books

"Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it."

"Why can't people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?"

"Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination."

"Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own."[The Sick Chamber (The New Monthly Magazine , August 1830)]"

"People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world."

"Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head."

"Good books are about everything."

"Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind."

"As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other you will find what is needful for you in a book."

"There's a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them."

"There’s nothing as cozy as a piece of candy and a book."

"A good book is an event in my life."

"I don't remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books."

"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."

"I love everything that is old; old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines."

"It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in."

"A good book has no ending."

"great books are the ones we need"

"Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life."

"I love to lose myself in other men's minds.... Books think for me."