books

"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."

"When a stargirl cries, she sheds not tears but light."

"Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream."

"In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar."

"All novels are sequels; influence is bliss."

"Authors do not choose a story to write, the story chooses us."

"Nothing was truly unbearable if you had something to read."

"A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way."

"Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you."

"A good book will pull you in from the beginning and take you on a journey you'll never forget."

"A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. He cheats them! Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it."

"... a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge."

"Books may look like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head."

"Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries."

"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."

"How can you tell? That I like books, I mean.The look on your face when you walked in, somehow I doubted you were that impressed by me."

"If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can’t be in books. The book needs you."

"I read to be alone. I read so as not to be alone."

"There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere."

"I am a part of all I have read."