Book Quotes - Page 181

I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one stitched into his own private coat, together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.

Reading texts is no substitute for meditation and practicing Zen. If you read a book about a place, and you want to go there, you don't keep reading the book. You have to travel. That's what practice is about. Traveling. Walking the path.

Television isn't inherently good or bad. You go to a bookstore, there are how many thousands of books, but how many of those do you want? Five? Television's the same way. If you're going to show people stuff, television is the way to go. Words and pictures show things.

I feel sometimes that in children's books there are more and more grim problems, but I don't know that I want to burden third- and fourth-graders with them.

In seventh grade...I found a place on the [library]shelf where my book would be if I ever wrote a book, which I doubted.

Elton John's home is laden with trinkets and books relating to Satanism and witchcraft.

Death is the gate of life. Ingratitude is the soul's enemy... Ingratitude is a burning wind that dries up the source of love, the dew of mercy, the streams of grace. You will find something far greater in the woods than you will find in books. Stones and trees will teach you that which you will never learn from masters.

And yes, there's a simplicity to writing books because you're not a member of a team, so you make all the decisions yourself instead of deferring to a committee.

Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they'll only see their narrow range reflected in it.

Immorality, perversion, infidelity, cannibalism, etc., are unassailable by church and civic league if you dress them up in the togas and talliths of the Good Book.

For most people, what is so painful about reading is that you read something and you don't have anybody to share it with. In part what the book club opens up is that people can read a book and then have someone else to talk about it with. Then they see that a book can lead to the pleasure of conversation, that the solitary act of reading can actually be a part of the path to communion and community.

Books are the carriers of civilization... Books are humanity in print.

These are the things before me. And as I stand here at the door of glory, I look behind me for the last time. I look upon the history of men, which I have learned from the books, and I wonder. It was a long story, and the spirit which moved it was the spirit of man’s freedom. But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. This and nothing else.

There are so many ways in which we learn about life and the self. Each day opens paths to this exploration. For many of us, books play a major role in that adventure

More books have resulted from somebody's need to write than from anybody's need to read.

Don Quixote's 'Delusions' is an excellent read - far better than my own forthcoming travel book, 'Walking Backwards Across Tuscany.'

Michael Jackson is an extremely productive ethnographer, a serious reader of phenomenological and existential philosophy, and a remarkable writer at a level that one rarely sees in anthropology. Lifeworlds, unsurprisingly, is no exception. The several essays included here fit into an impressive whole that set out a compelling case for a type of ethnography of which Jackson is one of the masters. The writing is strong and the critical reflections impressive. This book defines an approach to anthropology that is resonant enough to challenge the leading models of our time.

In accordance with the terms of the Clarke-Asimov treaty, the second-best science writer dedicates this book to the second-best science-fiction writer. [dedication to Isaac Asimov from Arthur C. Clarke in his book Report on Planet Three]

he technology that threatens to kill off books as we know them - the "physical book," a new phrase in our language - is also making the physical book capable of being more beautiful than books have been since the middle ages.

What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.

Every time I get mad, I grab my hammer and make a bookshelf or something.

I usually get up not before 9. I have a huge library - I'm a big fan of Scandinavian crime fiction - so I'll usually take a book and go off to one of my favorite bistros for a cappuccino or espresso or maybe I'll have some lovely smoked salmon for breakfast.

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.

Story of O is a fairy tale for another world, a world where some part of me lived for a long time, a world that no longer exists except between the covers of a book.