Book Quotes - Page 50

Do nothing that you would not like God to see. Say nothing you would not like God to hear. Write nothing you would not like God to read. Go no place where you would not like God to find you. Read no book of which you would not like God to say, "Show it to Me." Never spend your time in such a way that you would not like to have God say, "What are you doing?

Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.

I just want to stay in my hotel room, read my book. I enjoy that private time.

I could dance with you until the cows come home. On second thought I'd rather dance with the cows until you come home.

He is no true reader who has not experienced the reproachful fascination of the great shelves of unread books, of the libraries at night of which Borges is the fabulist. He is no reader who has not heard, in his inward ear, the call of the hundreds of thousands, of the millions of volumes which stand in the stacks of the British Library asking to be read. For there is in each book a gamble against oblivion, a wager against silence, which can be won only when the book is opened again (but in contrast to man, the book can wait centuries for the hazard of resurrection.)

What you are lies with you. If you are lazy, and accept your lot, you may live in it. If you are willing to work, you can write your name anywhere you choose, among the only ones who live beyond the grave in this world, the people who write books that help, make exquisite music, carve statues, paint pictures, and work for others. Never mind the calico dress, and the coarse shoes. Work at you books, and before long you will hear yesterday's tormentors boasting that they were once classmates of yours.

In Western Civilization, our elders are books.

One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.

I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

Rule books are paper - they will not cushion a sudden meeting of stone and metal.

Ever heard of anyone executed for distributing copies of Grimm's fairy tales? Imagine people trying to smuggle copies of Hans Christian Andersen's works into China? The Bible, which has been called a mere collection of myths has suffered all of these fates: even today, copies of the Bible are banned and burned. There's something about this ancient book that threatens and frightens those in power.

The parties happen when we book the studio. That's a safe place. Get alcohol, food, girls, homies, and have these small listening parties while I'm recording. And that energy always gets into the music.

Anyway, these books I love, they’re all books by men—every last one of them. Because if it’s unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it’s totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry. I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.

Bonfire of the Vanities: The lesson of that book is, never start believing your own press.

People who know and love the same books as you, have the road map to your soul.

Write the book you want to read, the one you cannot find.

The writer has the advantage of a medium that can be contemplated many times over on the pages of a book or a magazine. The words lie on the page and the writer has an extended opportunity to imprint on his reader every meaning and nuance distilled from experience.

Quite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood.

We didn’t have Facebook in my day, we had a phone book but you wouldn’t waste an afternoon on it

The world was hers for the reading.

You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents - each man to see what the other looked like.

Wait, Wikipedia isn't working? Why hasn't someone invented a paper version of it? A set of books organized alphabetically by topic?

What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?...Was ever anything so civil?

For the writer, there is nothing quite like having someone say that he or she understands, that you have reached them and affected them with what you have written.

My fellow believers, it is time to return to the Book. It is time to look to the one source that holds the answers for how our country should operate, the Bible.