Book Quotes - Page 442

Symbols and emblems were everywhere. Buildings and pictures were designed to be read like books. Everything stood for something else; if you had the right dictionary, you could read Nature itself. It was hardly surprising to find philosophers using the symbolism of their time to interpret knowledge that came from a mysterious source.

You mean old books?" "Stories written before space travel but about space travel." "How could there have been stories about space travel before --" "The writers," Pris said, "made it up.

I have friends whose society is delightful to me; they are persons of all countries and of all ages; distinguished in war, in council, and in letters; easy to live with, always at my command.

Choose a book, ... Any book. Bring it here, and I'll show you what else the world can offer.

[Examiners] spend their lives in discovering which pages of a text-book a man ought to read and which will not be likely to 'pay'.

As for you and your heart and the things you said and didn't say, she will remember them all when men are fairy tales in books written by rabbits.

I can't tell you about acting. You can develop all the skills, voice, gesture, movement, you can develop by exercise and practice but finally fundamentally it's mining from yourself, from your own personality, from what you know. If you can't know it you can have a good guess by people you know or books you've read.

One of my heroes, almost necessarily from what I'm saying, of course, is Borges, who is a supreme master of doing thing -- being a data bank -- and the beauty of this economy is that he could have written War and Peace in three or four pages; who knows, it might have been a better book.

The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.

I read the books the day before I had met with the director Catherine Hardwicke. The first I heard of it was my agent called and said, 'Do you want to be in a vampire movie?' and I said 'No.' I thought it was like a zombie, blood-and-guts, vampire movie.

What I like about the third movie is you get to see a side of Carlisle you haven't seen before. You actually get to see what his vampire capabilities are because there's some great battle sequences. It's my favorite book. Carlisle is holding on to that humanity. He doesn't want to be a vampire.

I would like to write my next book about what happened to critical intelligence in America and how it's been undermined by these really shallow ideas about human life and nature.

It was Rachel Carson's famous book 'Silent Spring' that got me involved with the environment. I read it in The New Yorker, in installments. Up to then, I'd thought the main job to do is help the meek inherit the Earth. And I still, that's a job that's got to be done. But I realized if we didn't do something soon, what the meek would inherit would be a pretty poisonous place to live.

In fiction there can be no appeal to any authority outside the book itself. . . . the thing has to look true, and that is all. It is not made to look true by simple statement.

I'll tell you what is insidious about the Disney Princess, besides the fact that if you look into their merchandise, the 26,000 items, you're always finding books that are about "my perfect wedding." It's what it puts girls on the path for. And that it poses as something that protects girls, or staves off premature sexualization, when I think it primes them for it. I don't know where to put that on the continuum exactly. I guess eight?

There are two kinds of people in this world: the ones who don't cook out of and have NEVER cooked out of THE I HATE TO COOK BOOK, and the other kind...The I HATE TO COOK people consist mainly of those who find other things more interesting and less fattening, and so they do it as seldom as possible. Today there is an Annual Culinary Olympics, with hundreds of cooks from many countries ardently competing. But we who hate to cook have had our own Olympics for years, seeing who can get out of the kitchen the fastest and stay out the longest.

There are already current laws on the books and there are - and jurisdictions. The IRS can come in and do any kind of investigation of a person.

This is the best message that I have been responsibly for it. This will help you, A, find your identity. Because you can never overcome life issues. You'll never overcome your condition without knowing your position. So identity. Significance comes out of identity, meaning life's purpose, your why in life. But the great thing is this book ['You are all that'] is so practical.

There are two kinds of books in this world. One improves the mind, the other the bank balance. Sometimes they're the same -- but not often. Most publishers find combining the two is the only way to stay afloat.

Travel is about failure or overcoming obstacles, overcoming failures. When a traveler is having lots of good luck, that is not a happy book. That's a book you say, well, I don't need that. I want a life lesson. I want to find out - I want a journey that reflects my life.

Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial - but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something.

Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.

One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.

... Oceanic malaise. I never saw anyone reading anything more demanding than a comic book. I never heard any youth express an interest in science or art. No one even talked politics. It was all idleness, and whenever I asked someone a question, no matter how simple, no matter how well the person spoke English, there was always a long pause before I got a reply, and I found these Pacific pauses maddening. And there was giggling but no humor - no wit. It was just foolery.