#books

"I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it."

"I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow"

"You could write a book about things that you can't find on-line."

"Her heart is so dark, if it were ink it’d be beyond black and would only be good for writing a murder mystery novel."

"Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons."

"They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?"

"Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom."

"Books, the children of the brain."

"If you love books enough, books will love you back."

"The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."

"I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible."

"Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper."

"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."

"Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head."

"The ultimate luxury is to reread: to revisit a book to see how time has treated it, how memory has distorted it, or how my own passing years have cast a new light on it."

"Literature is news that stays news."

"A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert."

"Reading is my favourite occupation, when I have leisure for it and books to read."

"The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story."

"She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness."