Book Quotes - Page 171

Teachers and librarians can be the most effective advocates for diversifying children's and young adult books. When I speak to publishers, they're going to expect me to say that I would love to see more books by Native American authors and African-American authors and Arab-American authors. But when a teacher or librarian says this to publishers, it can have a profound effect.

Red Hook Road made me happy, and happy to be alive. It took me out of my home on the coast of South Carolina, placed me in the town along Red hook Road, and changed me the way good books always do.

I don't think that children, if left to themselves, feel that there is an author behind a book, a somebody who wrote it. Grown-ups have fostered this quotient of identity, particularly teachers. Write a letter to your favorite author and so forth. When I was a child I never realized that there were authors behind books. Books were there as living things, with identities of their own.

At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.

It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.

I interviewed - no - had lunch with Harper Lee several years ago, trying to convince Harper Lee to do "To Kill a Mockingbird" for the book club. She wouldn't do it. She said, "Honey, I said everything I wanted to say."

The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's one devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.

I never remain passive in the process of reading: while I read I am engaged in a constant creative activity, which leads me to remember not so much the actual matter of the book as the thoughts evoked in my mind by it, directly or indirectly.

I am driven by love and I have been in love with a handful of different people, men and women. It's like, if you go to a bookstore and you know exactly what kind of book you want, you have to look it up in the system because it's in a specific section of the bookstore. I fit into a handful of sections in the bookstore.

Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisers.

I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful.

The rain is playing its soft pleasant tune fitfully on the skylight, and the shade of the fast-flying clouds across my book passed with delicate change.

I'm the biggest geek of all. Adventure, fantasy, comic books - I can't get enough.

We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race - we are a very unfair one.

I sip the Dom P watching Gandhi til I'm charged - writing in my book of rhymes, all the words past the margin

I'm a reader, so when I go to bookstores I need (stuff) that's going to help me. There a big emptiness there and I want to help fill that through song.

Government has only one religion - India first! Government has one holy book - the Constitution. The Government must be immersed in only one Bhakti- Bharat Bhakti! The Government's only strength is Jan Shakti! Government's only ritual is the well being of the 125 crore Indians! The only code of conduct of the Government should be 'Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas!

Most of you didn't think that helping people share books would be a subversive act...Yet the fact is that you have chosen a profession that has become radical.

I scribbled four words down in my notebook: 'The world is flat.

If you have time to chatter, Read books. If you have time to read, Walk into mountain, desert and ocean. If you have time to walk, Sing songs and dance. If you have time to dance, Sit quietly, you Happy Lucky Idiot.

Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.

In the early '90s, when I really started to find my voice, I was reading a lot of books, and I was moved by the writers, like Chinua Achebe, and I wanted to be able to write rhymes that were as potent as what I was reading.

Beware that the one who reads is the same as the book, the same as what is read, the same as the speaker and the same as what is spoken without being the word.

Memorization of variations could be even worse than playing in a tournament without looking in the books at all.