometimes seeming hopelessness that can provide answers.

When we are returned to power we want to put in the statute book an act which will make our people citizens of the world before they are citizens of this country.

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

When we finish a book, why do we hold it in both hands and gaze at it as if it were somehow alive?

When we had to do book reports, I would pick a book that no one read and just make it up and turn that in. I got praised for my imagination.

When we haven't the time to listen to each other's stories we seek out experts to tell us how to live. The less time we spend together at the kitchen table, the more how-to books appear in the stores and on our bookshelves. But reading such books is a very different thing than listening to someone' s lived experience. Because we have stopped listening to each other we may even have forgotten how to listen, stopped learning how to recognize meaning and fill ourselves from the ordinary events of our lives. We have become solitary; readers and watchers rather than sharers and participants.

When we got around to books, I was finally set, as our minister would say, on solid ground. I gorged on books. I sneaked them at night. I rubbed their spines and sniffed in the musty smell of them in the library.

When we have read a book or poem so often that we can no longer find any amusement in reading it by ourselves, we can still take pleasure in reading it to a companion. To him it has all the graces of novelty.

When we learn to read, it's a real product of civilization and a civilized society. It affects your brain. It affects the way you think, and it gives you that capacity for self-reflection that you simply do not have without the agency of books.

When we meet and I discover that we have read and loved the same books, we are instant friends.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.

When we read a book, our most essential trait - imagination - is given the opportunity to soar.

When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.

When we talk about the environment, about creation, my thoughts turn to the first pages of the Bible, the Book of Genesis, which states that God placed man and woman on earth to cultivate and care for it. And the question comes to my mind: What does cultivating and caring for the earth mean? Are we truly cultivating and caring for creation? Or are we exploiting and neglecting it?

When we think too much about the opinions of others, we are letting them edit a book God has written.

When we want a book exactly like the one we just finished reading, what we really want is to recreate that pleasurable experience--the headlong rush to the last page, the falling into a character's life, the deeper understanding we've gotten of a place or a time, or the feeling of reading words that are put together in a way that causes us to look at the world differently. We need to start thinking about what it is about a book that draws us in, rather than what the book is about.

When we think of design, we usually imagine things that are chosen because they are designed. Vases or comic books or architecture... It turns out, though, that most of what we make or design is actually aimed at a public that is there for something else. The design is important, but the design is not the point. Call it "public design"... Public design is for individuals who have to fill out our tax form, interact with our website or check into our hotel room despite the way it's designed, not because of it.

When [wines] were good they pleased my sense, cheered my spirits, improved my moral and intellectual powers, besides enabling me to confer the same benefits on other people. (Notes on a Cellar Book)

When we wrote that scene about the Sleepy Kittens where he's reading the storybook to the kids, it's like we've had to read these stupid books to our kids, and we all want to just tell our kids, "This is really bad. Don't you know that? Can't you see that?

When women understand that governments and religions are human inventions; that Bibles, prayer-books, catechisms, and encyclical letters are all emanations from the brains of man, they will no longer be oppressed by the injunctions that come to them with the divine authority of *Thus sayeth the Lord.*

When you adapt a book to a film, you take all the best parts and put them into an hour and 15 minutes and have to compromise on the characters.

When what you read elevates your mind and fills you with noble aspirations, look for no other rule by which to judge a book; it is good, and is the work of a master-hand.

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.

When you are getting on in years (but not ill, of course), you get very sleepy at times, and the hours seem to pass like lazy cattle moving across a landscape.

When you are out of favor, so to speak, it's not just the reviewers. It's the editors, the publishers, they don't want you anymore, you're just gone and you've been written out of history as effectively as the old Stalinists would write someone else out, take their photograph out of a book.

When you are reading a book and you finish a chapter, you don’t keep re-reading the chapter you just finished. You move on to the next chapter to see what happens.

When You Are Old" WHEN you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face; And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

When you are writing, of course, you have to do all that writing and correcting for yourself. When I was a librarian it was expected that I would know about a wide range of books.

When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do.

When you care about perfection, you care about an expectation. But there is also caring for where I am right now, for what's happening right now. When I spend time with students, they tell me that they've read something in a book or heard something from a teacher that they don't think they're living up to. And I tell them, “Take care of yourself right now. Befriend what's happening, not just who you're supposed to be or what the world should be like. This is where you are now. So how do you care for yourself this minute?

When you are writing a book, it feels as if you are simply concentrating on the world of the book and that whatever is happening in your personal life is outside the room, as it were. But maybe that's just the way you have to talk to yourself to make it possible.

When you broadcast your book reading voluntarily, it creates moments of fascinating serendipity.

When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book — to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.

When you close the book, does the story end? No! That's such a bland way to read. Every story goes on forever in our imaginations, and its characters live on.

When you find a chillness upon your souls, and that your former heat begins to abate, ply yourselves with warm clothes, get those good books that may acquaint you with such truths as may warm and affect your hearts.

When you educate a woman, you set her free. Had I not had books and education in Mississippi, I would have believed that's all there was.

When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get you a good dinner with reading you the cookery book.