#books

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

"There was another reason [she] took her books whenever they went away. They were her home when she was somewhere strange. They were familiar voices, friends that never quarreled with her, clever, powerful friends -- daring and knowledgeable, tried and tested adventurers who had traveled far and wide. Her books cheered her up when she was sad and kept her from being bored."

"As the hours crept by, the afternoon sunlight bleached all the books on the shelves to pale, gilded versions of themselves and warmed the paper and ink inside the covers so that the smell of unread words hung in the air."

"Not being the sort to throw a book, she pounded her fist on her cushion."

"A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest."

"I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose."

"You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes."

"Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head."

"If you want to really know something you have to observe or experience it in person; if you claim to know something on the basis of hearsay, or on happening to see it in a book, you'll be a laughingstock to those who really know."

"Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city."

"People talk about books being an escape, but here on the tube, this one feels more like a lifeline...The motion of the train makes her head rattle, but her eyes lock on the words the way a figure skater might choose a focal point as she spins, and just like that, she's grounded again."

"All thoughts, secret or spoken, belong in a coffee table book written in Braille, so you can really feel the emotions."

"Don Quixote could never manage without his patient servant Sancho Panza."

"For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately."

"A precious, mouldering pleasure ’t is To meet an antique book, In just the dress his century wore; A privilege, I think."

"For a moment I was distracted. Books always did that to me... I liked the creamy pages, the smell of ink, all the secrets locked inside."

"Writers are the exorcists of their own demons."

"CUSTOMER: If I were to, say... meet the love of my life in this bookshop, what section do you think they would be standing in?"

"There weren't any curtains in the windows, and the books that didn't fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a bunch of intellectual refugees."

"In Western Civilization, our elders are books."