Book Quotes - Page 89

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.

Spare a thought for the poor introverts among us. In a world of party animals and glad-handers, they're the ones who stand by the punch bowl. In a world of mixers and pub crawls, they prefer to stay home with a book. Everywhere around them, cell phones ring and e-mails chime and they just want a little quiet.

While there may not be a book in every one of us, there is so often a damned good short story.

I have left my book, I have left my room, For I heard you singing Through the gloom.

I do believe that books can change lives and give people this kind of language they wouldn't have had otherwise.

We want to raise a generation of kids who have a mouse in one hand and a book in the other.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book.

Reading was like an addiction; I read while I ate, on the train, in bed until late at night, in school, where I'd keep the book hidden so I could read during class. Before long I bought a small stereo and spent all my time in my room, listening to jazz records. But I had almost no desire to talk to anyone about the experience I gained through books and music. I felt happy just being me and no one else. In that sense I could be called a stack-up loner.

But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.

Part of growing up is learning your strengths and weaknesses. What better way to figure out that hand-eye coordination ain't your thing than by getting drilled in the mouth by a red, rubber ball? You only gotta get beaned in the face so many times before you figure out, 'I better hit the books because this is not working out.

Hoping to see karate included in the universal physical education taught in our public schools, I set about revising the kata so as to make them as simple as possible. Times change, the world changes, and obviously the martial arts must change too. The karate that high school students practice today is not the same karate that was practiced even as recently as ten years ago [this book was written in 1956], and it is a long way indeed from the karate I learned when I was a child in Okinawa.

Books make me feel safe. Books make me feel normal.

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

Someday it will dawn on man that woman does not read the wonderful books with which he has filled his libraries, and though she may well admire his marvelous works of art in museums she herself will rarely create, only copy.

Just as the office worker dreams of murdering his hated boss and so is saved from really murdering him, so it is with the author; with his great dreams he helps his readers to survive, to avoid their worst intentions. And society, without realizing it respects and even exalts him, albeit with a kind of jealousy, fear and even repulsion, since few people want to discover the horrors that lurk in the depths of their souls. This is the highest mission of great literature, and there is no other.

Don't just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents." Translation by Sharon Lebell

The helpful thought for which you look Is written somewhere in a book.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

I believe that the Bible is to be understood and received in the plain and obvious meaning of its passages; for I cannot persuade myself that a book intended for the instruction and conversion of the whole world should cover its true meaning in any such mystery and doubt that none but critics and philosophers can discover it.

I am a struggling writer. A middle-aged man with two little kids and I'm just trying to earn a living. So buy this book - or my kids will have to go to foster care.

Right now, we're living in an ugly chapter of our lives, but books always get better!

Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music.

I often carry things to read so that I will not have to look at the people.

I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.

You can't get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.