Book Quotes - Page 327

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them....I know they are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon's teeth and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.

Knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defiled.

The rosary was said every evening. I always liked that sentence about the medieval Churches, that they were the Bibles of the poor. The Church was my first book and I would think it is still my most important book.

There's something deeply satisfying when it succeeds, but I'm not going to do another book just to put my name on something and make some money if it's not something I deeply care about.

The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should. I've got Greenspan's book.

[T]he theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of production and distribution of a given output produced under the conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire.

They read all the books, but they can't find the answers.

Each one could be a Jesus mild, Each one has been a little child, A little child with laughing look, A lovely white unwritten book; A book that God will take, my friend, As each goes out at journey's end.

Every book is three books, after all; the one the writer intended, the one the reader expected, and the one that casts its shadow when the first two meet by moonlight.

I fell in love with the book [ Brief Interviews with Hideous Men] and always wanted to do something with and fought to get the rights, which was pretty fun and an incredible experience in itself.

I'm a huge classics fan. I love Ernest Hemingway and J.D. Salinger. I'm that guy who rereads a book before I read newer stuff, which is probably not all that progressive, and it's not really going to make me a better reader. I'm like, 'Oh, my God, you should read To Kill a Mockingbird.

From time to time I have wished to do more work in philosophy of religion, but the demands and challenges have been such that it needed more work than I had time for. I sneaked a chapter into my book on loyalty that touched on some issues in the area. Maybe in the future I will try responding to Philip Kitcher's excellent critique: Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism - it gets closer to me than much of what is produced in the field.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

I've been a faithful reader of the great classical documents of economics, or tried to be. The first book in the field that I ever read was Principles of Economics by Alfred Marshall. I suppose subsequently I would have to pick out Keynes, Adam Smith, Marx.

When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, Before high-piled books, in charactery, Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain; When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

You can read ten books and finally come across one detail, and it's like, "now everything else makes sense. Now I know where I am."

I did get tired of hearing that criticism years ago. That is not a compliment. Being labeled a "beach read" is a put-down. So, I did deliberately set out to write a book, Camino Island, that would be very entertaining and compulsively readable and we published it on June 6 in time for summer vacation, hoping that people would buy it and take it to the beach.

I always do book signings with the same blue pen. That way, if I add a personalised message to a book I've already signed, it'll be in the same colour as my signature.

Ten years from now I plan to be sitting here, looking out over my land. I hope I'll be writing books, but if not, I'll be on my pond fishing with my kids. I feel like the luckiest guy I know.

In my case, once you sell a lot of books and you are labeled a bestselling author, the serious critics are never gonna say anything nice about you.

The professional guts a book through - in full knowledge that what he is doing is not very good. Not to work is to exhibit a failure of nerve.

As I recall, you promised to CALL when you finished the book, not text.

This is unbearable ... God. These books she'll never read. Her Life's Library.

You cannot invent an algorithm that is as good at recommending books as a good bookseller.

We must strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul labouring in isolation. We must strike it down because it threatens the overall quality and breadth of American literature.