books

"Have you thought of an ending?""Yes, several, and all are dark and unpleasant.""Oh, that won't do! Books ought to have good endings. How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily ever after?""It will do well, if it ever came to that.""Ah! And where will they live? That's what I often wonder."

"The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library,'The medicines of the soul."

"And what would they be scared of? There's nothing to fear in a perfect world, is there?"

"If anything attacked us, we could just panic at it until it went away."

"Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad."

"Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary."

"So many books, so little time."

"When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf."

"Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything."

"Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance."

"I solemnly swear that I am up to no good."

"لو سُئلت :ماالذي تتمنى أن تشربه دون أن تفيق ؟، لقلت : عصير الكتب ، خلاصة الفكر ، مسحوق الفلسفة"

"الأمر الوحيد الذي أندم عليه هو أنه لن يتسنى لي قراءة كل الكتب التي أود قرائتها."

"The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book."

"Her heart is so dark, if it were ink it’d be beyond black and would only be good for writing a murder mystery novel."

"A stereotype becomes a stereotype when a significant percentage of the population appears to conform to it."

"Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination."

"Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot."

"I love the smell of book ink in the morning."

"So many FREAKS and not enough CIRCUSES!"