books

"It doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books."

"Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons."

"Prometheus, thief of light, giver of light, bound by the gods, must have been a book."

"The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story."

"The world must be all fucked up,"he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight."

"In a bookstore you can find me in the romance section, because I’m not a lover, I’m a reader."

"For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice."

"There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind."

"He was the crazy one who had painted himself black and defeated the world.She was the book thief without the words.Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like rain."

"Books didn’t make me wallow in darkness, darkness made me wallow in books."

"I am simply a 'book drunkard.' Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee. I cannot withstand them."

"It did occur to me that the effect of good literature may be as dizzying as that of alcohol."

"Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him."

"Books are love letters (or apologies) passed between us, adding a layer of conversation beyond our spoken words."

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."

"Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species."

"The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book."

"It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language"

"Always buy pornographic books in hardback because they're easier to hold with one hand."

"An active mind didn't need distractions in its physical environment. It needed a collection of outstanding books and a good lamp. Maybe some cheese and crackers."