#literature

"Since there is no real silence, Silence will contain all the sounds, All the words, all the languages, All knowledge, all memory."

"There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book."

"In the end, you have to choose whether or not to trust someone."

"Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces."

"Literature is the real life of imaginary people."

"Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told."

"Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm."

"I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves."

"Kill me, or you are a murderer."

"What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote."

"You never know who you're inspiring or uninspiring. People notice more than you think."

"I know a girl from whose body sunbeams rose to the clouds as if they’d fallen from the sun.Her laugh was like a bangle of bells. “Your hair is wet,” I told her one day, “Did you take a bath?” “It is dew!” she laughed, “I’ve been lying in the grass. All morning long, I lay here waiting for the dawn."

"If you`re wondering how you`ll find time, it means you don`t really want to read. Because nobody`s ever got time. Children certainly haven`t, nor have teenagers or grown-ups. Life always gets in the way. <...>Time to read is always time stolen. <...>Stolen from what? From the tyranny of living.”- p.125"

"Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself."

"There is another alphabet, whispering from every leaf, singing from every river, shimmering from every sky."

"Color is the overpowering of black; white – the final victory over black."

"[novan]: bassists are very good with their fingers[novan]: and some of us sing backup vocals, so that means we're good with our mouths too...(~ IM chat with Novan Chang, 18, bassist)"

"Words rich in meaning can be cheap in sound effects."

"I think imagination is at the heart of everything we do. Scientific discoveries couldn't have happened without imagination. Art, music, and literature couldn't exist without imagination. And so anything that strengthens imagination, and reading certainly does that, can help us for the rest of our lives."

"By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This is to me is a miracle."