books

"It takes a certain ingenuous faith - but I have it - to believe that people who read and reflect more likely than not come to judge things with liberality and truth."

"Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge."

"Only bad books have good endings.If a book is any good, it's ending is always bad - because you don't want the book to end."

"Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard covered book to a friend and when he doesn’t return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five cent books are different."

"I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised."

"Break the spine of one of my books and I break yours."

"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious."

"I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books."

"Un buen escritor se aprecia mejor por lo que rompe que por lo que publica."

"Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book."

"Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the Universe together into one garment for us."

"As the hours crept by, the afternoon sunlight bleached all the books on the shelves to pale, gilded versions of themselves and warmed the paper and ink inside the covers so that the smell of unread words hung in the air."

"Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude."

"All I have learned, I learned from books."

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

"but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short."

"If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book."

"Elend: I kind of lost track of time…Breeze: For two hours?Elend: There were books involved."

"Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them; but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents."

"Anything can become a children's book if you give it to a child...Children are actually the best (and worst) audience for literature because they have no patience with pretence."