#literature

"There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book."

"I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things."

"At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel."

"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."

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

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

"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."

"I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time."

"Kill me, or you are a murderer."

"Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head."

"From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood."

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

"Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment."

"Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while."

"Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay."

"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!"

"There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature."

"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."

"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."

"You must give everything to make your life as beautiful as the dreams that dance in your imagination."