Book Quotes - Page 413

When I got to the library I came to a standstill, - ah, the dear room, what happy times I have spent in it rummaging amongst the books, making plans for my garden, building castles in the air, writing, dreaming, doing nothing.

But it is impossible, I find, to tidy books without ending by sitting on the floor in the middle of a great untidiness and reading.

This is a book that respects kids and their ideas. And in that regard, it places Chasing Vermeer in the tradition of classic favorites fondly recalled from our own childhoods.

Write, if you must; not otherwise. Do not write, if you can earn a fair living at teaching or dressmaking, at electricity or hod-carrying. Make shoes, weed cabbages, survey land, keep house, make ice-cream, sell cake, climb a telephone pole. Nay, be a lightning-rod peddler or a book agent, before you set your heart upon it that you shall write for a living.... Living? It is more likely to be dying by your pen; despairing by your pen; burying hope and heart and youth and courage in your ink-stand.

I know of no other book that so fully teaches the subjection and degradation of women.

The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.

BLINDSIGHT is fearless: a magnificent, darkly gleaming jewel of a book that hurdles the contradictions inherent in biochemistry, consciousness, and human hearts without breaking stride.

I love a garden and a book.

When you're reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners?

There's a popular concept of 'intelligence' as book smarts, like calculus or chess, as opposed to, say, social skills. So people say that 'it takes more than intelligence to succeed in human society.' But social skills reside in the brain, not the kidneys.

[The Book of the Law]was lost for so many years. And then Josiah decided to celebrate Passover. The text says that "The Passover sacrifice had not been offered in that way ... during the days of the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah" [2 Kings 23:22]. What do you mean? Not in the days of David and Solomon? Never before? And what of the days of the prophets? What happened? That's what I'm anguishing over. If the Book of the Law could be forgotten for so many years, who knows what was done to it during those years? Maybe it was lost later, too.

For the purpose of my life, I don't ask the question. First of all, I believe. I think the Five Books of Moses are inspired. Call it divine. I don't know. But I would certainly call it inspired.

A day out-of-doors, someone I loved to talk with, a good book and some simple food and music - that would be rest.

A book on cheap paper does not convince. It is not prized, it is like a wheezy doctor with pigtail tobacco breath, who needs a manicure.

The young people have read my book. Now I have no chance.

Absolutely delightful, at first for its unspoiled picture of late-nineteenth-century Japan as seen through the eyes of three remarkable but very different Americans, [the missionary William Elliot Griffis [1843-1928], the scientist Edward Sylvester Morse [1838-1925], and the writer Lafcadio Hearn], and then for the marvelous reconstruction of how Japan worked on their minds, radically changing their perceptions of the country and the whole relationship between East and West--between the barbarian and the civilized. The book is a tour de force.

At first I read mostly books by Southern authors - black and white - because almost all the people I knew were born and raised in the South, starting with my mother. I remember I got a lot of Erskine Caldwell.

To me, Fight Club was a comedy. When [David] Fincher sent me the book and I read it, the first thing I asked him was, "This is a comedy, right?" he said, "Yeah, that's the whole point," and I said, "Okay, I'm in." I certainly wasn't imagining myself as a dramatic actor when I was running around in my underwear in that film.

With Barack Obama, we will turn the page on the old politics of misrepresentation and distortion. With Barack Obama we will close the book on the old politics of race against race.

I was surprised recently to find a book called "Poetry in Persons" that's coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.

What we need now are heroes and heroines, about a million of them, one brave deed is worth a thousand books. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.

How long does it take to write a good book? All of the years that you've lived.

Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate.

If children haven't been read to, they don't love books. They need to love books, for books are the basis of literature, composition, history, world events, vocabulary, and everything else.

though the outside of human life changes much, the inside changes little, and the lesson-book we cannot graduate from is human experience.