Magic Of Books Quotes

I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books
whether it's strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking. Or a chance meeting with a stranger or friend who recommends a book we would never ordinarily reach for. Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives. ~ Cecelia Ahern

I think falling in love is like discovering the magic of books. You think to yourself, 'how was I living before this? ~ Kamand Kojouri

That's the magic of books. They're never quite the same for any two people. When you read one, you automatically make it your own. ~ Janette Rallison

A book is not just paper and ink, it's a world full of dreams, imaginations, knowledge, awakening, emboldening and a lot, lot more invaluable treasures. Gift your child a book - introduce them to the joy of reading. ~ Jyoti Arora

When I visit schools, I try to reach kids who perhaps don't have books at home or aren't that keen on reading. Somehow you draw them in with the pictures and then perhaps they'll want to learn more about it. I use a lot of audience participation and find kids who aren't really part of it and try to include them - to draw in those reluctant readers. ~ Korky Paul

When in many dissections, carried out as opportunity offered upon living animals, I first addressed my mind to seeing how I could discover the function and offices of the heart's movement in animals through the use of my own eyes instead of through the books and writings of others, I kept finding the matter so truly hard and beset with difficulties that I all but thought, with Fracastoro, that the heart's movement had been understood by God alone. ~ William Harvey

It was magic, the oldest magic of all when day became night, gods working in tandem, and I gave it the full benefit of my witness for the singular wonder it was. ~ J.D. Stanley

The first sentence of Ralph Waldo Emerson's that reached me still jolts me every time I run into it. "Meek young men," he wrote in "The American Scholar," "grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books… ~ Robert D. Richardson Jr.

If I walk into a place, a party, say, and there's a bookshelf, I immediately gravitate toward it. Unless there's a bar. But even then, it's only a matter of a few rounds before I make my way to the bookshelf. If there are good books on it, I may never leave the spot all night. Anybody I really want to talk to is going to make his or her way to that bookshelf sooner or later, anyway, right? Books are a nexus. They start conversations, and they continue conversations, and they make people better conversationalists. I have not found this to be the case with Iron Chef, or even alcohol. ~ Jonathan Evison

Books are the most tolerant of friends. ~ Richard Paul Evans

Anthropologically informed works, from Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough to Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained or Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust, fascinatingly document the bizarre phenomenology of superstition and ritual. Read such books and marvel at the richness of human gullibility. But that is not ~ Richard Dawkins

The ceaseless rain is falling fast,
And yonder gilded vane,
Immovable for three days past,
Points to the misty main,
It drives me in upon myself
And to the fireside gleams,
To pleasant books that crowd my shelf,
And still more pleasant dreams,
I read whatever bards have sung
Of lands beyond the sea,
And the bright days when I was young
Come thronging back to me.
In fancy I can hear again
The Alpine torrent's roar,
The mule-bells on the hills of Spain,
The sea at Elsinore.
I see the convent's gleaming wall
Rise from its groves of pine,
And towers of old cathedrals tall,
And castles by the Rhine.
I journey on by park and spire,
Beneath centennial trees,
Through fields with poppies all on fire,
And gleams of distant seas.
I fear no more the dust and heat,
No more I feel fatigue,
While journeying with another's feet
O'er many a lengthening league.
Let others traverse sea and land,
And toil through various climes,
I turn the world round with my hand
Reading these poets' rhymes.
From them I learn whatever lies
Beneath each changing zone,
And see, when looking with their eyes,
Better than with mine own. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The woods that I loved as a child are entirely gone. The woods that I loved as a young adult are gone. The woods that most recently I walked in are not gone, but they're full of bicycle trails. And this is happening to the world, and I think it is very very dangerous for our future generations, those of us who believe that the world is not only necessary to us in its pristine state, but it is in itself an act of some kind of spiritual thing. I said once, and I think this is true, the world did not have to be beautiful to work. But it is. What does that mean?
[from 'A Thousand Mornings' With Poet Mary Oliver for NPR Books] ~ Mary Oliver

She read beautifully, deeply. I don't know how else to describe it.
Eventually, I finally asked her what she got out of reading these books by old dead men, what the words on the page had to do with her. The kind of question an idiot asks. But she took it seriously, she pursed her lips.
It's just another way to talk to the dead, she said.
It's another way to make a way, she said. ~ Bryan Washington

[ ... ]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

I just make the best book that I can and try to not worry about audience or if it will sell. The odds are against you, so why abuse your talent for the sake of a chimera? The only real pleasure for me in writing comes from pleasing myself. What readers think is interesting and illuminating (and it may even be correct), but that is nothing compared to the excitement of seeing a world develop. Besides, even though I like most individuals I meet, I have a pretty low opinion of people in general. So if I were to write for people in general, I would have to drastically lower my estimation of the intelligence of my reader. Rather than doing that, I write the way it seems the book has to appear. I don't think that's egotistic. There are often things I would like to include in my books - things about me personally and other materials - that I feel I have to leave out because they aren't relevant to the book. I'm fairly ruthless along those lines, because I try to let nothing come in the way of what's best for the book. If that means that the book won't sell or that a publisher won't buy it, then that's my problem. I'll suffer for that, but I won't let the book suffer for it. ~ William T. Vollmann

I was brought up in Zimbabwe, and there were seven of us in my family, so it was difficult to read aloud to us all. There weren't that many picture books around in the Fifties in Zimbabwe. My favourite was Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter, which was really frightening. ~ Korky Paul

I kind of lost track of time ... "
"For two hours?"
Elend nodded sheepishly. "There were books involved. ~ Brandon Sanderson

You have to understand that while I pre-plot the meta story of a given book, I often have no idea of what will happen on the next page, let alone the next chapter. That's what makes it fun for me; I write the books the same way many people read them. ~ R.A. Salvatore

As for my writing process, there is one truth I have discovered after writing some twenty-plus books: Not every book is the same, but the middle of every book is where I really begin to question my choice of vocations. The beginning and end is usually fairly clear to me, but that middle just sucks the life right out of me. ~ Julia London

A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading. ~ Virginia Woolf

We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones. ~ Patti Smith

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books. ~ Thomas Carlyle

Schwitzgebel even scrounged up the missing-book lists from dozens of libraries and found that academic books on ethics, which are presumably borrowed mostly by ethicists, are more likely to be stolen or just never returned than books in other areas of philosophy.49 In other words, expertise in moral reasoning does not seem to improve moral behavior, and it might even make it worse (perhaps by making the rider more skilled at post hoc justification). ~ Jonathan Haidt

This book taught me, once and for all, how easily you can escape this world with the help of words! You can find friends between the pages of a book, wonderful friends. ~ Cornelia Funke

Perhaps all love sailed too close to madness. The deeper the love, the more dangerous. ~ Cassandra Clare

I am so excited about the 'Goosebumps' movie; I am geeking out. I was a huge fan of the books. ~ Jillian Bell

I was used and tricked and thrown away, but I cannot be forgiven. It's a funny thing. You go your whole life thinking you're the protagonist, but really, you're just the backstory. The boys shrug and go on, they fight and blow things up and half of them do much worse... and still get a key to the city, and eventually you're just a story your high school boyfriend tells the kid he had with his new wife. ~ Catherynne M. Valente

I don't see love as some perfect happily ever after thing like it is in books and movies. It's more like a bumpy road filled with potholes ... and detours. Sometimes we even veer off into the ditch. But the places that road will take you, the things you'll experience, are worth all of the uncertainty. ~ Melissa Brown

The love of books is a love which requires neither justification, apology, nor defense. ~ John Alfred Langford

He planned for his son or daughter to have three or four toys, minimal sports equipment, and a thousand books. He didn't care for the rhymed nonsense of Dr. Seuss, but preferred anything that instilled basic knowledge sets. He could abide a talking animal, but not an inanimate object that spoke. ~ John Brandon

I'd love to do a whole series of stories and have them collected into books. ~ Sergio Aragones

[T]o read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement
not incitement. ~ Susan Sontag

It takes courage to knowingly read a book that is challenging some of your cherished beliefs. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

What kind of life is that? Do you know? Do you? Because I know. I lived that life. For years I lived it. Without you. And I've never been more miserable. I'd rather fight everyday to keep you near me than have you walk away. I'd rather pay that price, Max. I'm not afraid to pay it. I can't believe you're standing here telling me that you are."
~Layla to Max; TORN ~ Laney McMann

What I eventually realized is that the real business of books is not done by awards committees or people who turn trees into paper or editors or agents or even writers. We're all just facilitators. The real business is done by readers. ~ John Green

My first typewriter cost me $75. I can't tell you how many hours it took me to earn that money, or how proud I was of that object. I wrote my first books on it. They will never be published, but that's all right. ~ Jeffrey Zeldman

I fell deeply in love with the books of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. They parented me, and gave me a sense of what it was to be a decent person, without any of the usual hypocritical rhetoric. They fired my imagination and opened me up... they gave me the soul nutrients I needed... He taught me that it was fun and beautiful to be humble, and that human beings are no more important than rutabagas. That we've got to love with all we are, not for some reward down the line, but purely for the sake of being a loving person, and that creativity was the highest part of ourselves to engage... His humorous detachment from the world's insane and egotistical violence - "So it goes" - my first hint of a spiritual concept. ~ Flea

When you write your first novel you don't really know what you're doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first 'Once upon a time'. I'm not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner tube. And I have this theory that while the Story Council has its faults, it does have some idea that if books are going to get written, authors have to be able to write them. ~ Robin McKinley

This, among other things, is where the magic of the screen lies: that suddenly, as an audience, you find yourself in a state of tension because you're in a world shown to you by the director. That world is so coherent, so comprehensive, so succinct that you're transported into it and experience tension because you sense the tension between the characters. ~ Krzysztof Kieslowski

She had always enjoyed the warm, calming feeling of the sand. It slipped as a silken scarf of liquid sunshine across the surface of her skin. Kayn took one hand and ran it over the surface of the sand, and it shifted as though it had been moved by a light breeze without her hand making contact. Her life now had no room for feet being firmly planted on the ground. She had to allow her mind to take off in flight and accept the impossible. She had to embrace life as a toddler. In a child's world, every breath of life is a mystery; everything had the possibility of being magic. ~ Kim Cormack

The unfolding through time of all things from one is the simple message, finally, of every one of the creation myths reproduced in the pages of these volumes-including that of our contemporary biological view, which becomes an effective mythic image the moment we recognize its own inner mystery. By the same magic, every god that is dead can be conjured again to life, as any fragment of rock from a hillside, set respectfully in a garden, will arrest the eye. ~ Joseph Campbell

Sins of the past that I can't rectify alone. Sins I committed as an enemy of S.H.I.E.L.D. I need help and fast. I need someone off the books. Someone angry. ~ Nathan Edmondson

Julia had once been picked out to work in Pornosec, the sub-section of the Fiction Department which turned out cheap pornography for distribution among the proles. It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who worked in it, she remarked. There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like Spanking Stories or One Night in a Girls' School, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal.

"What are these books like?" said Winston curiously.

"Oh, ghastly rubbish. They're boring, really. They only have six plots, but they swap them round a bit. ~ George Orwell

Of the female black authors, I really like Morrison's early books a lot. But she's really become so much a clone of Faulkner. He did it better. ~ Leslie Fiedler

Her concept of paradise was something more immediate: a book and a blanket beneath a tree, where she might read in peace. ~ Janet Evanovich

No one asks to live in squalor, Tris. It is just that squalor is all that is left to them by those who have money. ~ Tamora Pierce

Cassidy and I wouldn't be friends if we met today. She's blunt, even when she shouldn't be. She's cynical to the point of perpetual gloom. Her interest in culture begins and ends with fashion magazines - hence the gloom. She's still the best friend I've ever had. We're there for each other in a way no one else is. That's what counts, not the music she listens to or the books she doesn't read. ~ A.O. Monk

Are we to deny our daughters the works of Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck or Shakespeare?....Where is the equality in banning girls from enjoying wonderful works of literature?....What kind of society defines suitable reading material by sex? This is indefensible censorship encouraging ignorance and bias. [About Caitlin Moran's statement.] ~ Diane Davies

Life is very difficult. There's nothing to be ashamed of by reading self-help books. If you're stuck in a dark place it can be incredibly uplifting and hope providing to engage with those tools. So go out there and do it!! ~ Jim Dooley

Isolation and "control" might produce quieter life. But, peace isn't a quiet life, peace is a quiet soul. Peace is the gift of Jesus through the work of Jesus that we can have no matter what's going on in our living rooms or our inboxes or our Facebook feeds. The loudest of lives can't overwhelm the quiet that comes from Christ. ~ Scarlet Hiltibidal

always busy because of interesting books ~ Lois Lowry

When one compares the talents one has with those of a Leibniz , one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner. ~ Denis Diderot