books

"She reads a lot of books. Good things, books."

"A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo."

"I’m a book lover. I’ve probably already fucked a whole library."

"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are."

"There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books."

"A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat."

"Imagination is what you do with your inspiration."

"No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it"

"Rule number one: Don't fuck with librarians."

"What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say."

"And how could anyone consent to give up the smell of open books, old or new?"

"Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head."

"The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night."

"Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble."

"There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it."

"If the self-help books worked, it would be a shrinking industry not a growing one."

"Right now, we're living in an ugly chapter of our lives, but books always get better!"

"Some like to believe it's the book that chooses the person."

"I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose."

"And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun."