Forgotten Books Quotes

Welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Daniel. I could make out about a dozen human figures scattered among the library's corridors and platforms. Some of them turned to greet me from afar, and I recognized the faces of various colleagues of my father's, fellows of the secondhand-booksellers' guild. To my ten-year-old eyes, they looked like a brotherhood of alchemists in furtive study. My father knelt next to me and, with his eyes fixed on mine, addressed me in the hushed voice he reserved for promises and secrets. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

At such times a young couple found it difficult to believe that in a few hours the whistle would call them, two slaves amongst a multitude of slaves, when they felt that each other was the most important person in the world! They walked on air, and saw the stars shine , and even poverty could not numb their hearts, but let them stray for a short time in that fairy garden whose gate opens but once , and , once closing, nevermore! Miss Nobody- Ethel Carnie ~ Ethel Carnie Holdsworth

Got up to fetch a glass of water and, assuming I'd missed the train to sleep, I went up to the study, opened the drawer in my desk and pulled out the book I had rescued from the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a metaphor, not just for books but for ideas, for language, for knowledge, for beauty, for all the things that make us human, for collecting memory. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Alicia, welcome back to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

A month alone behind closed doors
forgotten books, remembered, clear again.
Poems come, like water to the pool
Welling,
up and out,
from perfect silence ~ Yuan Mei

Through one hundred years' worth of forgotten books and dusty master's dissertations in the fields of history and folklore, through articles in defunct magazines, and amid brain-numbing ~ Stephen King

I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Hey, do you know what happens to a liar when he dies? He lies still, Jack! ~ Howard Books

It was a basic plot in any number of her books: girl strikes out, makes good, finds love, gets revenge. In that order. The making good and striking out part I liked. The rest would just be bonus. ~ Sarah Dessen

Something that's bothered me for a while now is the current profligacy in YA culture of Team Boy 1 vs Team Boy 2 fangirling. [...] Despite the fact that I have no objection to shipping, this particular species of team-choosing troubled me, though I had difficulty understanding why. Then I saw it applied to Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games trilogy – Team Peeta vs Team Gale – and all of a sudden it hit me that anyone who thought romance and love-triangles were the main event in that series had utterly missed the point. Sure, those elements are present in the story, but they aren't anywhere near being the bones of it, because The Hunger Games, more than anything else, is about war, survival, politics, propaganda and power. Seeing such a strong, raw narrative reduced to a single vapid argument – which boy is cuter? – made me physically angry.

So, look. People read different books for different reasons. The thing I love about a story are not necessarily the things you love, and vice versa. But riddle me this: are the readers of these series really so excited, so thrilled by the prospect of choosing! between! two! different! boys! that they have to boil entire narratives down to a binary equation based on male physical perfection and, if we're very lucky, chivalrous behaviour? While feminism most certainly champions the right of women to chose their own partners, it also supports them to choose things besides men, or to postpone the question of partnership in favour of ~ Foz Meadows

When he went to PARC for his formal interview, Kay was asked what he hoped his great achievement there would be. "A personal computer," he answered. Asked what that was, he picked up a notebook-size portfolio, flipped open its cover, and said, "This will be a flat-panel display. There'll be a keyboard here on the bottom, and enough power to store your mail, files, music, artwork, and books. All in a package about this size and weighing a couple of pounds. That's what I'm talking about." His interviewer scratched his head and muttered to himself, "Yeah, right." But Kay got the job. ~ Walter Isaacson

Many people think they cannot have knowledge or understanding of God without reading books. But hearing is better than reading, and seeing is better than hearing. Hearing about Benares is different from reading about it; but seeing Benares is different from either hearing or reading. ~ Ramakrishna

No man has the right to bring up children without surrounding them with books. ~ Horace Mann

If you're smarter than me, you shouldn't be reading my books. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Only bad books have good endings.
If a book is any good, it's ending is always bad - because you don't want the book to end. ~ Pseudonymous Bosch

The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified. ~ H.G.Wells

Yet the basic fact remains: every regulation represents a restriction of liberty, every regulation has a cost. That is why, like marriage (in the Prayer Book's words), regulation should not "be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly" ~ Margaret Thatcher

The past in retrospect holds manifold disenchantments, failures and even tragedies; and yet the worse may be forgotten and the best held fast. ~ William Robertson Nicoll

Songs. Books. Poetry. Paintings. These things reveal truth. I believe lies and truth are tangled together. ~ Brenda Sutton Rose

Looking back over my own life I here declare without apology that it is the study of God's Word, year after year, close communion with Christ, and great books that have nourished my soul in wondrous ways. Such authors as Fenelon, Henry Drummond, F. B. Meyer, G. Campbell Morgan, Martyn Lloyd Jones, A. W. Tozer, Hannah Whitehall Smith Oswald Chambers, Andrew Murray and John Stott have each, with their own special insights, enriched my life beyond measure. ~ W. Phillip Keller

You must have brought something. Books? I never saw you without a green bag of books. ~ Wallace Stegner

Every widow I have met has recognized in the wheel a dear forgotten friend. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Well see, I'm a good enough writer that not everybody in my books talks exactly like I do. ~ Robert Kirkman

She thought of the library, so shining white and new; the rows and rows of unread books; the bliss of unhurried sojourns there and of going out to a restaurant, alone, to eat. ~ Maud Hart Lovelace

I wish I could go back and rewrite my first book, You Bright and Risen Angels; I could do a better job. But in the meantime, nobody knows as much about my books as I do. Nobody has the right but me to say which words go into my books or get deleted or edited. When I'm dying, I'll smile, knowing I stood up for my books. If I die with more money, that wouldn't bring a smile to my face. Unless I got better drugs or more delicious-looking nurses. ~ William T. Vollmann

Books are a gateway to the extraordinary, a portal for the unfettered imagination and limitless creativity. ~ Diana Jane Heath

Being an actor, you are recognized for being somebody else, whereas these books are distilled from me. ~ Jamie Lee Curtis

The idea is that readers don't come blank to books. Consciously and not, we bring all the biases that come with our nationality, gender, race, class, age. They you layer onto that the status of our health, employment, relationships, not to mention our particular relationship to each book--who gave it to us, where we read it, what books we've already read--and as my professor put it, 'That massive array of spices has as much to do with the flavor of the soup as whatever the cook intended ~ Kelly Corrigan

I was a big reader. I could spend whole days absorbed in a book, whole weekends in the library or the park, completely oblivious to my surroundings. 'Escapism', I suppose they'd call it, but I never really liked that term much myself. I mean, who is it exactly who gets to decide which parts of your life are real and which parts are only allowed to count as an escape from that reality? I preferred to think that good books were my real life and all the other stuff - school, chores, all the rest of it - was just an interruption. ~ Jess Vallance

Most people do not erode their self-esteem over big issues but over small ones, little acts of betrayal and hypocrisy forgotten (repressed) very quickly. But the computer in your subconscious mind forgets nothing. It records your spiritual profit and loss. The balance sheet reflects your present level of self-esteem
and sends you the information via your emotions. ~ Nathaniel Branden

The prefect evening ... lying down on the couch beside the bookcase and reading himself sleepy ... Jim lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other's presence. ~ Christopher Isherwood

My wife is really sentimental. One Valentine's Day I gave her a ring and to this day she has never forgotten those three little words that were engraved inside Made in Taiwan! ~ Leopold Fechtner

But all attractions are alike,' he said. 'They come from an emptiness inside.' He hammered on this chest with his index finger. 'Something's missing and you have to fill it. Books, paintings, people, they're all the same...'
'A lot of people do without books and paintings.'
'True,' he said, 'but that doesn't affect the argument.' Paris turned his head to one side and chewed on his lip. 'Of course, nothing ever does the trick. Nobody's really satisfied for long. ~ Siri Hustvedt

When the last page of a book is turned, it leaves behind an emptiness, a certain kind of sadness that fills you up from within, yet leaves you craving for more. ~ Anangsha Alammyan

Bad criticism has followed things like comic books or TV, and they put down a medium. A medium cannot be inherently good or bad. ~ Corey Stoll

Friendships are forgotten when the game begins. ~ Alvin Dark

We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so ... ~ Michael Cunningham

I had a serious library at my disposal, because my Popo believed that culture entered by osmosis and it was better to start early, but my favorite books were fairy tales. ~ Isabel Allende

You know how they say that right before you die your life flashes before your eyes? It doesn't. That is just a notion they came up with for books and movies to make death seem romantic. Here's what really happens: Your intestines feel like a dishrag that's being wrung dry and your stomach acts like a balloon when you let the air out of it ~ Dinah Katt

My stomach is rather content, now that I think about it. 'Tis my mind that is starving. ~ Hannah Ashworth