Book Quotes - Page 445

I'm never ashamed to read a book twice or as many times as I want. We never expect to drink a glass of water just once in our lives. A book can be that essential, too.

The book is the only medium left that hasn't been corrupted by the profane.

What did a person need to survive? Food. Water. Shelter. Warmth in cold weather. And something else... books.

Once you have some sort of reputation in the outside world, they will try to woo you. They will say, "Won't you come and be on a talk program about books? That's not political." Then they can say to the outside world, "See how free it is, she appears on television. See how free it is." So I refused to have anything of mine read or dramatized on South African television.

The Bible is the book of my life. It's the book I live with, the book I live by, the book I want to die by.

This book fills a much-needed gap.

All books will become light in proportion as you find light in them.

The wonderful thing about books is you never run out of them, you can just keep going. So I'm always finding new writers, or old writers that I just happen not to have read.

It's never too late to begin a life or a book.

When I'm really plugged in I find it difficult to write. It's like digging a well. If you make a void, something moves in to fill it. Writing books is like that. It's mostly about freeing up time, doing nothing, and in that time some writing starts to happen. We need to figure out how to maintain those voids.

In a world of intrusive technology, we must engage in a kind of struggle if we wish to sustain moments of solitude. E-reading opens the door to distraction. It invites connectivity and clicking and purchasing. The closed network of a printed book, on the other hand, seems to offer greater serenity. It harks back to a pre-jacked-in age. Cloth, paper, ink: For these read helmet, cuirass, shield. They afford a degree of protection and make possible a less intermediated, less fractured experience. They guard our aloneness. That is why I love them, and why I read printed books still.

As a child I read all kinds of stuff, whether it was 'Asterix and Obelix' and 'Tin Tin' comic books, or 'Lord of the Rings,' or Frank Herbert's sci-fi. Or 'The Wind in the Willows.' Or 'Charlotte's Web.'

If your book is set in the plantation days of the slave-owning South and you write a little romance between two slave owners without acknowledging the system they live, that's a political gesture.

As the great philosopher George Santayana would have said, 'those who cannot remember the past . . . should simply read Jan Van Meter's Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.' Van Meter's greatest hits collection of slogans is the catchiest ever retelling of American history. It's like the greatest minds of Madison Avenue sat down to write a history book. They don't make sound bites like they used to!

I'm not a detective from Baker Street or an old lady who solves crimes while she's knitting in an easy chair. I'm just a book girl. So I can't make a deduction, only take a flight of fancy--er, forget I said that. I meant, I can only take a guess.

As far as movies, I love 'The Notebook.' I always say that I wish I could play Rachel McAdams' character. She's amazing. That's the movie every girl wants to be in.

When I was twenty-five, I went on exactly four dates with a much older guy whom I'll call Peter Parker. I'm calling him Peter Parker because the actual guy's name was also alliterative, and because, well, it's my book and I'll name a guy I dated after Spider-Man's alter ego if I want to.

My regular life today is reading books, making dolls houses, sewing dolls with my daughter and barbequing.

Gently stroke your books, dear stranger, and remember they are dust.

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.

I am grateful for the 30 years of my work and the way it has influenced humanity, especially all the books that became international bestsellers and were translated into 37 different languages, which means they have gone all around the world.

I read all the time... I read a lot of history books.

To me, the circle and the square where the sky and the earth, as symbolized by the ancient Oriental religions; they formed a kind of rudimentary alphabet by means of which everything could be expressed with the most limited means. They evoked prehistoric runes and the early I-Ching, or Book of Changes.

And if nobody reads me, shall I have wasted my time, when I have beguiled so many idle hours with such pleasant and profitable reflections?

I was brought up in a home where I saw my parents read and I was taken to bookshops and libraries, so I grew up feeling very comfortable around books. Also, Ireland is a country which has honoured its writers and poets, so when someone says they wanted to be a writer, its not mocked or looked down upon.