#books

"Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier."

"I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructed, a feeling there is something more than the mundane, and a reason for our plodding."

"The books brought brilliance to my life, and they brought an understanding: Life is a story. Everything that has happened and will happen to me is all part of the story of this enchanted place - all the dreams and visions and understandings that come to me in my dungeon cell. The books helped me see the truth is not in the touch of the stone but in what the stone tells you."

"Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain."

"I’m trying to translate what my cat says and put it in a book, but how many homonyms are there for meow?"

"Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them; but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents."

"Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,Are a substantial world, both pure and good:Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,Our pastime and our happiness will grow."

"I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books."

"I remember the hours I had spent in Father's library, drugging myself with books so I could forget my doom for an hour.."

"If you surround yourself with the good and righteous, they can only raise you up. If you surround yourself with the others, they will drag you down into the doldrums of mediocrity, and they will keep you there, but only as long as you permit it."

"Reading is probably another way of being in a place."

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

"Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time."

"A novel is not an allegory.... It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing."

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."

"Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel."

"If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book."

"Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species."

"it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do."

"Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you'll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding."