Book Quotes - Page 24

As a writer, it's disheartening to write books that you pour your soul into and not have them distributed widely enough to find their audience.

My grandmother was a kind of Scarsdale, New York, society woman, best known in her day as the author of the 1959 book 'Growing Your Own Way: An Informal Guide for Teen-Agers' - this despite being a person whose parenting style made Joan Crawford's wire hangers look like pool noodles.

Materializations are often best produced in rooms where there are books. I cannot think of any time when materialization was in any way hampered by the presence of books.

I spend my nights just sitting and reading a book and drinking my tea and walking my dog. That's about as exciting as my life gets.

The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.

It's the possibility that keeps me going, not the guarantee.

Libraries are our friends.

Anyone who was once a child should have at least one children's book in them.

The book trade invented literary prizes to stimulate sales, not to reward merit.

If you read a lot of books you are considered well read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well viewed.

Rest, nature, books, music...such is my idea of happiness.

If I could go back in time and tell my younger self that eventually that I'd become very successful writing Dune books after Frank Herbert's death, I would have laughed myself silly, I think, at how strange that prospect would be.

Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.

And when the book of Daniel was showed to him (Alexander the Great) wherein Daniel declared that one of the Greeks should destroy the empire of the Persians, he supposed that himself was the person intended.

Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.

It is better to be respected than it is to be popular. Popularity ends on yearbook day, but respect lasts forever.

If a given scientist had not made a given discovery, someone else would have done so a little later. Johann Mendel dies unknown after having discovered the laws of heredity: thirty-five years later, three men rediscover them. But the book that is not written will never be written. The premature death of a great scientist delays humanity; that of a great writer deprives it.

The main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio, TV, magazines, and books, so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us, like Somalia. We turn on the TV and see what blew up in Iraq or we see conditions in Afghanistan.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think.

I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.

The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.

Question four: What book would you give to every child? Answer: I wouldn't give them a book. Books are part of the problem: this strange belief that a tree has nothing to say until it is murdered, its flesh pulped, and then (human) people stain this flesh with words. I would take children outside and put them face to face with chipmunks, dragonflies, tadpoles, hummingbirds, stones, rivers, trees, crawdads. That said, if you're going to force me to give them a book, it would be The Wind In The Willows, which I hope would remind them to go outside.

It is better to read a little and ponder a lot than to read a lot and ponder a little.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

Don't settle. Don't finish crappy books. If you don't like the menu, leave the restaurant. If you're not on the right path, get off it.