Libraries Books And Reading Quotes

A library is a hospital for the mind. - Anonymous ~ Alvin Toffler

There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away ... ~ Emily Dickinson

Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

You want weapons? We're in a library! Books! The best weapons in the world! ~ The Doctor

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message from the dead - from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers. ~ Charles Kingsley

The way a book is read - which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book - can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it. ~ Norman Cousins

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes ~ John Le Carre

When I got [my] library card, that was when my life began. ~ Rita Mae Brown

Of all things I liked books best. My father had a large library and whenever I could manage I tried to satisfy my passion for reading. ~ Nikola Tesla

How important my books are or anybody's books are, I don't know. I don't think they are terribly important I think that they make people contented during the period they are reading them and this is worth something is to take care of somebody for a couple of hours. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

There is an underlying rhythm to all text. Sentences crashing fall like the waves of the sea, and work unconsciously on the reader. Punctuation is the music of language. As a conductor can influence the experience of the song by manipulating its rhythm, so can punctuation influence the reading experience, bring out the best (or worst) in a text. By controlling the speed of a text, punctuation dictates how it should be read. A delicate world of punctuation lives just beneath the surface of your work, like a world of microorganisms living in a pond. They are missed by the naked eye, but if you use a microscope you will find a exist, and that the pond is, in fact, teeming with life. This book will teach you to become sensitive to this habitat. The more you do, the greater the likelihood of your crafting a finer work in every respect. Conversely the more you turn a blind eye, the greater the likelihood of your creating a cacophonous text and of your being misread. ~ Noah Lukeman

Books ... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose. ~ Sven Birkerts

I love to read. I wish I could advise more people to read. There's a whole new world in books. If you can't afford to travel, you travel mentally through reading. You can see anything and go any place you want to in reading. ~ Michael Jackson

Albert-next-door doesn't care for reading, and he has not read nearly so many books as we have, so he is very foolish and ignorant, but it cannot be helped ... Besides, it is wrong to be angry with people for not being so clever as you are yourself. ~ E. Nesbit

Turn off your radio. Put away your daily paper. Read one review of events a week and spend some time reading good books. They tell too of days of striving and of strife. They are of other centuries and also of our own. They make us realize that all times are perilous, that men live in a dangerous world, in peril constantly of losing or maiming soul and body. We get some sense of perspective reading such books. Renewed courage and faith and even joy to live. ~ Dorothy Day

Confronted with the choice between having time and having things, we've chosen to have things. Today it is a luxury to read what Socrates said, not because the books are expensive, but because our time is scarce. ~ Gabriel Zaid

Each book has a reader, and each reader has a book. ~ Carmela Dutra

We are narrative creatures, and we need narrative nourishment - narrative catechisms. ~ N.D. Wilson

Pat, if there's anything you recall about your first visit with Monsignor Frank Kief, I sincerely hope it's this: there is no such thing as being too busy to read. The fine irony is, the answers to the questions we're so busy wrestling with, they're pressed between the pages. Waiting. One need only pause. You'll find books reinforce what you already know, and confirm what you've always suspected. What I mean is our instincts our right, mostly. Sometimes we just need a gentle reminder from an outside source. That's the power of reading others' words. It's reassurance that even from great distances, we human beings do come to the same conclusions. To know we're not all so different after all, that is the shared humanity found in the cousel of good books. ~ Kerry Casey

You are either in a state of perfection or a state of learning. Reading is one of the best ways to learn about our lives and purpose! ~ Cupideros

What are you reading?' he asks this afternoon.

'Kafka's Metamorphosis,' George says, without looking up.

'And what's it about?'

'Guy turns into a giant bug and eventually dies.'

'Not exactly life-affirming,' Martin observes.

'Life isn't exactly life-affirming,' George says.

'How have you been able to read so many books?' he asks, and she looks up from Kafka, her thumb marking the page. 'I'm a weird girl in high school. I've had some time to kill. ~ Cath Crowley

How does it happen that a writer who's not even very good - and I can say that, I've read four or five of his books - gets to be in charge of the world's destiny? Or of the entire universe's?"

If he's not very good, why didn't you stop at one?"

Mrs. Tassenbaum smiled. "Touché. He is readable, I'll give him that - tells a good story... ~ Stephen King

Conversations and jokes together, mutual rendering of good services, the reading together of sweetly phrased books, the sharing of nonsense and mutual attentions. ~ Robertson Davies

(Tania Unsworth) writes of a time when she was a "girl of eleven, with a flashlight under the covers, devouring The Chronicles of Narnia" - when there was a complete immersion in the world of the novel, when one connected with a book's protagonist and experienced the world through the eyes of the "other" in a powerful, beautiful way.

There was an intensity to reading then, a kind of total involvement in story that is hard to reproduce as an adult. I know too much now about tired plots and clichés. I am always comparing one thing to another, recognizing devices, identifying styles. No matter how good or bad I find something, I'm always aware of my response, slightly detached, consciously enjoying or not enjoying. ~ Tania Unsworth

In Catcher in the Rye, the protagonist Holden Caulfield mentions reading books that make him wish he could be friends with the author and be able to call him on the phone and so forth. I would consider a literary work that made someone feel this way a success. Furthermore, it's the only kind of success in literature that means anything to me. ~ Thomas Ligotti

Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarily deflected from your chosen path. ~ Nick Hornby

There is also a trilogy of books out. I started reading right after Christmas Divergent. I went to read Insurgent after, and now I'm on the third one. I don't know, it's Detergent or whatever. But it's written by a 26-year-old girl. It's brilliant. But I'm about halfway through now on book number three. Wait until you get to book number three. Hello, Google genome project.

Technology is advancing at a rapid pace, and yet, morality and ethics are afterthoughts. We're excited about discovery and advancement, you know? We're in fact so excited that we don't even take the time to discuss or debate the moral dilemmas and implications of new technology. Sure, we're still in control of technology now, but does there come a time when we're not? Who will be the one that says turn it off? When do things go wrong?

I don't see anyone at Google or in the government or anyone at the forefront of technology boom that is contemplating the ethics and morality issues. Now that is a truly scary thought that doesn't come in a movie. ~ Glenn Beck

I realize that people still read books now and some people actually love them, but in 1946 in the Village our feelings about books--I'm talking about my friends and myself--went beyond love. It was as if we didn't know where we ended and books began. Books were our weather, our environment, our clothing. We didn't simply read books; we became them. We took them into ourselves and made them into our histories. While it would be easy to say that we escaped into books, it might be truer to say that books escaped into us. Books were to us what drugs were to young men in the sixties.

They showed us what was possible. We had been living with whatever was close at hand, whatever was given, and books took us great distances. We had known only domestic emotions and they showed us what happens to emotions when they are homeless. Books gave us balance--the young are so unbalanced that anything can make them fall. Books steadied us; it was as if we carried a heavy bag of them in each hand and they kept us level. They gave us gravity. ~ Anatole Broyard

I have lots of passions - gardens, art, music and reading. I have eclectic taste and read a huge variety of books. ~ Zoe Wanamaker

The reading of books, what is it but conversing with the wisest men of all ages and all countries. ~ Isaac Barrow

I just stopped reading a lot of books. I mean, I read books that I have to read for school, but I don't actually pick up a book and read for fun. On my time off, I go to movies, hang out with friends, go shopping ... just little things. ~ Mark Indelicato

A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you. ~ Daniel J. Boorstin

Books are totally useless unless you take their advice. If you just keep reading them, thinking "that's so insightful! that changes everything," but never actually doing anything different, then pretty quickly the feeling will wear off and you'll start searching for another book to fill the void. ~ Aaron Swartz

Thoughts. Your imagination. The voices inside your head. They're all the same thing and spirit is what fuels it. ~ S.A. Tawks

Although, as you well know, dictionary sales to laymen have been waning for a long time. As books have gone out of print and we've moved from reading to "consuming data streams," "texting" rather than writing - as Memes have become king - the average consumer has had much less need for real meanings. And Synchronic ~ Alena Graedon

Books speak to us thoughtfully, one at a time. They demand our attention. And they demand that we briefly put aside our own beliefs and prejudices and listen to someone else's. There's one questions I think we should ask one another a lot more often, and that's "what are you reading? ~ Will Schwalbe

[Roland] Barthes turned the thable on the author, saying no only the a book needs a reader to wake it into life, but that in so doing the reader becomes nothing less that the author, who reveals in the book's hermeneutic possibilities, releases them and so becomes its own creator. ~ Robert Rowland Smith

You sometimes feel that reading books is the only way you can think, as if the reading occupied one part of your brain and this allowed the other part to go free and become more active. You need that time to read in order to think. That's all there is to it. ~ Yannick Murphy

it would be fairer to say I have traveled widely, without ever leaving my own native soil, I've traveled, one might say, through literature, each time I've opened a book the pages echoed with a noise like the dip of a paddle in midstream, and throughout my odyssey I never crossed a single border, and so never had to produce a passport, I'd just pick a destination at random, setting my prejudices firmly to one side, and be welcomed with open arms in places swarming with weird and wonderful characters ~ Alain Mabanckou

We like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of "sense" of what is going on. This "sense" is not to be obtained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing there, in those white spaces) but by reading the lines themselves looking at them and so arriving at a feeling not of satisfaction exactly, that is too much to expect, but of having read them, of having "completed" them. ~ Donald Barthelme

I love seeing the bookshops and meeting the booksellers
booksellers really are a special breed. No one in their right mind would take up clerking in a bookstore for the salary, and no one in his right mind would want to own one
the margin of profit is too small. So, it has to be a love of readers and reading that makes them do it
along with first dibs on the new books. ~ Mary Ann Shaffer

Students will read if we give them the books, the time, and the enthusiastic encouragement to do so. If we make them wait for the one unit a year in which they are allowed to choose their own books and become readers, they may never read at all. To keep our students reading, we have to let them. ~ Donalyn Miller

It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book. ~ Maureen Corrigan

No, I have never had a problem finding books to read. But I have had a problem finding people who understand what it's like to really LOVE reading. Maybe even need it. People who associate periods of their life with the kinds of things they were reading then, whether in school or in dusty old rooms of a house in Holland. The kind of people who take personal journeys into books and write responses that are part review, part stories in themselves. This is what Goodreads has always given me. ~ G.R. Reader

And I am a writer, writer of fictions
I am the heart that you call home
And I've written pages upon pages
Trying to rid you from my bones ... ~ Colin Meloy

I had seen myself, a portrait of myself as a reader. My childhood: hours spent in airless classrooms, days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew, forbidden books read secretively late at night. Teenage years reading - trying to read- books I'd heard were important, Naked Lunch and The Fountainhead, Ulysses and Women in Love. -The Night Bookmobile ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Surely we all occasionally buy books because of a daydream we're having
a little fantasy about the people we might turn into one day, when our lives are different, quieter, more introspective, and when all the urgent reading, whatever that might be, has been done. We never arrive at that point, needless to say ... ~ Nick Hornby

I spend money on convenient, comfortable and luxurious things; I spend money on books too. ~ Amit Kalantri