books

"The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters."

"However much you study, you cannot know without action. A donkey laden with books is neither an intellectual nor a wise man. Empty of essence, what learning has he whether upon him is firewood or book?"

"The greatest gift is the passion for reading.It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites,it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind.It is a moral illumination."

"Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like betrayal"

"Books are love letters (or apologies) passed between us, adding a layer of conversation beyond our spoken words."

"Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm."

"I am not interested in being original. I am interested in being true."

"I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language."

"We were never organized readers who would see a book through to its end in any sory of logical order. We weave in and out of words like tourists on a hop-on, hop-off bus tour. Put a book down in the kitchen to go to the bathroom and you might return to find it gone, replaced by another of equal interest. We are indiscriminate."

"...I will not allow books to prove any thing.""But how shall we prove any thing?""We never shall."

"The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking."

"I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul."

"After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels."

"She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live."

"There are a large number of people in the room, but one is unaware of them. They are in the books. At times they move among the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading."

"Never trust a man who reads only one book."

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

"Far be it from me to keep a woman from her book. That could become dangerous"

"Soon enough his head would be swimming with tales of derring-do and high adventure, tales of beautiful maidens kissed, of evildoers shot with pistols or fought with swords, of bags of gold, of diamonds as big as the tip of your thumb, of lost cities and of vast mountains, of steam-trains and clipper ships, of pampas, oceans, deserts, tundra."

"لا أحب الكتب الجديدة .. أنها تمنعني من قراءة الكتب القديمة"