Banned Book Quotes

Franz shook his head. When a society is rich, its people don't need to work with their hands;they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they've got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls' Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That's why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities. ~ Milan Kundera

The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book. ~ Walt Whitman

Grace is my favourite church word. A state of being. Something you can pray for. Something God can grant. Something you can obtain. Perfection is out of reach. But grace
grace you can reach for. ~ Elizabeth Scott

Isn't he beautiful? Hadley says longingly.
Yes, I think, but not in the way she obviously sees him. He's beautiful in the way the apple in the banned book my father read to me ages ago was beautiful to the princess.
Tempting but deadly. ~ Trisha Wolfe

Yeah,there was a whole chapter on you in my eight grade History of Angels textbook," Miles said. Arriane clapped. "And they told me that book was banned! ~ Lauren Kate

Few things in life seem more sexy than a banned book. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

The Koran is a fascist book which incites violence. That is why this book, just like [Adolf Hitler's] Mein Kampf, must be banned ~ Geert Wilders

The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading. It isn't achieved by the book alone, nor by the child alone, nor by the adult who's reading aloud - it's the relationship winding between all three, bringing them together in easy harmony. ~ Mem Fox

Certain voices heard
are heard
not because
they
are phonetic...

But,
from one soul
they head,
to another,
in the form of magic.
(Poem: When, When a not, Book: Ginger and Honey) ~ Jasleen Kaur Gumber

The calm serenity of the breeze as it blows across the ocean releases the tangled web within my mind. ~ J. Kahele

You must begin writing your life book. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I don't know why the world has changed so much that writers are now expected to appear in public and talk about their work. It's something I find very difficult. And yet, one does have some sense of responsibility towards one's publishers, to the people trying to sell the book. ~ Jonathan Lethem

An invaluable little book ... What Makes a Terrorist uses standard tools of economics and statistical analysis to get at the truth about terrorism ... Krueger finds one familiar fact in all his numbers. Countries with fewer civil liberties tend to produce more terrorists. ~ Daniel Finkelstein

Peter Schweizer's book, Clinton Cash, is not discredited. It has been quoted on the front page of the New York Times and the Washington Post. ~ Rush Limbaugh

Some change their philosophy of life with every book they read: one book sells them on Freud, the next on Marx; materialists one year, idealists the next; cynics for another period, and Eberals for still another. They have their quivers full of arrows but no fixed target. As no game makes the hunter tired of the sport, so the want of destiny makes the mind bored with life. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

What's happiness for a reader? Be pleasantly surprised by a book from which he expected nothing. ~ Gabrielle Dubois

When I sit down I write very fast ... if I haven't finished a book in two or three months then I think it's not going well. ~ Michael Morpurgo

Sweet Sunday afternoons, beneath the chestnut-tree in our Combray garden, from which I was careful to eliminate every commonplace incident of my actual life, replacing them by a career of strange adventures and ambitions in a land watered by living streams, you still recall those adventures and ambitions to my mind when I think of you, and you embody and preserve them by virtue of having little by little drawn round and enclosed them (which I went on with my book and the heat of the day declined) in the gradual crystallization, slowly altering in form and dappled with a pattern of chestnut-leaves, of your silent, sonorous, fragrant, limpid hours. ~ Marcel Proust

Sometimes people read a book in order to not go on a trip. You read a book instead of going on the trip. And so the travel writer is doing the traveling for you. ~ Paul Theroux

That was par for the course but I also found that commissions were being canceled and in fact I considered this directly libelous - I write biographies for a living as well as being a journalist - for a non fiction book to be called fiction from beginning to end. ~ Anthony Holden

I want to force myself again and again to leave the warmth and security of static situations and move into the world of growth and suffering where the real books are people's minds and souls. ~ Sylvia Plath

True browsing means that we discover shelves and subjects that we could not have anticipated when we started. And the books we read introduce us to other books, as if we are at a magnificent party of the mind, being ever welcomed by new friends to join in the conversation. ~ Ramona Koval

Anytime you start doing a comic book with mythology attached, people are like, "Are you going to get it right? It's important to me." ~ Tom Cavanagh

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Is your book interesting? I had already formed the intention of asking her to lend it to me some day. ~ Charlotte Bronte

Since the purpose of reading, of education, is to become good, our most important task is to choose the right books. Our personal set of stories, our canon, shapes our lives. I believe it is a law of the universe that we will not rise above our canon. Our canon is part of us, deeply, subconsciously. And the characters and teachings in our canon shape our characters
good, evil, mediocre, or great. ~ Oliver DeMille

Yeah, I picked up a book and I read. You can get something out of a book, even a bad book ... but a cunt, it's just sheer loss of time ... ~ Henry Miller

The diet book is one of those fool-and-money separation devices that seems, like roulette or slot machines, never to lose its power. ~ Christopher Hitchens

On the day of the races at Krasnoe Selo, Vronsky had come earlier than usual to eat beefsteak in the common messroom of the regiment. He had no need to be strict with himself, as he had very quickly been brought down to the required light weight; but still he had to avoid gaining flesh, and so he eschewed farinaceous and sweet dishes. He sat with his coat unbuttoned over a white waistcoat, resting both elbows on the table, and while waiting for the steak he had ordered he looked at a French novel that lay open on his plate. He was only looking at the book to avoid conversation with the officers coming in and out; he was thinking. ~ Leo Tolstoy

The biblical story of Noah can be found in the book of Genesis. ~ Noah

Every man is a book in which God himself writes. ~ Victor Hugo

Very well, then: why are you attached to any one book, or to the words and ways of one saint when he himself tells you to let them go and walk in simplicity? To hang on to him as if to make a method of him is to contradict him and to go in the opposite direction to the one in which he would have you travel. ~ Thomas Merton

The wise man is but a clever infant, spelling letters from a hieroglyphical prophetic book, the lexicon of which lies in eternity. ~ Thomas Carlyle

The Soul of Money is an inspired and utterly fascinating book. It will change the way you think about money ... It is a book for everyone who would like to make the world a better place. ~ Jane Goodall

Some people have a knack, for example, of being able to tell when someone's lying to them. They may not know what the truth is, but they can tell when someone is trying to lead them astray or sell them something shady. I think he had that ability to an amazing degree. I also think he thought, without saying it explicitly, that you can convince a crowd of something that's not true more easily than you can one person at a time. ~ George Orwell

When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book. ~ David McCullough

If we ever fall in love, it will be out of our hearts' tricks. ~ Ophelia Callens

[pull-quote]I can understand your concern that works on sex crimes class next to works on gays, but this is an accident of classification, in which some topics must appear next to other topics although there may be no relation between them except that they are a subtopic of a larger subject. . . . To even begin to contemplate any intent other than to arrange works on distinct topics on the shelves boggles the mind.[end pull - quote]

The book before you provides an account of an attempt to perform this mind-boggling work. ~ Melissa Adler

I like to think of books as lovers; you have to introduce yourself slowly to them, read them one page at a time. Notice them, appreciate them. Respect what they're trying to tell you, let their words caress you, then sink into you, and finally, become a part of you. ~ Stacie Hammond

In the United States in 1907, a book entitled Three Acres and Liberty seized the imagination of the reading public. The author, Bolton Hall, began by taking for granted the awkwardness of having to work for someone else, and so advised his readers that they could win their freedom by leaving their offices and factories and buying three acres apiece of inexpensive farmland in middle America. This acreage would soon enable them to grow enough food for a family of four and to build a simple but comfortable home, and best of all, relieve them of any need ever again to flatter or negotiate with colleagues and superiors. ~ Alain De Botton

Somewhere in the cosmos, he said, along with all the planets inhabited by humanoids, reptiloids, fishoids, walking treeoids and superintelligent shades of the color blue, there was also a planet entirely given over to ballpoint life forms. And it was to this planet that unattended ballpoints would make their way, slipping away quietly through wormholes in space to a world where they knew they could enjoy a uniquely ballpointoid lifestyle, responding to highly ballpoint-oriented stimuli, and generally leading the ballpoint equivalent of the good life.
And as theories go this was all very fine and pleasant until Veet Voojagig suddenly claimed to have found this planet, and to have worked there for a while driving a limousine for a family of cheap green retractables, whereupon he was aken away, locked up, wrote a book and was finally sent into tax exile, which is the usual fate reserved for those who are determined to make fools of themselves in public. ~ Douglas Adams

Slowly the banners of the sunset city gave up their crimson and gold; slowly the conqueror's pageant faded out. Twilight crept over the valley and the little group grew silent. Walter had been reading again that day in his beloved book of myths and he remembered how he had once fancied the Pied Piper coming down the valley on an evening just like this. He ~ L.M. Montgomery

The book has to give the idea of another kind of newspaper, has to show how I labored away for a year to create a model of journalism independent of all pressure, implying that the venture failed because it was impossible to have a free voice ~ Umberto Eco

He has left nothing except for a note, which I find neatly folded under one of my sneakers.
The Story of Solomon is the only way I know how to explain.
And then, in smaller letters:
Forgive me. ~ Lauren Oliver

I plot as I go. Many novelists write an outline that has almost as many pages as their ultimate book. Others knock out a brief synopsis ... Do what is comfortable. If you have to plot out every move your characters make, so be it. Just make sure there is a plausible purpose behind their machinations. A good reader can smell a phony plot a block away. ~ Clive Cussler

You are sovereign over your life. No one else. If your heart's desires are not manifest, only you have the power to take action to change that. ~ Amy Leigh Mercree