Stendhal Books Quotes

Becoming a book collector is like joining a religion: it's for life. ~ Arturo Perez Reverte

In the last 1,000 years, the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in just one year. ~ Larry Elder

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see. ~ John Burroughs

[When under stress I thought of] the books I had read [and applied] them to myself. I [imagined I was] one of the characters [and soon found myself] in made-up circumstances which were most agreeable to my inclinations. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Life is wonderful and strange...and it's also absolutely mundane and tiresome. It's hilarious and it's deadening. It's a big, screwed-up morass of beauty and change and fear and all our lives we oscillate between awe and tedium. I think stories are the place to explore that inherent weirdness; that movement from the fantastic to the prosaic that is life....

What interests me - and interests me totally - is how we as living human beings can balance the brief, warm, intensely complicated fingersnap of our lives against the colossal, indifferent, and desolate scales of the universe. Earth is four-and-a-half billion years old. Rocks in your backyard are moving if you could only stand still enough to watch. You get hernias because, eons ago, you used to be a fish. So how in the world are we supposed to measure our lives - which involve things like opening birthday cards, stepping on our kids' LEGOs, and buying toilet paper at Safeway - against the absolutely incomprehensible vastness of the universe?

How? We stare into the fire. We turn to friends, bartenders, lovers, priests, drug-dealers, painters, writers. Isn't that why we seek each other out, why people go to churches and temples, why we read books? So that we can find out if life occasionally sets other people trembling, too? ~ Anthony Doerr

To teachers, education is just a duty, but to students, it's their right. ~ Amit Kalantri

The best books ...
The best books of men are soon exhausted
they are cisterns, and not springing fountains.
You enjoy them very much at the first acquaintance,
and you think you could hear them a hundred times over-
but you could not- you soon find them wearisome.
Very speedily a man eats too much honey:
even children at length are cloyed with sweets.
All human books grow stale after a time-
but with the Word of God the desire to study it increases,
while the more you know of it the less you think you know.
The Book grows upon you: as you dive into its depths
you have a fuller perception of the infinity which remains
to be explored. You are still sighing to enjoy more of that
which it is your bliss to taste. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

My dearest one, it is not proper for men to be without names. There was a time when each man had a name of his own to distinguish him from all other men. So let us choose our names. I have read of a man who lived many thousands of years ago, and of all the names in these books, his is the one I wish to bear. He took the light of the gods and brought it to men, and he taught men to be gods. And he suffered for his deed as all bearers of light must suffer. His name is Prometheus. ~ Ayn Rand

Books are the reality you get to choose; life is the reality you hide from inside a book. ~ A.M. Hudson

Let me in, Emily, and I swear to you that you'll never regret it.
Ethan Sterling in Private Emotions ~ Elize Amornette

Right after Matt died, I was afraid to do basically everything. I couldn't even bite my nails or sniff my shirt to see if I needed deodorant without feeling like he was watching me. I willed and prayed and begged him to give me a sign that he was watching, that he was with me, so I would know.
But he never did. Time moved on. And I stopped being afraid. Until right now, vulnerable and insecure and a little bit drunk. Lying in the sand and falling in crazy love with someone I just met. Matt is watching me. Observing. Possibly judging. And the worst part of it is, I don't want to wake up under his landslide of sad rocks anymore. I don't want to taste the marzipan frosting and the clove cigarettes. I don't want to think about the blue glass necklace or the books he read to me on his bed or the piles of college stuff or some random boy in the grocery store wearing his donated clothes.
I don't want to be the dead boy's best-friend-turned-something-else.
Or the really supportive neighbor friend.
Or the lifelong keeper of broken-hearted secrets. ~ Sarah Ockler

However many reproductions I might supply, illustrations taken out of the apparatus of the individual bound book can never convey the bookishness of a book, the pace and scale and satisfaction of it, no more than a fish scale can substitute for a real, live unblinking carp, or a slice of honey-glazed ham can the suggest the respectable professional pig. ~ Gregory MacGuire

There are many ways in which songs differ from books, but both songwriters and novelists are looking for material that will somehow mean something beyond itself, something that contains echoes and ironies and texture and complication.
something both timely and timeless ~ Nick Hornby

I am in this same river. I can't much help it. I admit it: I'm racist. The other night I saw a group (or maybe a pack?) or white teenagers standing in a vacant lot, clustered around a 4x4, and I crossed the street to avoid them; had they been black, I probably would have taken another street entirely. And I'm misogynistic. I admit that, too. I'm a shitty cook, and a worse house cleaner, probably in great measure because I've internalized the notion that these are woman's work. Of course, I never admit that's why I don't do them: I always say I just don't much enjoy those activities (which is true enough; and it's true enough also that many women don't enjoy them either), and in any case, I've got better things to do, like write books and teach classes where I feel morally superior to pimps. And naturally I value money over life. Why else would I own a computer with a hard drive put together in Thailand by women dying of job-induced cancer? Why else would I own shirts mad in a sweatshop in Bangladesh, and shoes put together in Mexico? The truth is that, although many of my best friends are people of color (as the cliche goes), and other of my best friends are women, I am part of this river: I benefit from the exploitation of others, and I do not much want to sacrifice this privilege. I am, after all, civilized, and have gained a taste for "comforts and elegancies" which can be gained only through the coercion of slavery. The truth is that like most others who benefit from this ~ Derrick Jensen

As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa. ~ Umberto Eco

Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books. ~ Orson Scott Card

Imagine what it would be like to have a bookshelf filled only with books that you really love. Isn't that image spellbinding? For someone who loves books, what greater happiness could there be? ~ Marie Kondo

This is the first time a guy on Date-Match has told the truth. I think it's a sign."

"It's not." I shook my head. "And the model? How did you get someone to take all those pictures?"

"It wasn't a model. It was my roommate." Her eyes widened as I stood up. "Wait a second! All the things I said to you on the phone were absolutely true. I am interested in politics, and I do love studying the law and keeping up with high profile cases."

"What law school did you go to?"

"Law school?" She raised her eyebrow. "No, not law school type of law. Law like, I've watched every episode of SVU and I've read all of John Grisham's books. ~ Whitney G.

She never managed to find herself in these books no matter how hard she tried, exhuming traits from between the pages and donning them for an hour, a day, a week. We think in some ways, we have all done this our whole lives, searching for the book that will give us the keys to ourselves, let us into a wholly formed personality as though it were a furnished room to let. As though we could walk in and look around and say to the gray-haired landlady behind us, We'll take it. ~ Eleanor Brown

People talk about books that write themselves, and it's a lie. Books don't write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you'd believe. ~ Neil Gaiman

Doctoral training is devoted almost entirely to learning to do research, even though most Ph.Ds who enter academic life spend far more time teaching than they do conducting experiments or writing books. ~ Derek Bok

I don't have many friends. It's not because I'm a misanthrope. It's because I'm reserved. I'm self-contained. I get all my adventures in my head when I'm writing my books. ~ Ian Rankin

If only they would all just leave me alone with my books and my letters, I would be content to let life, and the world pass me by ~ Alison Weir

Magazine articles are the new books. ~ Tina Brown

ROSES UNDERFOOT

The sound of salaams rising as
waves diminish down in prayer,

hoping for some trace of the one
whose trace does not appear. If

anyone asks you to say who you
are, say without hesitation,

soul withing soul within soul.
There's a pearl diver who does

not know how to swim! No matter.
Pearls are handed him on the

beach. We lovers laugh to hear,
"This should be more that and

that more this,"coming from
people sitting in a wagon tilted

in a ditch. Going in search of
the heart, I found a huge rose

under my feet, and roses under
all our feet! How to say this

to someone who denies it? The
robe we wear is the sky's cloth.

Everything is soul and flowering.

---------------------------------

I open and fill with love and
other objects evaporate. All

the learning in books stays put
on the shelf. Poetry, the dear

words and images of song, comes
down over me like mountain water.


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Any cup I hold fills with wine
that lovers drink. Every word

I say opens into mystery. Any way I turn I see brilliance. ~ Rumi

Forget decorated generals, tell me about Private Ryan. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves. Early reading has more influence than any religious teaching. ~ Graham Greene

The experience gathered from books, though often valuable,is but the nature of learning whereas the experience gained from actual life is of the nature of wisdom ~ Samuel Smiles

Life and love can be so cruel and beautiful and utterly confusing. This isn't the love I dreamed of as a little girl. This isn't the whirlwind romance I swooned over in books. There's no sparkly ring, no wedding bells, no husband holding our baby in the delivery room. But what we have is a real love. It's dark, and ugly; raw and passionate. It brings pain and it brings happiness and everything in between. This love - our love – is a love that never dies. It withers in the dark and comes back to life again under bright moments even stronger than it was before. ~ Carian Cole

Zorba sighed. He lit a cigarette, took one or two puffs and then threw it away.
My country, you say? ... You believe all the rubbish your books tell you ... ? Well, I'm the one you should believe. So long as there are countries, man will stay like an animal, a ferocious animal ... But I am delivered from all that, God be praised! It's finished for me! What about you? ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

I think she'll fit quite well. As wives go, Miss Pursling will be just like these books. When I wish to take her down and read her, she'll be there. When I don't, she'll wait patiently, precisely where she was left. She'll make me a comfortable wife, Ames. Besides, my mother likes her. ~ Courtney Milan

Female authors were still using male names when I was young, or they were neatly shoehorned into 'women's books' except for those few that men could always point at when the disparity was pointed out. ~ Sherwood Smith