Book Viii Quotes

In the moment when the eyes of the two men met, Javert, without having moved or made the least gesture, became hideous. No human emotion can wear an aspect so terrible as that of jubilation. He had the face of a fiend who has found the victim he thought he had lost. ~ Victor Hugo

Large, heavy, ragged black clouds hung like crape hammocks beneath the starry cope of the night. You would have said that they were the cobwebs of the firmament. ~ Victor Hugo

I think 'The Book of Mormon' has made that difference in its field. It changed the game. It's something that 20 years from now people will still be talking about, hopefully. That's my goal as an artist, as a creator, as a work for hire, is to choose projects that make people think, make people talk, and make people interested in having a dialogue. ~ Josh Gad

This profusion of questions, exclamations, and tales is the new version of the Society. Its members are spread all over the world, but they are joined by their love of books, of talking about books, and of their fellow readers. We are transformed each time we pass a book along, each time we ask a question about it. ~ Mary Ann Shaffer

It took a brave editor in the U.S. to sign a contract for Dancing Girls, and without her belief in the book, I'm not sure it would ever have found its way into print. ~ Louise Brown

I'm not going to break up my family, not for a book. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The many mysteries boil down to three. There is the kind that can be solved: who planted the bomb? Will the travellers reach their destination? What is Mother's childhood secret? There is the supernatural: dark metaphysical forces, never to be fully exposed, yet hinting of themselves in a way that suggests the author could reveal more if he chose, and might do, in his next book. And there are the insoluble mysteries: what lies beyond life, what beauty is for, why the innocent suffer and the guilty prosper, what goes on in the heads of other people, why life keeps fucking us over just when we're doing all right
these are the mysteries the books dealing with them can't solve, and it is for this reason that the best of these books are the ones we keep rereading. ~ James Meek

But why has our physical world revealed such extreme mathematical regularity that astronomy superhero Galileo Galilei proclaimed nature to be "a book written in the language of mathematics," and Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner stressed the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences" as a mystery demanding an explanation? ~ Max Tegmark

Science fiction is always a vehicle for ideas. It's the form which allows either movies or books to be an exploration of how we should live. ~ Salman Rushdie

I did not count the days or the weeks or the months. Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time. ~ Yann Martel

I usually write about ordinary people and ordinary things, but Paul Farmer is the least ordinary person I've ever met ... He's the leader of a small group of people who hope to cure a sick world, and I hope my book can help in some small way. ~ Tracy Kidder

When Arnold Schwarzenegger goes to his reward - how's that? That's a crack, but I treat Governor Schwarzenegger well in my book. He's done such great work in California; we'll forgive him one personal habit. Everybody should have one not-totally-CO2-friendly habit they can be forgiven for. So we'll forgive him that one. ~ Jay Inslee

I said it would be better if we weren't friends, not that I didn't want to be. ~ Stephenie Meyer

I Know you are asking: What if I am wrong?
What if RAGNAROK does not come? What if it does not happen the way I say it is going to happen?
I suppose that is a possibility.
Perhaps the Mayans WERE wrong.
Maybe we WILL enter a new era of consciousness.
Maybe we will NOT destroy ourselves with technology.
Perhaps it will be that some new old god comes. Say his name is DOZGOTH, the 701st, and say he takes pity on us. And a thousand years after all the suffering of RAGNOROK, he will retcon us back to the very day this book was pusblished.
You will remember nothing of what happened or what you did to survive. The only evidence that any of this ever happened will be this book, and the fact that ou now have a tentacle instead of an arm. But you will explain that away simply by saying you are wearing an octopus sleeve. The mind can explain so many things when it wants to close its eyes and sleep.
Perhaps only one person will remember what really happened, and he will be named Jonathan Coulton. But he cannot tell anyone, for he is but an animal. ~ John Hodgman

Tucking my nose into a book makes me completely oblivious to my surroundings. I would have made a terrible spy in the army
the first person to hand me a novel would have been able to shoot my head clean off without me noticing. ~ Alyxandra Harvey

You need to change yourself. The moment that you change yourself it is a gigantic step. And this is what I do. The book is much more important than the writer. ~ Paulo Coelho

These notes are little pieces of history no one cares about, but they remind you that you're not the first person to hold that book. Someone else owned it first and read the exact same words, and one way or another, it impacted them. We're all connected. ~ Chelsea Sedoti

THE WRITER can get free of his writing only by using it, that is, by reading oneself. As if the aim of writing were to use what is already written as a launching pad for reading the writing to come. Moreover, what he has written is read in the process, hence constantly modified by his reading. The book is an unbearable totality. I write against a background of facets. ~ Edmond Jabes

There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought! ~ Lewis Carroll

For most of us the rules of English grammar are at best a dimly remembered thing. But even for those who make the rules, grammatical correctitude sometimes proves easier to urge than to achieve. Among the errors cited in this book are a number committed by some of the leading authorities of this century. If men such as Fowler and Bernstein and Quirk and Howard cannot always get their English right, is it reasonable to expect the rest of us to? ~ Bill Bryson

Those of us who are writers and have to perform to communities that aren't used to coming to book events, I would recommend taking some theater. ~ Sandra Cisneros

The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed - but survivable. ~ Alain De Botton

We're at a point nowhere it has to change. We have characters that are not alive that are alive in the book. We have characters that never appeared in the book. We have a lot of events that didn't quite happen the same way in the book. But there's so much in the book, stuff we've passed in the timeline that I really thought was awesome, that I really wanted to get to. ~ Scott M. Gimple

Marriage is love put to it's ultimate test - the grindstone of life. Where the idealism of love meets the everydayness of marriage. ~ Carew Papritz

I'm just surprised you can understand it. Is it the picture book edition? ~ Jus Accardo

The book thief has struck for the first time – the beginning of an illustrious career. ~ Markus Zusak

It is an aphorism in physic, that unwholesome airs, because perpetually sucked into the lungs, do distemper health more than coarser diet used but at set times. The like may be said of society, which, if good, is a better refiner of the spirits than ordinary books. ~ Frances Osborne

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat. ~ Mark Twain

My novels are never truly finished, even if they're published and sitting on the shelf. While I may no longer be interested in spending time with that particular set of characters, I can't help but think about all the ways the book could be different, the small, insignificant tweaks that no one but me would ever notice. ~ Jillian Medoff

Not counting 'Small Steps,' I think 'Holes' is my best book, in terms of plot, and setting, and the way the story revealed itself. It hasn't changed my life, other than that I have more money than I did before I wrote it. I'm still too close to 'Small Steps' to compare it to 'Holes.' ~ Louis Sachar

He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know. ~ Lao-Tzu

A happy love is a single story, a disintegrating one is two or more competing, conflicting versions, and a disintegrated one lies at your feet like a shattered mirror, each shard reflecting a different story, that it was wonderful, that it was terrible, if only this had, if only that hadn't. The stories don't fit back together, and it's the end of stories, those devices we carry like shells and shields and blinkers and occasionally maps and compasses. The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anecdotes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt. ~ Rebecca Solnit

I feel like my life is a book, and someone turned the page before I was ready, and now I can't follow the story. ~ Rachel Vincent

A scene from the book:

"Where are we going?" She asked.
"Does that matter?" I smiled, remembering the dream.
"Then what matters?" she asked.
"We", I replied. ~ Sameem Ul Islam

Individuals somehow are led to find my books at times that are important to them. The mail that I get very, very often will say, "I was at a difficult time in my life, and someone gave me a copy." ~ Richard Bach

There's a book called Mummy and the people actually seem to have become addicted to mummy dust. And mummy dust was somehow made from people who've died of the most loathsome diseases. It's too bad that [David] Cronenberg didn't see this book, see I only saw it after the film was made. It might have been of interest to him. ~ William S. Burroughs

The Reich Youth Leader was Baldur von Schirach, a romantically minded young man and an energetic organizer, whose mother was an American and whose great-grandfather, a Union officer, had lost a leg at Bull Run; he told his American jailers at Nuremberg that he had become an anti-Semite at the age of seventeen after reading a book called Eternal Jew, by Henry Ford. ~ William L. Shirer

[ ... ]he also had a device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million "pages" could be summoned at a moment's notice. It looked
insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words
Don't Panic printed on it in large friendly letters. The other reason was that this device was in fact that most
remarkable of all books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor - The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitch hiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in. ~ Douglas Adams