Book Quotes - Page 144

We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.

I usually write about ordinary people and ordinary things, but Paul Farmer is the least ordinary person I've ever met... He's the leader of a small group of people who hope to cure a sick world, and I hope my book can help in some small way.

A book is always a dialogue with other readers and other books.

I do try not to spend much time reading in the suspense genre.

A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book.

Wherever they went the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries and tied to their waists as signs of triumph, just as Irish heroes had once tied to their waists their enemies' heads. Where they went they brought their love of learning and their skills in bookmaking. In the bays and valleys of their exile, they reestablished literacy and breathed new life into the exhausted literary culture of Europe. And that is how the Irish saved civilization.

Beware of the person of one book.

I've been reading a book lately. That book is Thom Yorke, and the conclusion is that he's brilliant.

The Library didn't only contain magical books, the ones which are chained to their shelves and are very dangerous. It also contained perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren't also dangerous, just because reading them didn't make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangeous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader's brain.

The literature of disease is more interesting to me than all the healthy books.

Every rule in the book can be broken, except one - be who you are, and become all you were meant to be.

Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this divinity by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this either by work, or worship, or psychic control, or philosophy - by one, or more, or all of these - and be free. This is the whole of religion. Doctrines, or dogmas, or rituals, or books, or temples, or forms, are but secondary details.

True religion comes not front the teaching of men or the reading of books; it is the awakening of the spirit within us, consequent upon pure and heroic action.

Books are good but they are only maps. Reading a book by direction of a man I read that so many inches of rain fell during the year. Then he told me to take the book and squeeze it between my hands. I did so and not a drop of water came from it. It was the idea only that the book conveyed. So we can get good from books, from the temple, from the church, from anything, so long as it leads us onward and upward.

Entrails. No hissing. This is the closest we will ever come to love.

Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted. A photograph changes according to the context in which it is seen: thus Smith's Minamata photographs will seem different on a contact sheet, in a gallery, in a political demonstration, in a police file, in a photographic magazine, in a book, on a living-room wall. Each o these situations suggest a different use for the photographs but none can secure their meaning.

Having read the source material, I had to have drawn from that. As a fan, I wanted to remain true to that character, but it was really cool because, as we were figuring these characters out, I realized that there was a lot more backstory, rather than what I had gotten just from reading the book. Glenn doesn't really get much of a backstory there. He's just seen as this kid who is put in this situation, not knowing where his mind-set is, but then you slowly see him start to develop.

A lot of my books deal with very controversial issues that most people often don't want to talk about, issues that, in my country, are more likely to get put under the carpet than get discussed. And when you talk about moral conundrums, about shades of gray, what you're doing is asking the people who want the world to be black and white to realize instead that maybe it's all right if it isn't. I know you'll learn something picking up my books, but my goal as a writer is not to teach you but to make you ask more questions.

If I were founding a university I would begin with a smoking room; next a dormitory; and then a decent reading room and a library. After that, if I still had more money that I couldn't use, I would hire a professor and get some text books.

I like vocabulary and I actually read a book called 'Word Freak,' which is about a guy who basically went into competitive Scrabble for a year. But having a big vocabulary and being good at Scrabble are not the same thing.

Comic books sort of follow with the move - if people see the movie and if they're interested in the character and want to see more of the character, they start buying the comic books. So a good movie helps the sale of the comic books and the comic books help the movie and one hand washes the other. So, I don't think there's any reason to think that comics will die out.

I read books because I love them, not because I think I should read them.

I'm reading Our Ecstatic Days, by Steve Erickson. It's an extraordinary journey and the most exciting thing I've found since The Master and Margarita, which I've read about 20 times. I like being taken away somewhere by a book.

Humor is the oxygen of children's literature. There's a lot of competition for children's time, but even kids who hate to read want to read a funny book.

Who were my mentors in poetry and literature? This is a matter of opinion. Some see in my books the influences of authors whose names, in my ignorance, I have not even heard, while others see the influences of poets whose names I have heard but whose writings I have not read. And what is my opinion? From whom did I receive nurture? Not every man remembers the name of the cow which supplied him with each drop of milk he has drunk.