Book Quotes - Page 395

Books are the way the dead talk to the living.

One may as well be asleep as to read for anything but to improve his mind and morals, and regulate his conduct.

Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?

I feel like what's most important for painting - which has been hierarchically on the top for a really long time in terms of what is considered fine art, by comparison with something like a comic book or what's considered low art - is that painting should open up laterally to include other cultures and things that don't immediately resonate as a painting but are obviously of equal contribution to the genre.

Every day after lunch when I was writing my first book, I'd nibble a square of fine chocolate and meditate on all that had gone into its creation: the sun and rain that spilled on the cocoa plant, the soil that nourished it, the hands that picked the beans, and so on. My taste of chocolate became a lesson on the interconnectedness of things, and the infinite blessings for which I am grateful.

For the true bookworm it is sometimes hard to distinguish between what one has experienced and what one has read. We know that this is odd and even a little demented. But there it is. We are uneasy in a void with no book.

Give the child good books, then let it alone! Don't plough and harrow its brain, or stretch it on Procrustes-beds of standardization, simplification, and what not!

Reading will give you lasting pleasure.

When you read with your child, you show them that reading is important, but you also show them they're important - that they are so important to you that you will spend 20 minutes a day with your arm around them.

[Confiscating a book and punishing its author] is a sign that one does not have a good case, or at least doesn't trust it enough to defend it with reasons and refute the objections. Some people even go so far as to consider prohibited or confiscated books to be the best ones of all, for the prohibition indicates that their authors wrote what they really thought rather than what they were supposed to think . . .

I think it's easy to get a book in a bookstore. I think it's just damn near impossible to get a book out of a bookstore.

I've been very fortunate at having good titles but I just think in terms of titles. I'm doing a workshop now where people write books and they come and I name their books for them. I'm good with titles.

I call this book The Intent to Live because great actors don't seem to be acting, they seem to be actually living.

Brian Turner has given us not so much a memoir as a mediation, rendered with grace and wit and wisdom. If you want to know what modern soldiers see when they look at their world, read this book.

I [read] "The Book of Unknown Americans," which is by a friend of mine, Cristina Henriquez, and is about two Latino, immigrant families who live in Delaware. I'm interested in reading things from different perspectives.

Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles is a novel that I have read over and over and over again. Tess is a pure child who has an inner glow none of the others in the book possess. They reject her because she is different, and they try in every possible manner to destroy her, because they are jealous. It is an extraordinary love story.

There is no place like home.

When I was young I longed to write a great novel that should win me fame. Now that I am getting old my first book is written to amuse children.

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.

All my life, I never believed most things I read in history books and a lot of things I learned in school. But now I've found I don't have the right to make a judgment on someone based on something I've read. I don't have the right to judge anything. That's the lesson I've learned

Before the Olympics, there's always been a part of me that's wanted to write a book about Women's cycling because there isn't one out there and I think there's a lot to be said.

Every other day I read a book. It takes me two days to finish a book. I like reading because if I'm not doing anything, then I read. If my mom tells me to go take out the trash, I'll go take out the trash, and come back and start reading again.

All that you see was and is for your sake. The numerous books, uncanny markings, and beautiful thoughts are the ghosts of souls who preceded you.

[Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns] is not just unique to books, but films and music.

I always thought the women of my age group got short shrift because the women's liberation movement came slightly after. You look at the yearbooks and you see the future homemakers of America - hurray for that - but you also see them in the engineers club. You see minority kids as student body presidents at a time when everyone was supposed to be terminally racist. Yearbooks are genres; they're also folk art, folk documentation.