Best 4184 quotes in «books quotes» category

When entering a library, I never forget to bow down!

Whenever I’m not writing, time trudges forward with the maddening, mortifying, miserable, morose, moribund pace of a funeral procession.

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.

Whenever Monsieur Perdu looked at a book, he did not see it purely in terms of a story, retail price and an essential balm for the soul; he saw freedom on wings of paper.

Whenever she opened a scientific book and saw whole paragraphs of incomprehensible words and symbols, she felt a sense of wonder at the great territories of learning that lay beyond her - the sum of so many noble and purposive attempts to make objective sense of the world.

Whenever someone is a threat to the enemy there will be an attack dispatched against that person to try to minimise their effectiveness.

Whenever you are in transition it is always important to choose the words that you use. You call it crises in your life and I call it transition.

Whenever we read a book we love, we change it, to some extent. We read into it our own interpretations, and the meanings which the words have taken on in our time. If a book is so rigid that it cannot lend itself to these fluctuations, it is useful only while it seems strictly true, and afterwards it is completely out of date.

Whenever we talk about darkness and light, the terms seem so abstract that many consider the answers to be found in meditation and yoga, but I’m here to tell you that the answers are in the books you will never read, waiting all your life in the libraries you ignored and the bookstores you didn’t visit. I’m here to tell you as well that you are your own Satan and evil can’t possibly interfere more in your life than what you’re already doing to yourself by remaining ignorant. Until you choose the light, darkness is your personal choice, and there’s no reason to feel any empathy for you.

Whenever, therefore, a lie has built unto itself a throne, let it be assailed without pity and without regret, for under the domination of an inconvenient falsehood, no one can prosper. Compton

When I began writing The Night Bookmobile, it was a story about a woman's secret life as a reader. As I worked it also became a story about the claims that books place on their readers, the imbalance between our inner and outer lives, a cautionary tale of the seductions of the written word. It became a vision of the afterlife as a library, of heaven as a funky old camper filled with everything you've ever read. What is this heaven? What is it we desire from the hours, weeks, lifetimes we devote to books? What would you sacrifice to sit in that comfy chair with perfect light for an afternoon in eternity, reading the perfect book, forever?

When he was seventy-four years old the Cretan novelist Nikos Kazantzakis began a book. He called it Report to Greco... Kazantzakis thought of himself as a soldier reporting to his commanding officer on a mortal mission—his life. ... Well, there is only one Report to Greco, but no true book... was ever anything else than a report. ... A true book is a report upon the mystery of existence... it speaks of the world, of our life in the world. Everything we have in the books on which our libraries are founded—Euclid's figures, Leonardo's notes, Newton's explanations, Cervantes' myth, Sappho's broken songs, the vast surge of Homer—everything is a report of one kind or another and the sum of all of them together is our little knowledge of our world and of ourselves. Call a book Das Kapital or The Voyage of the Beagle or Theory of Relativity or Alice in Wonderland or Moby-Dick, it is still what Kazantzakis called his book—it is still a "report" upon the "mystery of things." But if this is what a book is... then a library is an extraordinary thing. ... The existence of a library is, in itself, an assertion. ... It asserts that... all these different and dissimilar reports, these bits and pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles beyond, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies. ... The library, almost alone of the great monuments of civilization, stands taller now than it ever did before. The city... decays. The nation loses its grandeur... The university is not always certain what it is. But the library remains: a silent and enduring affirmation that the great Reports still speak, and not alone but somehow all together...

When I call on God, I am not trying to get his attention and I am not trying to get Him to notice me. In all this my journey with Him two questions usually comes to my mind, they are; am I paying attention to him or am I trying to get his attention?

When I didn't have friends, I had books.

When I have money, I invest in buying books. My personal development by reading these books is my greatest pleasure.

...when I look at and study the ranks of my books - for I have put the name of each author on the binding - I feel as if I am looking at the holy graves of those who wrote them.

When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.

When I hear that people live by the book, I always wonder which one.

When in doubt, do what they do in books, was one of Gabriel's secret mottos and - that rarest of things - a principle that he actually lived by.

When I read books, it is like I have met the sacred souls.

When I realized that I was an introvert and what that meant, I actually became more outgoing, more confident in social situations, and began to enjoy scenarios I used to find unbearable. Why? Because, in understanding what I needed with respect to replenishing my energy, I was able to set limits and boundaries that freed me to be more engaged.

When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud of dust; I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the denouement.

When I sit down and write, I do it to relieve myself of the madness that burdens me so that new words can wrap me in newer, better, madness.

When I started this book last year, I had a small reception in mind. A few copies in my hand to share with close friends, maybe a small gathering... I never imagined that my book would have its own ISBN number and be available to the public. I never imagined seeing my name next to the words, "published author." I feel so thankful that this has worked out so well for me. God is good!

When I stepped into the brown-tiled entryway of the Kentwood Public Library, the sunlight flowing down on me from the high windows, I felt a sense of importance. It gratified me to be in a place devoted to books and quiet; I was filled with a sense of hope. Reading to me was fundamental, as fundamental as food. And nothing could be more satisfying than reading a good book while eating a good meal of mi soup, french fries, and a thin cut of steak. I plowed through books as fast as possible in order to read them again.

When I think of the causes for which people more commonly give up their lives-nationalism, religion, ethnicity-it seems to me that a thirty-five pound bag of rocks and the lost world it represents, is not such a bad thing to die for.

When I was with him, I felt like a book worth reading all the way through again and again and again. Sure, he liked my cover. I wanted him to, but I wanted him to like everything else too. I imagined him buying the book, studying it, quoting it, memorizing his favorite parts. He’d keep it with him always, like a Bible, hold it sacred even when the cover fell off and the book became bent with age and use. Maybe, he’d be buried with it. That’s all I wanted.

When I was a child, I read everything I found, anywhere I found it. The only thing that felt beautiful about my life was the way books helped me escape it.

When I was young I studied in the west suburb, with the birds of the forest as my only neighbours. I would open a book and read from beginning to end before going on to another, never simply dipping into the text or stopping halfway. I would sit up all night without a break, forgetting cold and hunger, not bothering to comb my hair or wash my face.

When I write sometimes I strike gold, sometimes I labor in vain and keep producing rubbish

When Molly O'Toole was looking at the colored pictures in Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's big dictionary and just happened to be eating a candy cane at the same time and drooled candy cane juice on the colored pictures of gems and then forgot and shut the book so the pages all stuck together, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle didn't say, "Such a careless little girl can never ever look at the colored pictures in my dictionary again." Nor did she say, "You must never look at books when you are eating." She said, "Let's see, I think we can steam those pages apart, and then we can wipe the stickiness off with a little soap and water, like this-now see, it's just as good as new. There's nothing as cozy as a piece of candy and a book.

When my friends are in danger,” he says, his voice sincere. “I will always be there to help them, no matter what.” “Sheesh,” I comment, catching Adam’s eye and making him grin harder. “I think I preferred the moodier you, not the soppy one.” And with that, we are back in business.

When my phone chimes with a text message on Monday morning, I'm still in that dreamy state between sleep and awake where you can pretty much convince yourself of anything. Like that a teen Mick Jagger is waiting in your driveway to take you to school. Or that your favorite book series ended with an actual satisfying conclusion, instead of what the author tried to pass off as a satisfying conclusion.

When one opens a book, one should also open one's mind.

When people read, they hear voices and see images in their head. This production is total synesthesia and something close to madness. A great book is an hallucinated IMAX film for one. The author had a feeling, which he turned into words, and the reader gets a feeling from those words—maybe it’s the same feeling; maybe it’s not. As Peter Mendelsund wrote in What We See When We Read, a book is a coproduction. A reader both performs the book and attends the performance. She is conductor, orchestra, and audience. A book, whether nonfiction of fiction, is an “invitation to daydream.

When reading a book, you are sold what some writer thought. When reading a newspaper, you are sold what someone did, and, what some advertiser made.

When someone gives me either a democratic or republican pamphlet, I throw it in their face. I’m a librarian, damn it! We only take book donations.

When she thinks a book is very good, what she says to herself is: yes, that's how things are. I hadn't thought of it before, but that's how things are.

When someone recommends a book to you, you know two things; that it is a good book and you have a good friend.

When Suzie introduced Helen, she told the audience that one of the best things about books is that they are an interactive art form: that while the author may describe in some detail how a character looks, it is the reader's imagination that completes the image, making it his or her own. "That's why we so often don't like movies made from books, right?" Suzie said. "We don't like someone else's interpretation of what we see so clearly." She talked, too, about how books educate and inspire, and how they soothe the soul-"like comfort food without the calories," she said. She talked about the tactile joys of reading, the feel of a page beneath one's fingers; the elegance of typeface on a page. She talked about how people complain that they don't have time to read, and reminded them that if they gave up half an hour of television a day in favor of reading, they could finish twenty-five books a year. "Books don't take time away from us," she said. "They give it back. In this age of abstraction, of multitasking, of speed for speed's sake, they reintroduce us to the elegance-and the relief!-of real, tick-tock time.

When The Pyramid falls, the other cities will follow in short order. Nature's balance will be restored and Man will finally return to solitude.

When they show you who they are — you know what to do already.

when the press and problems of humanity become too much, I love to escape into books, where people are served up in digestible portions and can be pushed to one side when one is satiated.

When the imagination takes over, the second hand could be the hour hand to a creator of stories.

When the writing is good, a book becomes a mirror. The reader will see an uncanny familiarity and respond accordingly.

[When under stress I thought of] the books I had read [and applied] them to myself. I [imagined I was] one of the characters [and soon found myself] in made-up circumstances which were most agreeable to my inclinations.

When was it that they who dwell upon the earth have not sinned in thy sight? or what people have so kept thy commandments? Thou shall find that you all by name had kept thy precepts; but not the heathen.

When we love something, we always want more of it, whether it’s good for us or not. This is as true of ice cream and French fries as it is of great books. It’s only natural to wish for more time with our favorite characters, but an essential part of what makes us fall in love with a book is the fact that it ends (something it wouldn’t hurt to remind the heads of Hollywood studios). When there can be no more of something, it makes what already exists more precious and perfect.

When we read, we decide when, where, how long, and about what. One of the few places on earth that it is still possible to experience an instant sense of freedom and privacy is anywhere you open up a good book and begin to read. When we read silently, we are alone with our own thoughts and one other voice. We can take our time, consider, evaluate, and digest what we read—with no commercial interruptions, no emotional music or special effects manipulation. And in spite of the advances in electronic information exchange, the book is still the most important medium for presenting ideas of substance and value, still the only real home of literature.

When you learn to have the heart of praise in the presence of your enemies, you set the table; if you can work with God in darkness enough depending on the light that He showed you in the last season, you will learn to read your enemies as a sign that it is time to eat. ( a bit deep). Whenever you sense a crisis in your life, note that your harvest is near.