books

"I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books."

"There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?"

"Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered."

"One glance at (a book) and you hear the voice of another person - perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millenia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time."

"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."

"Cakes are like books: There are new ones you want to read and old favorites you want to reread."

"I don't believe in the kind of magic in my books. But I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book."

"My library is an archive of longings."

"If you have a dream, don’t just sit there. Gather courage to believe that you can succeed and leave no stone unturned to make it a reality."

"Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told."

"And what is the use of a book,"thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?"

"Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining."

"Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth."

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."

"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."

"You’ll miss the best things if you keep your eyes shut."

"Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance."

"A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation... A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold."

"Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written."

"Remember, the past need not become our future as well."