#books

"A book is as private and consensual as sex."

"There are essentially two things that will make you wise -- the books you read and the people you meet."

"I read because one life isn't enough, and in the page of a book I can be anybody."

"Oh well, maybe the only beauty left in cities is in the oil slicks on the road and maybe there isn't any beauty left in the people who live in these places."

"Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare."

"the depth of a person's character is not measured by his or her physical strength, but by the depth of his or her nobility."

"Books fall open, you fall in."

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."

"The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night."

"I have gone to [this bookshop] for years, always finding the one book I wanted - and then three more I hadn’t known I wanted."

"....a good book can teach you about the world and about yourself. You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life. You become wiser. Not just more knowledgeable - books that provide nothing but information can produce that result. But wiser, in the sense that you are more deeply aware of the great and enduring truths of human life."

"An active mind didn't need distractions in its physical environment. It needed a collection of outstanding books and a good lamp. Maybe some cheese and crackers."

"This book taught me, once and for all, how easily you can escape this world with the help of words! You can find friends between the pages of a book, wonderful friends."

"The old man was peering intently at the shelves. 'I'll have to admit that he's a very competent scholar.'Isn't he just a librarian?' Garion asked, 'somebody who looks after books?'That's where all the rest of scholarship starts, Garion. All the books in the world won't help you if they're just piled up in a heap."

"That which others hear or read of, I felt and practised myself; they get their knowledge by books, I mine by melancholizing."

"Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books."

"Books turn people into isolated individuals, and once that's happened, the road only grows rockier. Books wire you to want to be Steve McQueen, but the world wants you to be SMcQ23667bot@hotmail.com."

"For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice."

"I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page."

"Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything."