books

"I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in."

"It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down."

"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."

"There were two sets of double doors leading out of the antechamber, one marked STACKS and the other TOMES. Not knowing the difference between the two, I headed to the ones labeled STACKS. That was what I wanted. Stacks of books. Great heaps of books. Shelf after endless shelf of books."

"Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not."

"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."

"I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows."

"What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!"

"I should rather have you than a heap of gold, even if it were very comfortable to sleep on."

"There was another reason [she] took her books whenever they went away. They were her home when she was somewhere strange. They were familiar voices, friends that never quarreled with her, clever, powerful friends -- daring and knowledgeable, tried and tested adventurers who had traveled far and wide. Her books cheered her up when she was sad and kept her from being bored."

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

"Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all."

"I keep my motivational book collection in the fridge. Hey, Who Moved My Cheese?! Did somebody let grandpa out of his cage again?"

"Remember, when you don’t know what to do, it never hurts to play Scrabble. It’s like reading the I Ching or tea leaves."

"Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense."

"Adult librarians are like lazy bakers: their patrons want a jelly doughnut, so they give them a jelly doughnut. Children’s librarians are ambitious bakers: 'You like the jelly doughnut? I’ll get you a jelly doughnut. But you should try my cruller, too. My cruller is gonna blow your mind, kid."

"Books, the children of the brain."

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."

"Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart."

"My head’ll explode if I continue with this escapism."