#books

"Allowing yourself to stop reading a book - at page 25, 50, or even, less frequently, a few chapters from the end - is a rite of passage in a reader's life, the literary equivalent of a bar mitzvah or a communion, the moment at which you look at yourself and announce: Today I am an adult. I can make my own decisions."

"That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet."

"A good book has no ending."

"Generally speaking, books don't cause much harm. Except when you read them, that is. Then they cause all kinds of problems."

"Books are a poor substitute for female companionship, but they are easier to find."

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."

"I sat, a solitary man,In a crowded London shop,An open book and empty cupOn the marble table-top.While on the shop and street I gazedMy body of a sudden blazed;And twenty minutes more or lessIt seemed, so great my happiness,That I was blessed and could bless."

"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."

"Before this generation lose the wisdom, one advice - read books."

"His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore."

"Remember, when you don’t know what to do, it never hurts to play Scrabble. It’s like reading the I Ching or tea leaves."

"Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly."

"Un buen escritor se aprecia mejor por lo que rompe que por lo que publica."

"The problem with books is that they end."

"الأمر الوحيد الذي أندم عليه هو أنه لن يتسنى لي قراءة كل الكتب التي أود قرائتها."

"Every night, I have to read a book, so that my mind will stop thinking about things that I stress about."

"I’m a book lover. I’ve probably already fucked a whole library."

"Books to the ceiling,Books to the sky,My pile of books is a mile high.How I love them! How I need them!I'll have a long beard by the time I read them."

"Only bad books have good endings.If a book is any good, it's ending is always bad - because you don't want the book to end."

"Soon enough his head would be swimming with tales of derring-do and high adventure, tales of beautiful maidens kissed, of evildoers shot with pistols or fought with swords, of bags of gold, of diamonds as big as the tip of your thumb, of lost cities and of vast mountains, of steam-trains and clipper ships, of pampas, oceans, deserts, tundra."