Spy Books Quotes

Slightly embarrassing admission: Even when I was a kid, I used to have these little spy books, and I would, like, see what everybody was doing in my neighborhood and log it down. ~ Heather Brooke

I read a lot of books for information, like doctor books, spy books ... ~ William S. Burroughs

No matter how bad your past is, you still don't want it erased. ~ Paul Aertker

I think, basically, what I'm good for is reading - a lot. I think I'll always be more of a reader than a writer, definitely. There are sooo many books in the world I haven't read, sometimes I feel as if they're all piled on top of my head weighing me down and saying, 'Hurry up.' ~ Helen Oyeyemi

Life is arduous without any breaks, like a long journey without any inns. Learned variety makes it pleasant. Spend the first part of a fine life in communication with the dead. We are born to know and to know ourselves, and books reliably turn us into people. Spend the second part with the living: see and examine all that's good in the world. Not everything can be found in one country; the universal Father has shared out his gifts and sometimes endows the ugliest with the most. Let the third stage be spent entirely with yourself: the ultimate happiness, to philosophize. ~ Baltasar Gracian

I was in full digression! far from the subject! ... my colonel was losing track ... rapidly, of my story! my story! ... my own story! ... the gifts that I had personally received from Heaven! ... yet I had insisted, every time! truly extraordinary gifts! ... I'd made him repeat them a hundred times! ... enough so he'd remember! that I was the only true genius! the century's only writer! the proof: that no one ever spoke of me! ... everyone was jealous! Nobel! no Nobel! they had all joined forces to have me executed! ... they could just go fuck off! ... drop dead! since it was a question of death between me and them! I'll send their readers packing! all their readers! I'll make the public grow sick of their books! cabal! no cabal! since there was no room for two styles! ... it was mine or theirs! ... crawl or breastroke! ... you understand! ... the only inventor of the century! is me! me! me right here! the only genius, you might say! damned or not! ... ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

Books
they come home hot in your hands and then by increments they warm your life, like heated bricks in a New England bed. ~ Robin R. Meyers

No matter how many books you own, you can never own enough. Reading books is the best addiction anyone can have. ~ Love The Stacks Bookstore

She wanted to and believed she could
- so she did. ~ Jill Telford

There are some great, subversive female writers out there. Gender should not affect anything. It does, but it shouldn't. ~ Carla H. Krueger

Our hope is that the elementary reading of comics will lead to the joy of reading good books. ~ Nelson Mandela

I always considered myself a loner.
I mean, not like a poor-me, Byron-esque, I-should-have-brought-a-swimming-buddy loner. I mean the sort of person who doesn't feel too upset about the prospect of a weekend spent seeing no one, and reading good books on the couch. It wasn't like I was a people hater or anything. I enjoyed activities and the company of friends. But they were a side dish. I always thought I would be happy without them. ~ Jim Butcher

The Greek word euphuia, a finely tempered nature, gives exactly the notion of perfection as culture brings us to perceive it; a harmonious perfection, a perfection in which the characters of beauty and intelligence are both present, which unites "the two noblest of things"
as Swift ... most happily calls them in his Battle of the Books, "the two noblest of things, sweetness and light. ~ Matthew Arnold

If a boy can manage to have coffee with me during the apocalypse, I know he cares. There's not a speck of doubt in my mind. He must care. ~ Caroline George

I've forgotten most of what I've read and, frankly, it never seemed very important to me or to the world. ~ Leonard Cohen

The last thing I would want is for Monbiot, Mann, Flannery, Jones, Hansen and the rest of the Climate rogues' gallery to be granted the mercy of quick release. Publicly humiliated? Yes please. Having all their crappy books remaindered? Definitely. Dragged away from their taxpayer funded troughs and their cushy sinecures, to be replaced by people who actually know what they're talking about? For sure. But hanging? Hell no. Hanging is far too good for such ineffable toerags. ~ James Delingpole

She knew now that everyone had heartbreak in their life at some point. What had happened didn't make her special or unusual. It was part of being human. A broken heart was, after all, the source material of myriad books. Some of those books had become her comfort, and had made her realize she was not alone. ~ Veronica Henry

Except that my father got a raise, and my mother didn't because she doesn't get paid for housework, and my sister stopped reading those self-esteem books because she met a new boy ~ Stephen Chbosky

Writing is architectural. Letters become words, and words become sentences, and sentences become paragraphs, and paragraphs become chapters and chapters become books. ~ Veronica Chambers

I love digging myself into books because the moment I'm drifted from reality, I'm in a different world and I'm a different person. ~ Nathalie M. Llanto

Books can take you places. ~ Sandra Boynton

Somehow the old philosophers could make even the most salacious topics seem boring. ~ Brandon Sanderson

I answer that I try to write true stories but that at a given point the story becomes unbearable because of it's very truth, and then I have to change it. I tell her that I try to tell my story but all of a sudden I can't-I don't have the courage, it hurts too much. And so I embellish everything and describe things not as they happened but the way I wished they happened.
She says, "Yes, there are lives sadder than the saddest of books." I say, "Yes. No book, no matter how sad, can be as sad as a life. ~ Agota Kristf

I am Envy, begotten of a chimney-sweeper and an oyster-wife. I cannot read, and therefore wish all books were burnt; I am lean with seeing others eat - O that there would come a famine through all the world, that all might die, and I live alone; then thou should'st see how fat I would be! But must thou sit and I stand? Come down, with a vengeance! ~ Christopher Marlowe

The guys in my band are great-we watch movies, we eat pizza, take walks, read books. Everybody has a really great sense of humor. And my boyfriend comes and visits me on the road. ~ Lisa Loeb

Far more books get written about how to get more people in your church than how to get the people already in your church to have more humility and sincere love. ~ John Ortberg

I didn't really start publishing books until I was 40 because I was busy being a McDonald's employee. So there's always a sense of trying to make up for lost time. ~ Jerry Stahl

The sincere love of books has nothing to do with cleverness or stupidity any more than any other sincere love. It is a quality of character, a freshness, a power of pleasure, a power of faith. A silly person may delight in reading masterpieces just as a silly person may delight in picking flowers. A fool may be in love with a poet as he may be in love with a woman. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

The point is, it didn't really matter what the book was about. It was what it meant that was important. ~ Markus Zusak

The good thing about a self-help book is that if you misunderstand something then it won't mock you. ~ Stephen Richards

I believe reading books is one of the best ways to gain real empathy for people different from ourselves, and helping boys develop empathy for girls is a cause worth fighting for. ~ Shannon Hale

What I mean is, if we aren't learning, we are forgetting, if we aren't getting smart, we are becoming dull. The latest statistic is that the average American watches 1,456 hours of television a year but only reads three books. So if it's true that readers are leaders, and the more you read the further you advance, then there isn't a lot of competition. ~ Donald Miller

I do not hesitate to read. all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable-any real insight or broad human sentiment. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Books should to one of these fours ends conduce, for wisdom, piety, delight, or use. ~ John Denham

The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public house. People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life. ~ Aldous Huxley

Time is but a notion contrived by those who don't truly understand the workings of the gods. It's merely a measurement of when, yet our focus is the now. Not what has already passed. ~ Aaron-Michael Hall

You know you're getting old when all the names in your black book have M. D. after them. ~ Harrison Ford

The famous University of Chicago Great Books program and the reorganization of the University structure along Aristotelian lines and the establishment of the "College," in which a reading of classics was initiated in fifteen-year-old students, were some of the results. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

For me, wearing a tie is a pleasure, a recherche one but a pleasure nonetheless. You could say that I'm avoiding tie avoidance. My own gorgeous collection runs into hundreds and I buy them the way I buy books - I simply can't pass a shop. I have loved them since I could spend my own money on them. ~ Peter York

Whether white, black, Asian, or Latino, American students rarely arrive at college as habitual readers, which means that few of them have more than a nominal connection to the past. It is absurd to speak, as does the academic left, of classic Western texts dominating and silencing everyone but a ruling elite or white males. The vast majority of white students do not know the intellectual tradition that is allegedly theirs any better than black or brown ones do. They have not read its books, and when they do read them, they may respond well, but they will not respond in the way that the academic left supposes. For there is only one 'hegemonic discourse' in the lives of American undergraduates, and that is the mass media. Most high schools can't begin to compete against a torrent of imagery and sound that makes every moment but the present seem quaint, bloodless, or dead. ~ David Denby

If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. ~ Toni Morrison

All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the "elect" have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so "slow," so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle - keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate. ~ Mark Twain

Damned mating heat. Lawe is threatening to join a monastery and Rule's threatening to quit. Why don't you two try to show the younger guys it can be fun instead of taking a note out of everyone else's books and letting it drive you insane?
-Jonas ~ Lora Leigh

A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor - such is my idea of happiness. ~ Leo Tolstoy

I love comic books - maybe to a fault sometimes. ~ Zack Snyder

I think there's a great difference in consciousness in that same way in that when we're young we read books for the story, for the excitement of the story - and there comes a time when you realise that all stories are more or less the same story. ~ John McGahern

Jerott, for God's sake! Are you doing this for a wager?' said Lymond, his patience gone at last. 'What does anyone want out of life? What kind of freak do you suppose I am? I miss books and good verse and decent talk. I miss women, to speak to, not to rape; and children, and men creating things instead of destroying them. And from the time I wake until the time I find I can't go to sleep there is the void - the bloody void where there was no music today and none yesterday and no prospect of any tomorrow, or tomorrow, or next God-damned year. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

I'm not too interested in books about India. ~ Beatrice Wood

I was lucky enough to be given books that weren't top sellers; books that were kind of under the radar. ~ Bill Sienkiewicz

The economic decline of a society without property rights is followed by the loss of other values. It is only when we have a sufficiency of necessaries that we give thought to nonmaterial things, to what is called culture. On the other hand, we find we can do without books, or even moving pictures, when existence is at stake. Even more than that, we who have no right to own certainly have no right to give and charity becomes an empty word; in a socialistic order no one need give thought to an unfortunate neighbor because it is the duty of the government, the only property owner, to take care of him; it might even become a crime to give a "bum" a dime. When the denial of the right of the individual is negated through the denial of ownership, the sense of personal pride, which distinguishes man from beast, must decay from disuse.
The income tax is not only a tax; it is an instrument that has the potentiality of destroying a society of humans. ~ Frank Chodorov

I can't live without books ~ Thomas Jefferson

The only book Knight didn't steal was the one he most often saw. 'I had no need for a Bible,' he said. ~ Michael Finkel