books

"Books should go where they will be most appreciated, and not sit unread, gathering dust on a forgotten shelf, don't you agree?"

"Still round the corner there may wait A new road or a secret gateAnd though I oft have passed them by A day will come at last when IShall take the hidden paths that run West of the Moon, East of the Sun."

"The books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill!"

"I hate to lend a book I love…it never seems quite the same when it comes back to me…"

"Honesty is the first chapter of the book wisdom."

"Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book."(Acceptance speech, National Book Award 2010 (Nonfiction), November 17, 2010)"

"She reads a lot of books. Good things, books."

"The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait."(About Books; Recoiling, Rereading, Retelling, New York Times, February 22, 1987)"

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

"A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity."

"A woman's destiny, they say, is not fulfilled until she holds in her arms her own little book."

"What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?"

"As a fiction writer, let me make it up, and let me make it up to you. I’ll pen our love story, if you’ll be my co-author."

"I just got out of the hospital. I was in a speed reading accident. I hit a book mark and flew across the room."

"Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble."

"The point is, it didn’t really matter what the book was about. It was what it meant that was important."

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

"The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it."

"The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves."

"What amazes me is that most days feel useless. I don't seem to accomplish anything-just a few pages, most of which don't seem very good. Yet, when I put all those wasted days together, I somehow end up with a book of which I'm very proud."