Book Objections Quotes

The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons, but children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed. ~ G.K. Chesterton

It's not wondering what I breathe in, but who, that threatens to choke me. ~ Suzanne Collins

Michel Houellebecq is the most interesting, provocative and important European novelist of my generation. Period. No one else comes close. He has written two or maybe three great books, and his latest, The Map and the Territory, is one of them. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

I Don't Waste My Time Doing Crosswords, As My Life Is The Only Puzzle I Care To Resolve! ~ Latif Mercado

Einstein and the Quantum is delightful to read, with numerous historical details that were new to me and cham1ing vignettes of Einstein and his colleagues. By avoiding mathematics, Stone makes his book accessible to general readers, but even physicists who are well versed in Einstein and his physics are likely to find new insights into the most remarkable mind of the modern era. ~ Daniel Kleppner

No one who writes a good book is really dead. ~ Walter Moers

Another danger is that - as is already happening to some extent - authors and editors run scared and go to absurd lengths to avoid giving offence. (An American editor rejected Polar, a picture book about a toy polar bear which is published in England by Andre Deutsch, on the ground that the text, written by Elaine Moss, states explicitly that the bear is white). A demand to avoid stereotypes can easily become in effect a demand for a different stereotype: for instance that girls should always be shown as strong, brave and resourceful, and that mothers should always have jobs and never, never wear an apron. And books written to an approved formula, or with deliberate didactic aim, do not often have the breath of life. Some members of women's groups in North America have published their own anti-sexist books, featuring such characters as fire-fighting girls or boys who learn to crochet. Good luck to them; but those I have seen are far below professional standard.

("Are Children's Books Racist and Sexist?" from Only Connect, 2nd ed., 1980) ~ John Rowe Townsend

Horses in the Book of Mormon would be another. You have relatively few mentions of horses, but there are some, and we don't know exactly how they were used; they don't seem to be all that common. Were they horses as we understood them, [or] does the term describe some other animal? Languages don't always and cultures don't always classify things the way we would expect. We have what we call common-sense ways of doing it. They're not common sense; they're just ours. But again, we don't have a strong case there. We're just problem solving there. ~ Daniel C. Peterson

We really learn only from those books that we cannot judge. The author of a book that we were able to judge would have to learn from us. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Who's Mrs. Gummidge?'
'If you're a good girl and get well soon I'll lend you the book.'
'Oh, somebody in a book! All you people like Nilla and the Cornishes and that man Darcourt seem to live out of books. As if everything was in books!'
'Well, Schnak, just about everything is in books. No, that's wrong. We recognize in books what we've met in life. But if you'd read a few books you wouldn't have to meet everything as if it had never happened before, and take every blow right on the chin. You'd see a few things coming ... ~ Robertson Davies

The candle-end was flickering out in the battered candlestick, dimly lighting up in the poverty stricken room the murderer and the harlot who had so strangely been reading together the eternal book. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

She would bring you some great book because she was a book matchmaker, because she loved books the way other girls loved clothes. ~ Deb Caletti

I would have never finished the book without Sam. I wanted to finish his story, to test him, to put him through tribulation and watch him become a man. No, not just a man, I wanted to watch him become a hero. He started his professional life only wanting to make money. I took him on a journey to wanting to make a difference. To be honest, I want men to read the book and decide its never too late to be somebody's hero. I want the man mired in sin to shed his shame and make a stand for righteousness. My Christ Jesus is ready to coach just such a man. ~ K.R. Dial

I think of my books as mainstream and that's were most people who read them look for them in book stores. ~ Jean M. Auel

I look upon every good man, as a good book, lent by its owner for another to read, and transcribe the excellent notions and golden passages that are in it for his own benefit, that they may return with him when the owner shall call for the book again: but in case this excellent book shall be thrown into a corner and no use made of it, it justly provokes the owner to take it away in displeasure.
Funeral of John Upton, Esq ~ John Flavel

I have to win this now, and for all time, or I'll fight it every day and it will get worse and worse. ~ Orson Scott Card

I have tons of fans in Canada. I've sold hundreds of thousands of books there. ~ Tucker Max

I loved the True Crime Story "Fighting the Devil" by Jeannie Walker. It is such an interesting book. ~ Jeannie Walker

Speed on my book! spread your white sails my little bark athwart the imperious waves, ~ Walt Whitman

A book or poem which has no pity in it had better not be written. ~ Oscar Wilde

That to me was one of the most exciting, and weird puzzles of this book: how are the most religious people and the least religious people of their time all drawn to very similar visions of utopia? ~ Christine Jennings

The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book
it makes a very poor doorstop. ~ Alfred Hitchcock

I thundered hot water into the big tub, setting up McGee's Handy Home Treatment for Melancholy. A deep hot bath, and a strong cold drink, and a book on the tub rack. Who needs the Megrims? Surely not McGee, not that big brown loose-jointed, wirehaired beach rambler, that lazy fishcatching, girlwatching, grey-eyed iconoclastic hustler. Stay happy, McGee, while you use up the stockpiled cash. Borrow a Junior from Meyer for the sake of coziness. Or get dressed and go over to the next doc, over to the big Wheeler where the Alabama Tiger maintains his permanent floating house party and join the festive pack. Do anything, but stop remembering the way Sam Taggart looks with all the wandering burned out of him. Stop remembering the sly shy way Nicki would walk toward you, across a room. Stop remembering the way Lois died. Get in there and have fun, fella. While there's fun to have. While there's some left. Before they deal you out. ~ John D. MacDonald

No matter what his rank or position may be, the lover of books is the richest and the happiest of the children of men. ~ John Alfred Langford

Man's objection to love is that it dies hard; woman's, that when it is dead, it stays dead. ~ H.L. Mencken

The last book I read was the book I've been rereading most of my life, The Fountainhead. ~ Vince Vaughn

The ultimate message of this book, though, is not that should strive for publication, but that you should become devoted to the craft of writing, for its own sake. Ask yourself what you would do if you knew you would never be published. Would you still write? If you are truly writing for the art of it, the answer will be yes. And then, every word is a victory. ~ Noah Lukeman

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. ~ Gichin Funakoshi

I felt like I haven't had the typical experience of a novelist whose book becomes a movie. ~ Kaui Hart Hemmings

I started to respond, but Bambi slithered up and placed its horse-sized head on my shoulder. Every muscle in my body locked up and I squeezed my eyes shut. There was a puff of air, stirring the hair along my temple. Bambi's forked tongue shot out, tickling the side of my neck.
"Hey, look, Bambi likes you."
I pried one eye open.
"And if she didn't?"
"Oh, you'd know, 'cause she would've eaten you by now."
Armentrout, Jennifer L. (2014-03-01). White Hot Kiss (The Dark Elements Book 1) (p. 255). Harlequin. Kindle Edition. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

For example, there was a book that started out with four pictures: first there was a wind-up toy; then there was an automobile; then there was a boy riding a bicycle; then there was something else. And underneath each picture, it said "What makes it go?"
I thought, I know what it is: They're going to talk about mechanics, how the springs work inside the toy; about chemistry, how the engine of an automobile works; and biology, about how the muscles work.

It was the kind of thing my father would have talked about: "What makes it go? Everything goes because the sun is shining." And then we would have fun discussing it:
"No, the toy goes becaues the spring is wound up, I would say.
"How did the spring get would up" he would ask.
"I wound it up"
"And how did you get moving?"
"From eating"
"And food grows only because the sun is shining. So it's because the sun is shining that all these things are moving" That would get the concept across that motion is simply the transformation of the sun's power.

I turned the page. The answer was, for the wind-up toy, "Energy makes it go." And for the boy on the bicycle, "Energy makes it go." For everything "Energy makes it go."

Now that doesn't mean anything. Suppose it's "Wakalixes." That's the general principle: "Wakalixes makes it go." There is no knowledge coming in. The child doesn't learn anything; it's just a word

What the should have done is to look at t ~ Richard P. Feynman

I once wrote a book on women in science. I realized when I was interviewing them that they were the equivalent of writers, or anyone else who tries to make art out of life. Through science they had reached the expressive. ~ Vivian Gornick

They'd seen her laugh before he did, had seen her live before he had. The thought of it provoked envy inside of Wharick, and that emotion at times, could be just as powerful as jealousy.
-Madison Thorne Grey, Sustenance ~ Madison Thorne Grey

Got to love men. Kissed the hell out of me yesterday, swim-stalked me on the beach this morning, and now couldn't even look up when I entered the room.

Eve, Jaymin (2014-01-15). First World (A Walker Saga Book 1) (p. 347). . Kindle Edition. ~ Jaymin Eve

Now, for my younger viewers out there, a book is something we used to have before the internet. It's sort of a blog for people with attention spans. ~ Stephen Colbert

Enthusiasm is big. When I write a book, it's a three-year commitment. Toward the end, I'm writing seven days a week, and it's exhausting but thrilling. The only hope is to have some real enthusiasm for the book ... Above all, you need some strong emotional or personal connection to your material. ~ Nathaniel Philbrick

Dear Mel:
I trust this finds you recovered. Why did you have to run off like that? But I figured you were safe arrived at home, and well, or Khesot would've sent to me here--since you wouldn't write.

And how was I to pay for sending a letter to Remalna-city? I thought indignantly, then sighed. Of course, I had managed to find enough coin to write to Ara's family, and to obtain through the father the name of a good bookseller. But the first was an obligation, I told myself. And as for the latter, it was merely the start of the education that Branaric had blabbed to the world that I lacked.

I'm here at Athanarel, finding it to my taste. It helps that Galdran's personal fortune has been turned over to us, as repayment for what happened to our family--you'll find the Letter of Intent in with this letter, to be kept somewhere safe. Henceforth, you send your creditors for drafts on Arclor House…

I looked up at the ceiling as the words slowly sank in. "Personal fortune"? How much was that? Whatever it was, it had to be a vast improvement over our present circumstances. I grinned, thinking how I had agonized over which book to choose from the bookseller's list. Now I could order them all. I could even hire my own scribe…
Shaking my head, I banished the dreams of avarice, and returned to the letter--not that much remained.

…so, outfit yourself in whatever you want, appoint someone responsible as steward, and join me here at Athana ~ Sherwood Smith

Poor are those who have eyes but cannot see ... ~ Luis Marques

Among the things most characteristic of organisms--most distinctive of living as opposed to inorganic systems--is a sort of directedness. Their structures and activities have an adaptedness, an evident and vital usefulness to the organism. Darwin's answer and ours is to accept the common sense view...[that] the end ("telos") [is] that the individual and the species may survive. But this end is (usually) unconscious and impersonal. Naive teleology is controverted not by ignoring the obvious existence of such ends but by providing a naturalistic, materialistic explanation of the adaptive characteristics serving them. [Book review in "Science," 1959, p. 673.] ~ George Gaylord Simpson

In a badly designed book, the letters mill and stand like starving horses in a field. In a book designed by rote, they sit like stale bread and mutton on the page. In a well-made book, where designer, compositor and printer have all done their jobs, no matter how many thousands of lines and pages, the letters are alive. They dance in their seats. Sometimes they rise and dance in the margins and aisles. ~ Robert Bringhurst

How I envy writers who can work on aeroplanes or in hotel rooms. On the run I can produce an article or a book review, or even a film script, but for fiction I must have my own desk, my own wall with my own postcards pinned to it, and my own window not to look out of. ~ John Banville

My main point about films is that I don't like the adaptation process, and I particularly don't like the modern way of comic book-film adaptations, where, essentially, the central characters are just franchises that can be worked endlessly to no apparent point. ~ Alan Moore

Ah, but you see, I didn't want to be fair. ~ E. M. Forster

By the time of the arrival of Islam in the early seventeenth century CE, what we now call the Middle East was divided between the Persian and Byzantine empires. But with the spread of this new religion from Arabia, a powerful empire emerged, and with it a flourishing civilization and a glorious golden age.
Given how far back it stretches in time, the history of the region
and even of Iraq itself
is too big a canvas for me to paint. Instead, what I hope to do in this book is take on the nonetheless ambitious task of sharing with you a remarkable story; one of an age in which great geniuses pushed the frontiers of knowledge to such an extent that their work shaped civilizations to this day. ~ Jim Al-Khalili

There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost. ~ Bharati Mukherjee

People add color to their story because they think it happened in black and white. ~ Tawny Lara

I don't have an interest in any car that isn't good for the environment, other than maybe an aesthetic quality in a picture book. ~ Emile Hirsch

The most difficult book I wrote was the fourth in a series of linked children's books. It was like pulling teeth because the publisher wanted exactly the same but completely different. I'd much rather just do something completely different, even if there's a risk of it going wrong. ~ Mark Haddon