Book Quotes - Page 277

I just got my phone back yesterday. My mom had it for two days. I was supposed to read a book and I really wanted to play Call Of Duty.

The women are, of course, the biggest single group of oppressed people in the world and, if we are to believe the Book of Genesis, the very oldest.

The dark night was the first book of poetry and the constellations were the poems.

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.

The peculiarity of all death-based religions is that their subject-matter is entirely outside of facts. Men could think and think, talk and argue, advance, deny, assert, and controversy, and write innumerable books, without being hampered at any time by any fact.

Writing is an art but also a craft, which means it's a job. I don't teach. This is how the groceries get on the table. You sometimes make creative sacrifices to get the job done. All that said, I'm looking forward to getting out of the two-book-a-year schedule I'm on and to getting some self-indulgence going.

Some of you read with me 40 years ago a portion of Aristotle's Ethics, a selection of passages that describe his idea of happiness. You may not remember too well.

The Book of Psalms instructs us in the use of wings as well as words. It sets us both mounting and singing.

What will you do when the Law of God comes in terror; when the trumpet of the archangel shall tear you from your grave; when the eyes of God shall burn their way into your guilty soul; when the great books shall be opened and all your sin and shame shall be punished... can you stand against an angry Law in that Day?

If I ever wrote a book on preaching, it would contain three words: Preach the Word. Get rid of all the other stuff that gets you sidetracked; preach the Word.

Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carrying a cargo of zeros and ones. Metaphors and similes are wonderful literary devices but they do nothing but obscure the beauty of technology.

Judicious mothers will always keep in mind that they are the first book read, and the last put aside, in every childs library.

He has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.

I love to lose myself in other men's minds.... Books think for me.

The first books I was interested in were all about baseball. But I can't think of one single book that changed my life in any way.

Get yourself a notebook and write in it EVERY night for two weeks. Then stop if you can. If you can't, you're a writer.

I do the same things I did when I was 12 years old: I ride bikes, I read books, I walk in the woods. And I listen to music.

I believe a good writer can write a good book with any sort of character, in any sort of setting, but I prefer to write about the outsider. It might just be because I've been one (or perceived myself to be one) for so much of my life. But the simple fact of being marginalized immediately brings conflict to a story before the narrative even begins, and that's gold for a writer because it means that your character already has depth before events begin to unfold.

During my second year at Edinburgh [1826-27] I attended Jameson's lectures on Geology and Zoology, but they were incredible dull. The sole effect they produced on me was the determination never as long as I lived to read a book on Geology.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us - never cease to instruct - never cloy.

He that studies books alone, will know how things ought to be; and he that studies men, will know how things are.

great books are the ones we need

I read my books at night, like that, under the quilt with the overheated reading lamp. Reading all those good lines while suffocating. It was magic.

I've often wished when I started a book I knew what was going to happen. I talked to writers who write 80-page outlines, and I'm just in awe of that.