#literature

"I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess."

"She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live."

"I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple."

"The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary."

"Literary detection and firearms don't really go hand in hand; pen mighter than the sword and so forth."

"Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!"

"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners."

"A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!"

"I wish the military were the militerary. Less fighting and more reading."

"I go to books and to nature as the bee goes to a flower, for a nectar that I can make into my own honey."

"We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

"Sometimes two people have to fall apart, to realize how much they need to fall back together."

"I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree."

"I awoke one morning to find myself famous."

"A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is."

"The bullet that has hit us Muslims today left the gun centuries ago when we let the clergy decide that knowledge and education were not important."

"You don’t know anything, but I know even less."

"I am conscious of a soul-sense that lifts me above the narrow, cramping circumstances of my life. My physical limitations are forgotten- my world lies upward, the length and the breadth and the sweep of the heavens are mine!"

"It is beautiful to express love and even more beautiful to feel it."

"At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader."