books

"But her grandmother had never suggested she could think the same of Scarlet. You'll be fine, she always said, after a skinned knee, after a broken arm, after her first youthfull heartbreak. You'll be fine, because you're strong, like me."

"But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence."

"I’m up for the Julius Caesar Author of the Year Award this year. I’m tremendously proud, considering Caesar is the guy who burned down the Library of Alexandria."

"Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity"

"being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right."

"Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being."

"I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree."

"It is time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a sea of unremarkable men and women, anonymous faces on the street, a hundred thousand unalphabetized things, a million forgotten hours."

"I think a good book is a good book forever.I don't think they get less good because times change."

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

"great books are the ones we need"

"One little Indian left all alone, he went out and hanged himself and then there were none."

"The ultimate luxury is to reread: to revisit a book to see how time has treated it, how memory has distorted it, or how my own passing years have cast a new light on it."

"I'm not really sure what makes a book a 'classic' to begin with, but I think it has to be at least fifty years old and some person or animal has to die at the end."

"I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else."

"The VoiceThere is a voice inside of youThat whispers all day long,"I feel this is right for me,I know that this is wrong."No teacher, preacher, parent, friendOr wise man can decideWhat's right for you--just listen toThe voice that speaks inside."

"For every book you buy, you should buy the time to read it."

"And so I'm me again, Leo. Thanks to the example of a five-year-old. I'm hoping you wouldn't want it any other way. Not that you weren't flattered, right? I mean, to have a girl two thousand miles away going to pieces over you, weeping at the mere memory of you, losing her appetite, losing herself and self-respect - well, that's trophy enough for any guy's ego, huh?"

"Helen's books were her friends, "the kind you invite for dinner in the middle of winter,"she'd told him, "and spend all night talking and never go to bed."

"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners."