#books

"The worn soles of Daffy's boots skidded on the icy stones. He'd been saving up for a new pair for Christmas, but then he'd come across an encyclopaedia in ten volumes, going cheap. Boots might last ten years, at best, but knowledge was eternal."

"I guess there are never enough books."

"Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life."

"Wisdom.... comes not from age, but from education and learning."

"It is time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a sea of unremarkable men and women, anonymous faces on the street, a hundred thousand unalphabetized things, a million forgotten hours."

"You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me."

"I hope people of the future will remember my books for being burned, and I challenge an elite few to imagine the embers of the last copy."

"How can you tell? That I like books, I mean.The look on your face when you walked in, somehow I doubted you were that impressed by me."

"The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer's ink is the greater explosive: it will win."

"My arms are killing me. I didn't know words could be so heavy."

"It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner."

"I suppose it’s not a social norm, and not a manly thing to do — to feel, discuss feelings. So that’s what I’m giving the finger to. Social norms and stuff…what good are social norms, really? I think all they do is project a limited and harmful image of people. It thus impedes a broader social acceptance of what someone, or a group of people, might actually be like."

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."

"Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read."[As quoted in Literary Censorship in England (in Current Opinion, Vol. 55, No. 5, November 1913)]"

"Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks."

"Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become."

"There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere."

"There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing."

"For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives."

"Without books, the world will be void."