Book Quotes - Page 480

The book of your revolution sits in the pit of your belly, young Indian. Crap it out, and read. Instead of which, they're all sitting in front of color TVs and watching cricket and shampoo advertisements.

I believe passionately in preemptive pessimism, especially before a book comes out. I expect the worst both from reviewers and sales, and then, with any luck, I may be proved wrong.

O my darling books! A day will come when you will be laid out on the salesroom table, and others will buy and possess you-persons, perhaps, less worthy of you than your old master. Yet how dear to me are they all! Have I not chosen them one by one, gathered them all in with the sweat of my brow? I do love you all!

…my life has been a remarkable one. Maybe one day someone will write a book about me . . .” "I’ve never much cared for horror stories.

I was a serious comic collector and fanboy as a kid. I wanted very badly to draw comic books for a lot of my childhood and early adolescence. So when you have an unfulfilled dream like that, when years later you find yourself in a position to make a graphic novel - hell yeah, I'm going to do that.

There's something not normal about you if you're writing a book about yourself, or about anything. And if you're the kind of person who can deal with being recognized by strangers and if that's tolerable or pleasing to you, and not immediately terrifying, that's not normal either.

You know how I love talking about books, and you know how I adore receiving compliments.

For my generation - the "Children of Nixon," as I call us in the book - the Lebanese civil war was an iconic event. Downtown Beirut became a metaphor for so many things: man's inhumanity to man, what Charles Bukowski called "the impossibility of being human." It shaped our perceptions of war and human nature, just as Vietnam did for our parents. We used it to understand how the world works.

Hazel had read enough books to know that a line like this one is the line down which your life breaks in two. And you have to think very carefully about whether you want to cross it, because once you do it’s very hard to get back to the world you left behind. And sometimes you break a barrier that no one knew existed, and then everything you knew before crossing the line is gone. But sometimes you have a friend to rescue. And so you take a deep breath and then step over the line and into the darkness ahead.

You have to be a lover of books without expecting more of them than they give - a little pleasure, a little insight, a moment of escape, a deepening of your own humanity. Not much else.

What is written beneath this heavy handsome book cover will count, so sayeth this cover.

Evangelical Christians and I can sit down and talk one on one about how much we love Jesus, and yet I'm not carried in Christian bookstores.

Ordinary people don't know how much books can mean to someone who's cooped up.

Some day, as soon as a book is printed it will be simultaneously put into digital form. That will be a wonderful research tool, but it will never substitute for holding the book. I feel certain that at least within my lifetime, everyone will still be going to the bookstore and buying printed books. Thank God I'll die before I have to worry about whether the printed book itself will disappear. That's something I don't want to live to see.

...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.

I'd rather have a book, but in a pinch I'll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions.

I think the gift of my mother's death, if anything so terrible can be said to have an upside to it, is that I was always keenly aware that life was fleeting, and that you'd better live while you have the chance. As I say in the book, since I was 19 years old I felt like I was living for two, and when I out-lived my mother, when I got into my forties, it felt like a miracle to me.

London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.

All of my books now come from readers' ideas.

Every time I finish a book, it's my favorite. I have a lot of favorites. I did just finish Jane Eyre and it was fabulous. I didn't want it to end.

Reading centers on finding yourself in a book.

The Coen brothers said something that helped me, "When you put the book down, you have a certain feeling, a certain understanding. That's what they need to feel when they walk out of the theater. That's your job, to literally put this book on film, you won't make a good movie, you'll do no service to anyone.

We're taking requests from customers who are looking for certain used copies. We already found 18 to 20 Louis L'Amour books that were on a customer's request list.

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, mouldering books.

Edward Conard’s book represents the most cogent and persuasive analysis of the Financial Crisis to date. It is deeper and likely more accurate than what we have seen so far from journalists, academ- ics, and particularly former government officials.