Phrase Books Quotes

A local phrase book, entitled Speak in Korean, has the following handy expressions. In the section 'On the Way to the Hotel': 'Let's Mutilate US Imperialism!' In the section 'Word Order': 'Yankees are wolves in human shape - Yankees / in human shape / wolves / are.' In the section 'Farewell Talk': 'The US Imperialists are the sworn enemy of the Korean people.' Not that the book is all like this - the section 'At the Hospital' has the term solsaga ('I have loose bowels'), and the section 'Our Foreign Friends Say' contains the Korean for 'President Kim Il Sung is the sun of mankind.'
I wanted a spare copy of this phrase book to give to a friend, but found it was hard to come by. Perhaps this was a sign of a new rapprochement with the United States, or perhaps it was because, on page 46, in the section on the seasons, appear the words: haemada pungnyoni dumnida ('We have a bumper harvest every year'). ~ Christopher Hitchens

Phrase books seem to be a universal and eternal source of hilarity and I think I know why. Their authors go mad in the course of compiling them. ~ Alice Thomas Ellis

In our own day anonymity has acquired a far more pregnant significance than is perhaps realized: it has an almost epigrammatic significance. People not only write anonymously, they sign their anonymous works: they even talk anonymously...Nowadays one can talk with any one, and it must be admitted that people's opinions are exceedingly sensible, yet the conversation leaves one with the impression of having talked to an anonymity. The same person will say the most contradictory things and, with the utmost calm, make a remark, which coming from him is a bitter satire on his own life. The remark itself may be sensible enough, and of the kind that sounds well at a meeting, and may serve in a discussion preliminary to coming to a decision, in much the same way that paper is made out of rags. But all these opinions put together do not make one human, personal opinion such as you may hear from quite a simple man who talks about very little but really does talk. People's remarks are so objective, so all all-inclusive, that it is a matter of complete indifference who expresses them, and where human speech is concerned that is the same as acting 'on principle'. And so our talk becomes like the public, a pure abstraction. There is no longer any one who knows how to talk, and instead, objective thought produces an atmosphere, an abstract sound, which makes human speech superfluous, just as machinery makes man superfluous. In Germany they even have phrase-books for the use of lovers, and i ~ Søren Kierkegaard

I'm an open book. But some of the pages are stuck together. ~ Kelli Jae Baeli

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new -
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dea ~ Philip Larkin

I am grateful to all my readers; you inspired me to keep writing. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I keep collecting books I know
I'll never, never read;
My wife and daughter tell me so,
And yet I never heed.
"Please make me," says some wistful tome,
"A wee bit of yourself."
And so I take my treasure home,
And tuck it in a shelf.

And now my very shelves complain;
They jam and over-spill.
They say: "Why don't you ease our strain?"
"Some day," I say, "I will."
So book by book they plead and sigh;
I pick and dip and scan;
Then put them back, distressed that I
Am such a busy man.

Now, there's my Boswell and my Sterne,
my Gibbon and Defoe;
To savor Swift I'll never learn,
Montaigne I may not know.
On Bacon I will never sup,
For Shakespeare I've no time;
Because I'm busy making up
These jingly bits of rhyme.

Chekov is caviar to me,
While Stendhal makes me snore;
Poor Proust is not my cup of tea,
And Balzac is a bore.
I have their books, I love their names,
And yet alas! they head,
With Lawrence, Joyce and Henry James,
My Roster of Unread.

I think it would be very well
If I commit a crime,
And get put in a prison cell
And not allowed to rhyme;
Yet given all these worthy books
According to my need,
I now caress with loving looks,
But never, never read."

(from, Book Lover) ~ Robert W. Service

What can I say Rango? What can I do to prove to you that I belong to you? ~ Anais Nin

None of [the books are] worth reading. There are no fairy tales, no faerie tails, no sword-swinging princesses or lightning-throwing gods. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

They are my slaves [ books and papers ] and they must serve me as I please. ~ Karl Marx

A building is not a sentence, which in principle has the ability to match and express a thought closely. It is not linear, like language. Compared to the fluidity of words, a building is atrociously clumsy, but it can be lived and inhabited as books cannot be. ~ Rowan Moore

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it. ~ Oscar Wilde

If you know how to read, the World of Books is open to you, after all; and if you like to read, you'll read. If you don't, you'll forget whatever anybody makes you read, anyway. ~ John Crowley

There are indeed in some writers visible instances of deep thoughts, close and acute reasoning, and ideas well pursued. The light these would give, would be of great use, if their readers would observe and imitate them; all the rest at best are but particulars fit to be turned into knowledge, but that can be done only by our own meditation, and examining the reach, force, and coherence of what is said; and then, as far as we apprehend and see the connection of ideas, so far it is ours; without that, it is but so much loose matter floating in our brain. The memory may be stored, but the judgment is little better, and the stock of knowledge not increased, by being able to repeat what others have said or produce the arguments we have found in them. Such a knowledge as this is but knowledge by hearsay, and the ostentation of it is at best but talking by rote, and very often upon weak and wrong principles. For all that is to be found in books is not built upon true foundations, nor always rightly deduced from the principles it is pretended to be built on. ~ John Locke

Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read. ~ Alberto Manguel

I only want power so I can get books. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

A recluse without books and ink is already in life a dead man. ~ Alfred Nobel

Heavy rains and a good book. A perfect extravagance. ~ Carew Papritz

One of the greatest creations of the human mind is the art of reviewing books without having read them. ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

Wow. I didn't think I'd ever see you like that."
Cam trembled; he couldn't help it. He felt like his body was not his own. "Like what?"
"So..." Sasha seemed to search for the right word. "Involved, maybe? On-screen, you all seem kinda cold. I guess I figured you'd done it all before."
Cam took a moment to gather himself. A phrase came to him, and he allowed himself a wry grin. "It's not the same. That's work, even if it's one of my friends. This is real sex. ~ Garrett Leigh

It is a phrase that may well perplex a poor modern, girt about on every side by clocks and chimes...For we are all so busy, and have so many far-off projects to realise, and castles in the fire to turn into solid habitable mansions on a gravel soil, that we can find no time for pleasure trips into the Land of Thought and among the Hills of Vanity. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

I enjoy books as misers enjoy treasures, because I know I can enjoy them whenever I please. ~ Michel De Montaigne

I like Disney stuff. No-one looks at 'Toy Story' and says,' Oh, that's just for kids.' Why is it that games can only appeal to a certain audience, but movies and books - I mean, how many adults read 'Harry Potter?' ~ Warren Spector

And I don't care what age you are, kissing in the rain is the best. ~ Carew Papritz

The more you read, the more you want to know, and so the more questions you have. ~ Xinran

A love of books, of holding a book, turning its pages, looking at its pictures, and living its fascinating stories goes hand-in-hand with a love of learning. ~ Laura Bush

Deep vers'd in books, and shallow in himself. ~ John Milton

In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth? ~ Carl R. Rogers

Whenever I think of the man I was in those days, cutting across the nat-cropped grass of the campus, burdened down by the weight of the books in which I sought the consolation of other men's grief, and aburdened futher by the large weight of my own bitterness, the whole vision seems a nightmare. There were girls all about me, so near and yet so out of reach, a pastel nightmare of honey-blond, pink-lipped, golden-legged, lemon-sweatered girls ~ Frederick Exley

Mr. Stegall has birthed a very important book that will help us as a people go to the next level. This book is very important because it's tackling issues that many brush under the rug. Mr. Stegall has proven that he's been given a message that the world should hear and this book is proof of that. Because of his insight and wisdom, this book will reach areas and points that other books around this topic have not. This is definitely a book we need! ~ Tony A. Gaskins Jr.

I write entertainment. There are some books you read but don't inhale. There are books that will change your life. ~ Michael Robotham

For anyone addicted to reading commonplace books ... finding a good new one is much like enduring a familiar recurrence of malaria, with fever, fits of shaking, strange dreams ... ~ M.F.K. Fisher

We were bleeding information from the nose and ears, though dazed and disoriented was not how I experienced it. Most of the time, I felt like I was three years old, high on chocolate cake and social networks, constantly wired, ingesting information and news about information, books and books about books, data and metadata - I was, in other words, overstimulated yet gluttonous for more. ~ Marilyn Johnson

Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new film, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. ~ Jim Jarmusch

Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go. ~ Ray Bradbury

A lot of my time is spent reading antique or out-of-print books of reference. ~ John Hodgman

If you do these things (read good books), what will be your reward? Gradually, unconsciously but inevitably, your diction will begin to take on added beauty and refinement. Gradually, you will begin to reflect someone the glory and beauty and majesty of your companions. ~ Dale Carnegie

There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person. ~ Elizabeth Moon

Be. So I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You aren't a vampire." Silver's voice mirrored his shock. She repeated the phrase with a huge smile on her face. "You aren't a vampire!"
"They don't call me Jackpot for nothing," he joked. ~ Kasi Blake

What are these things that this houses, Eva?" Rovender picked up a crumbling tome. He handed it to her.
"These are books," Eva said as the yellowed bits of paper flaked away in her hands to rest on the floor. "It's what humans used to put all of their writing in long ago. ~ Tony DiTerlizzi

Though I enjoy the occasional eBook from time to time, I will only stop reading books printed on paper when they pry them from my cold, dead, withered hands, and even then, they will be hard pressed to take them from me. ~ H.L. Stephens

The uninitiated might say that I am lost in my books, but I know I am more found than lost. ~ Donalyn Miller

If we read, we shall renew our mind. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

There's bleeding between age groups in terms of reading material, and there's bleeding between media. So there are books that are clearly comics and books that are prose, and then there are these books that are kind of in-between. ~ Gene Luen Yang

I learned to build bookshelves and brought books to my room, gathering them around me thickly. I read by day and into the night. I thought about perfectibility, and deism, and adjectives, and clouds, and the foxes, I locked my door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and went to the woods, by day or darkness. ~ Mary Oliver