books

"Books are like oxygen to a deep-sea diver,"she had once said. "Take them away and you might as well begin counting the bubbles."

"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."

"An hour spent reading is one stolen from paradise."

"To read is to empower,To empower is to write,To write is to influence,To influence is to change,To change is to live"."

"So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone."

"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."

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

"How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind."

"In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond."

"Books are the most tolerant of friends."

"So here is my story, may it bringSome smiles and a tear or so,It happened once upon a time,Far away, and long ago,Outside the night wind keens and wails,Come listen to me, the Teller of Tales!"

"Did you ever hear anyone say, 'That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me'?"

"There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life."

"Books can ignite fires in your mind, because they carry ideas for kindling, and art for matches."

"A book with the genuine power to stir and comfort its readers."

"The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library,'The medicines of the soul."

"We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And someday we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddamn steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in it and cover it up."

"A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo."

"Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today."

"How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!"