Best 4184 quotes in «books quotes» category

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." [Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]

What a man reads pours massive ingredients into his mental factory and the fabric of his life is built from those ingredients.

What an author doesn't know could fill a book.

What a glut of books! Who can read them?

What are these things that this houses, Eva?" Rovender picked up a crumbling tome. He handed it to her. "These are books," Eva said as the yellowed bits of paper flaked away in her hands to rest on the floor. "It's what humans used to put all of their writing in long ago.

What begins at the water shall end there, and what ends there shall once more begin. Words are a gift to the dead and a warning to the living.

What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever.

What books can you read to learn about this part of your life? What people do you need to confide in to grow deeper? What things do you need to stop doing in order to grow? What things do you need to start doing?

What can I say? I have a thing for women who carry heavy books and know how to use them

What can I say Rango? What can I do to prove to you that I belong to you?

What does it mean?” Flynn turns to gaze at me, eyes finally meeting mine. I find myself smiling because I know exactly what it means. “It means the clouds are clearing on Avon.

What does reading mean to me? For me it is like breathing, so vital, so basal, a necessity I cannot live without. Reading is my comfort and my retreat. Without reading I can exist, but I cannot thrive.

What do women want?" Sigmund Freud cried. Books and cats are a good start.

Whatever is true about your heart will show up in your actions.

Whatever you are physically, male or female, strong or weak, ill or healthy - all those things matter less than what your heart contains. If you have the soul of a warrior, you are a warrior. Whatever the color, the shape, the design of the shade that conceals it, the flame inside the lamp remains the same. YOU are the flame. That's what I believe.

Whatever you call me, my parents encouraged me to go to college and become a book lover, and to trust that I could do nearly anything if I could find the right book at the library. It was true; books had saved me in my home remodeling projects, but they fell short in teaching me how to trust my instincts, and how to stop thinking with my educated brain and more with my kneecaps and butt cheeks.

What had happened to the body I held in my arms that night last spring?

What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier.

What I know and I have learn is my books I can't tell you, but search out there and you will find. As a second think as you was here, you will be here and you are going to be here!

What if we just all read things, and talked about them, and sometimes we liked them and sometimes we didn’t and most of the time we didn’t agree at all, and then we all went and read more things, and repeated the dance all over again?

What if this is a horrible mistake?" I croaked. "Oh, it'll be horrible fine, just a bunch of pretentious rich people with shelves of books they've never read.

[W]hat I like best is staying home and reading. Being rich is not about how many homes you own. It’s the freedom to pick up any book you want without looking at the price and wondering whether you can afford it.

What is a book? Is it the binding, the ink, the pages, or the sum of the words contained?

What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not foolin’ a soul.

What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.

What is more natural than that a solidity, a complicity, a bond should be established between Reader and Reader, thanks to the book? You can leave the bookshop content, you, a man who thought that the period where you could still expect something from life had ended. You are bearing with you two different expectations, and both promise days of pleasant hopes; the expectation contained in the book - of a reading experience you are impatient to resume - and the expectation contained in that telephone number - of hearing again the vibrations, a times treble and at times smoldering, of that voice, when it will answer your first phone call in a while, in fact tomorrow, with the fragile pretext of the book, to ask her if she likes it or not, to tell her how many pages you have read or not read, to suggest to her that you meet again...

What is my strength, that I should hope? Is my strength the strength of stone? Or is my flesh of brass? Is not my help in me.

What is more important to a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it exists." [The Premise Of Meaning, American Scholar; Washington, DC, June 5, 1972]

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.

What is so refreshing like reading?

What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged and always disappointed.

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...

What is the quality you most like in a man? The ability to return books.

What is the point of all these books when I learn best by reading your body?

What is the sweetness of flowers compared to the savour of dust and confinement?

What is your motive when you go to church? To feed or to be fed? To serve or to be served? To worship or to be worshipped? To praise or to be praised? To teach or to learn? To give or to receive? Remember the woman with the issue of blood did not met Jesus in the church. Blind barthimus was blind though he could hear did not see Jesus but heard about Jesus passing; I am just wondering how many people have heard about Jesus through you? Who was this man interested in? Your answer might be Jesus of course but definitely not. The man loves himself and so was seeking healing even when the crowd could not allow him see Jesus. Let the crowd in the church not deceive you because God usually speak to one. (A bit deep).

What is WITH this guy and impersonating lizards? Man. He’s not exactly David Attenborough.

What makes us bleed? Come on…THINK. Love. The answer came to him in a blink of an eye. Love makes you bleed. Pain. Another answer came to him. Pain makes you bleed. Death. Death makes you bleed. They all made you bleed. Not necessarily physically, but emotionally. Just like now. Just like what was happening to him. The answers kept coming. The answers were infinite.

What man is able to do that, that thou should ask such things of me?

What life teaches us is not found in books!

What makes a book memorable is the message it etched in the readers’ minds.

What makes human life meaningful? I still felt literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain.

What proof have we that inorganic objects can feel no pain? Who knows if a book may not yearn for other books, its companions of many years, in some way strange to us and therefore never yet perceived?

What my wife desires--and what you should have guessed, had you paid attention--is bookcases. And books, of course, to fill them. Not more decorations or useless items. She wants books.

What more could you want if you were that smart and that beautiful?

[W]hat people truly desire is access to the knowledge and information that ultimately lead to a better life--the collected wisdom of the ages found only in one place: a well-stocked library. To the teachers and librarians and everyone on the frontlines of bringing literature to young people: I know you have days when your work seems humdrum, or unappreciated, or embattled, and I hope on those days you will take a few moments to reflect with pride on the importance of the work you do. For it is indeed of enormous importance--the job of safeguarding and sharing the world's wisdom. All of you are engaged in the vital task of providing the next generation with the tools they will need to save the world. The ability to read and access information isn't just a power--it's a superpower. Which means that you aren't just heroes--you're superheroes. I believe that with all my heart.

What separates a weak dreamer and a great dreamer is who is wishing and waiting or who is willing and working.

What's happiness for a reader? Be pleasantly surprised by a book from which he expected nothing.

What sorts of books are placed by garbage cans on garbage night in the town of Sterns? Mainly they're old class books, the kind people carry around in boxes in their basements for twenty years and then one day think: I will never again in my entire life open this book and there is no sense in its taking up valuable space in my basement, and they throw them out. Right out by the garbage cans they put them, in cardboard boxes with the bottoms falling out. Books should not ever be treated that way. It's a sin to treat a book that way. That's what I believe to be true.

What starts in the heart doesn't stay in the heart, it either turn into action or words.