Book Quotes - Page 268

I began to draw an invisible boundary between myself and other people. No matter who I was dealing with. I maintained a set distance, carefully monitoring the person’s attitude so that they wouldn’t get any closer. I didn’t easily swallow what other people told me. My only passions were books and music

When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.

Nights without work I spend with whisky and books.

I'll write to you. A super-long letter, like in an old-fashioned novel

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

I'm still old-fashioned. I love dusty old books and libraries.

Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch is a wise, humane, and delightful study of what some regard as the best novel in English. Mead has discovered an original and highly personal way to make herself an inhabitant both of the book and of George Eliot's imaginary city. Though I have read and taught the book these many years I find myself desiring to go back to it after reading Rebecca Mead's work.

What I want to do is tell stories about normal people in the American suburbs. I don't write the book where it's a conspiracy reaching the prime minister; I don't write the book with the big serial killer who lops off heads. My setting is a very placid pool of suburbia, family life. And within that I can make pretty big splashes.

We really tried hard not to make it a cricket book, it appeals to a much wider community.

At any rate, nothing was more characteristic of him [Walter Benjamin] in the thirties than the little notebooks with black covers which he always carried with him and in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of "pearls" and "coral." On occasion he read from them aloud, showed them around like items from a choice and precious collection.

There's no specific punishment in the books of fiqh (Islamic laws) that relate to homosexuality per se. They apply to any illicit sexual relations, including prohibited heterosexual acts like adultery. And the punishments are strong, but they are legal fictions because they are impossible to prove. You need four witnesses to say they witnessed (sexual) penetration. In what circumstances are you going to find someone to testify to that?

During really difficult times in my life when I start questioning why I am struggling with something, I often turn to books to understand myself better.

More wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of the ocean. Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. All my days I have watched it and listened to it, and I know it well. At first it told to me only the plain little tales of calm beaches and near ports, but with the years it grew more friendly and spoke of other things; of things more strange and more distant in space and time.

The truth is . . . that the great artists of the world are never puritans, and seldom ever ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man - that is, virtuous in the YMCA sense - has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading, and it is highly improbable that the thing has ever been done by a virtuous woman.

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

Writing books is certainly a most unpleasant occupation. It is lonesome, unsanitary, and maddening. Many authors go crazy.

I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.

Tell the truth and read story books;it will take you to the magical moment in a glory night.

Books-bright windows in this life of ours, lit by the shining souls of men.

Arguably, in business books, I don't think there's much that has never been said before.

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels

I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels

I don't have change I'd have to give you nine more books

I had written childrens books for 14 years before I published Wicked. And none of them were poorly reviewed, and none of them sold enough for me to be able to buy a bed.

How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.