Volumes Quotes

We all travelled light, taking with us only what we considered to be the bare essentials of life. When we opened our luggage for Customs inspection, the contents of our bags were a fair indication of character and interests. Thus Margo's luggage contained a multitude of diaphanous garments, three books on slimming, and a regiment of small bottles each containing some elixir guaranteed to cure acne. Leslie's case held a couple of roll-top pullovers and a pair of trousers which were wrapped round two revolvers, an air-pistol, a book called Be Your Own Gunsmith, and a large bottle of oil that leaked. Larry was accompanied by two trunks of books and a brief-case containing his clothes. Mother's luggage was sensibly divided between clothes and various volumes on cooking and gardening. I travelled with only those items that I thought necessary to relieve the tedium of a long journey: four books on natural history, a butterfly net, a dog, and a jam-jar full of caterpillars all in imminent danger of turning into chrysalids. Thus, by our standards fully equipped, we left the clammy shores of England. ~ Gerald Durrell

The big increases in heart and blood volumes that occur by the 12th week of pregnancy should have the same effect as 'blood doping'. This partially explains the outstanding performances of several female athletes from Eastern bloc countries who were at this stage of pregnancy when they competed in the 1976 Olympics. ~ James F. Clapp III

following limitations: 1. These are AP films therefore; the cardiac size cannot be accurately assessed. 2. Pleural fluid lies posteriorly creating a denser hemithorax. 3. A pneumothorax lies anteriorly and so can be missed. 4. Upper lobe vessels will be prominent even in the absence of cardiac failure. 5. Good inflation of the lungs is difficult, even if the volumes are normal. ~ David Wilson

Unfair," I said as Captain Goode opened a door to reveal a beautiful library. The room seemed to stretch on forever. Bookshelves lined all the walls. Hundreds, thousands of volumes. The air carried that wonderfully comfortable and musty scent of dust, age, and wisdom that only worn books can emit. ~ Tarun Shanker

[Mary Wortley Montagu] wrote more letters, with fewer punctuation marks, than any Englishwoman of her day; and her nephew, the fourth Baron Rokeby, nearly blinded himself in deciphering the two volumes of undated correspondence which were printed in 1810. Two more followed in 1813, after which the gallant Baron either died at his post or was smitten with despair; for sixty-eight cases of letters lay undisturbed ... 'Les morts n'écrivent point,' said Madame de Maintenon hopefully; but of what benefit is this inactivity, when we still continue to receive their letters? ~ Agnes Repplier

When one has never heard a man's name in the course of one's life, it speaks volumes for him; he must be quite respectable. ~ Oscar Wilde

The shadows outside tamed none of him. No, they cast him as stronger and more dangerous than ever before. He was bigger. Hungrier. Predatory.

He said nothing as he crawled through the window, but his dark, flashing eyes and body stalking toward her spoke volumes. ~ Kendall Grey

We were like matching bookends, almost touching but with volumes between us and stories, so many stories. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

What is more, in fact, we very soon look upon the world as something whose non-existence is not only conceivable, but even preferable to its existence. Therefore our astonishment at it easily passes into a brooding over that *fatality* which could nevertheless bring about its existence, and by virtue of which such an immense force as is demanded for the production and maintenance of such a world could be directed so much against its own interest and advantage."

―from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne. In Two Volumes, Volume II, p. 171 ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

I got four volumes of the letters and speeches of Oliver Cromwell. He is prominent among the great unread, and treated so oddly by history that I wanted to hear his side of things. ~ Marilynne Robinson

One day I was handed a few volumes of new literature unlike anything I had ever read before and so captivating as to make me utterly forget my hopeless state. They were the earlier works of Mark Twain and to them might have been due the miraculous recovery which followed. Twenty-five years later, when I met Mr. Clemens and we formed a friendship between us, I told him of the experience and was amazed to see that great man of laughter burst into tears. ~ Nikola Tesla

When I take my old copies of the phenomenologies of religion down from the shelf and thumb through their pages, I feel as if I were walking through the halls of abandoned buildings. My graduate school notes lie heavy in the margins, like scrawls of graffiti on the walls, attesting to the fact that human once contested these spaces. I wonder, each time I close one of these volumes and put it back on the shelf, whether the puff of dust that arises from its binding is not a reminder that systems are built to crumble, and the grander the system, the more spectacular the fall. ~ Malcom David Eckel

The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes. ~ James Agee

The not-doing spoke volumes. ~ Charles M. Blow

It was a singular bedroom, with its high walls of brown volumes, but there could be no more agreeable furniture to a bookworm like myself, and there is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book. I assured him that I could desire no more charming chamber, and no more congenial surroundings. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood
it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation
which these books arouse in a genuine collector. ~ Walter Benjamin

The air, soil and water cumulatively degrade; the climates and oceans destabilize; species become extinct at a spasm rate across continents; pollution cycles and volumes increase to endanger life-systems at all levels in cascade effects; a rising half of the world is destitute as inequality multiplies; the global food system produces more and more disabling and contaminated junk food without nutritional value; non-contagious diseases multiply to the world's biggest killer with only symptom cures; the vocational future of the next generation collapses across the world while their bank debts rise; the global financial system has ceased to function for productive investment in life-goods; collective-interest agencies of governments and unions are stripped while for-profit state subsidies multiply; police state laws and methods advance while belligerent wars for corporate resources increase; the media are corporate ad vehicles and the academy is increasingly reduced to corporate functions; public sectors and services are non-stop defunded and privatized as tax evasion and transnational corporate funding and service by governments rise at the same time at every level. ~ John McMurtry

Victor-Marie Hugo (26 February 1802 - 22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights campaigner, and perhaps the most influential exponent of the Romantic movement in France. In France, Hugo's literary reputation rests on his poetic and dramatic output. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles stand particularly high in critical esteem, and Hugo is sometimes identified as the greatest French poet. In the English-speaking world his best-known works are often the novels Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris (sometimes translated into English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame). Though extremely conservative in his youth, Hugo moved to the political left as the decades passed; he became a passionate supporter of republicanism, and his work touches upon most of the political and social issues and artistic trends of his time. Source: Wikipedia ~ Victor Hugo

Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists. When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence. ~ Edmond De Goncourt

The Reverie of Poor Susan
AT the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,
Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years:
Poor Susan has pass'd by the spot, and has heard
In the silence of morning the song of the bird.
'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees
A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.
Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale
Down which she so often has tripp'd with her pail;
And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's,
The one only dwelling on earth that she loves.
She looks, and her heart is in heaven: but they fade,
The mist and the river, the hill and the shade;
The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,
And the colours have all pass'd away from her eyes! ~ William Wordsworth

Just handling this ocean of different books - new and used, in and out of print, famous and forgotten - it was literature as this giant mosaic of texts and experiments and attitudes. I think it's just very liberating to break out of a great man's theory of history.
I guess I've always liked working from that sense of - what would you call it? - license that the margins permit. I always just visualize myself writing books that were meant one day to be dusty, forgotten volumes being encountered by intrepid browsers in a used bookstore. It was a much less freighted way to think about trying to enter the conversation than to imagine I had to write The Great Gatsby. ~ Jonathan Lethem

At a very early age I started a cartoon scrapbook, actually when I was in high school. And it became, in turn, a scrapbook of my life. And there are about 2,000 volumes. ~ Hugh Hefner

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

While dead men tell no tales, their corpses often speak volumes. ~ Douglas Preston

As long as we see church life as a meeting we'll miss its reality and its depth. If the truth were told, the Scriptures tell us very little about how the early church met. It tells us volumes about how they shared life together. They didn't see the church as a meeting or an institution, but as a family living under Father. ~ Wayne Jacobsen

This job has three requirements, each very strict. Do not agree to them lightly. Clerks in this store have followed these rules for nearly a century, and I will not have them broken now. ( ... ) Two: You may not browse, read, or otherwise inspect the shelved volumes. Retrieve them for members. That is all"
( ... )
"You must keep precise records of all transactions. The time. The customer's appearance. His state of mind. How he asks for the book. How he receives it. Does he appear to be injured. Is he wearing a sprig of rosemary on his hat. And so on ~ Robin Sloan

I think we function better mentally, emotionally, and physically when we take care of our bodies with nourishment, water, and exercise. The lie I used to believe was that my weight would define me, that it would speak volumes about who I was as a person. Today I believe it's not your weight that defines you, but the care and consideration you put into your body absolutely does. ~ Rachel Hollis

As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes. ~ Denis Diderot

I think that sonically, music speaks volumes more than words do, and I have always thought that and will continue to think that for the rest of my life. ~ Zach Condon

The Complete Work is essentially dramatic, thought it takes different forms - prose passages in this first volume, poems and philosophies in other volumes. It's the product of the temperament I've been blessed or cursed with - I'm not sure which. All I know is that the author of these lines (I'm not sure if also of these books) has never had just one personality, and has never thought or felt except dramatically - that is, through invented persons, or personalities, who are more capable than he of feeling what's to be felt. ~ Fernando Pessoa

There's volumes to be said for a wine that takes you three glasses to decide whether you find it compelling or repellent." - EVAN AND BRIAN MITCHELL The Psychology of Wine ~ Karen MacNeil

He grabs my arm and pulls me into his embrace. I close my eyes and it's perfection. The kiss is needy and desperate even if it's closed mouth. It's the things we don't say. Words like, I needed you more than anything in the entire world and here you are. It's the sentences neither of us can say. Because neither of us likes grand gestures or big words. But the kiss says it all, the desperate tremble of his fearful lips against mine, speak volumes compared to the words we may or may not be able to say. ~ Tara Brown

The girl who'd written volumes on the walls but never said a word. ~ Sarah Ockler

Many of the volumes had spines covered in numbers, symbols, or languages she didn't read. There were also a few spines with titles that she would have liked to read, had she not felt pressed for time.

Mermaids and Mermen and How to Become One

Ten Essential Rules of Time Travel

Shape-shifting for Beginners

Cakes, Cakes, and More Cakes

Turning Your Shadow into a Pet

Love, Death, and Immortality ~ Stephanie Garber

All of the biggest technological inventions created by man - the airplane, the automobile, the computer - says little about his intelligence, but speaks volumes about his laziness. ~ Mark Kennedy

You have not really learned a commandment until you have obeyed it. The Church suffers today from Christians who know volumes more than they practice. ~ Vance Havner

Mark ran his fingers over the bindings and
whispered words, written long ago, words that
wriggled through the aged leather, trembled
beneath his touch. What lives and loves,
hopes and dreams, deaths and despair
these volumes held. ~ Ellen Read

Judgment and disrespect is an absolute put off..
It crashes the entire person in my mind!!
We don't speak, our words do..
Words can mean a world in a given circumstance..
So depends on the person using them..his thoughts, understanding and intent to 'assign' a disrespectful meaning !!
Speaks volumes of the person!! ~ Abha Maryada Banerjee

Oh, you ask me, what is the greatest torture of a person who does portraits for a living? I could fill several volumes with nice nasty stories. I don't know. ~ Imogen Cunningham

We are not selling the black cab in large enough volumes. We want to expand globally. ~ Li Shufu

Thus the British Empire came into existence; and thus - for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the woodwork - sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes. ~ Virginia Woolf

Human knowledge consists not only of libraries of parchment and ink - it is also comprised of the volumes of knowledge that are written on the human heart, chiselled on the human soul, and engraved on the human psyche. ~ Michael Jackson

The house was a vast labyrinth of books. Volumes were stacked from floor to ceiling on every wall, dark, crackling, redolent of leather bindings, smooth to the touch, with their gold titles and translucent gilt-edged pages and delicate typography. ~ Isabel Allende

Of course, a single verse of the Holy Qur'an or a hadith moves the faithful to good actions, but volumes of books would not move an unwilling person who is like an ass carrying a load of books. ~ Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhalvi

for instance, the theories and practices of art and photography with anthropological theory and practice (e.g. Edwards 1997a; da Silva and Pink 2004; Grimshaw and Ravetz 2004; Schneider and Wright 2005). The interdisciplinary focus in visual methods has also been represented in Theo van Leeuwen and Carey Jewitt's Handbook of Social Research (2000) and Chris Pole's Seeing is Believing (2004) both of which combine case studies in visual research from across disciplines. The idea that visual research as a field of interdisciplinary practice is also central to Advances in Visual Methodology (Pink 2012a) and is demonstrated by the work of the volume's contributors, as well as by the recent SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods (Margolis and Pauwels 2011). Likewise the interdisciplinary journal Visual Studies (formerly Visual Sociology) provides an excellent series of examples of visual research, practice, theory and methodology. ~ Sarah Pink

Sence and Sensibility, for instance, came out in three separate volumes, as did Pride and Prejudice (so the next time you read one of the ubiquitous time-travel Austen adaptations and somebody picks up a single-volume first edition, you can hit your nerd buzzer and say "wrong!"). ~ Amy Smith

So all that fame had lasted less than a hundred years! Les Orientales, Les Meditations, La Comedie Humaine - forgotten, lost, unknown! Yet here were huge crates of books which giant steam cranes were unloading in the courtyards, and buyers were crowding around the purchase desk. But one of them was asking for 'Stress Theory' in twenty volumes, another for an 'Abstract of Electric Problems', this one for 'A Practical Treatise for the Lubrication of Driveshafts', and that one for the latest 'Monograph on Cancer of the Brain'. 'How strange!' mused Michel. 'All of science and industry here, just as at school, nothing for art!' I must sound like a madman asking for literary works here - am I insane? ~ Jules Verne

An extremely competitive retail market is pushing extensive discounting and large volumes of wine at low prices, and New World competitors from South America and South Africa are also impacting on the market. ~ Trevor O'Hoy

New Haven cultivates ... an open gloom that seems happy to acknowledge disrepair and the superfluity of appearance ... I realized that what cramped the town was the weight of unwritten volumes: they scored lines of unfinished writing on every second face that walked the streets ... ~ Sara Suleri

Whether I'm doing a routine where I want to move people, or if I want to feel moved myself, I definitely tap into those moments where it's not just dancing or movement. It might just be a hand gesture or just a slow look, or even just the way you slightly tip your head forward. These subtleties speak volumes. ~ Derek Hough

Oh, do you have A Tale of Two Cities?"
"That silly thing? Men going around getting their heads chopped off for love? Ridiculus." Will unpeeled himself from the door and made his way toward Tessa where she stood by the bookshelves. He gestured expansively at the vast number of volumes all around him. "No, here you'll find all sorts of advice about how to chop off someone else's head if you need to; much more useful. ~ Cassandra Clare

The great British Library
an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read: one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or pure English, undefiled wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought. ~ Washington Irving

In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned. When I first heard the phrase, I didn't understand it, but over time I came to realize it was perfect. Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual's consciousness is a collection of memories we've cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived. ~ Susan Orlean

The whole notion of exemplary violence seemed to fire Lenin's imagination. On August 11, 1918 he wrote a letter to Bolshevik leaders in Penza that speaks volumes: Comrades! The kulak uprising must be crushed without pity ... An example must be made. 1) Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known bloodsuckers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Take all their grain away from them ... Do this so that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble, know and cry: they are killing and will go on killing the bloodsucking kulaks ... P.S. Find tougher people. ~ Niall Ferguson

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice ... and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart. ~ Gilbert Highet

They can tell us not only what Shakespeare wrote but what he read. Geoffrey Bullough devoted a lifetime, nearly, to tracking down all possible sources for virtually everything mentioned in Shakespeare, producing eight volumes of devoted exposition revealing not only what Shakespeare knew but precisely how he knew it. ~ Bill Bryson

I felt that blush in my chest as we talked stupid talk never quite revealing our queerness to each other but somehow wordlessly generating volumes of desire like some kind of sublanguage that makes you want to splash into it even with all its tensions. ~ David Wojnarowicz

Of many large volumes the index is the best portion and the usefullest. A glance through the casement gives whatever knowledge of the interior is needful. An epitome is only a book shortened; and as a general rule, the worth increases as the size lessens. ~ Robert Aris Willmott

Did you hear about the middle Eastern potentate?" he asked me. "This potentate called a meeting of the wise men in the kingdom, and said, "I want you to gather all the world's knowledge together in one place so that my sons can read it and learn."The wise men went off, and after year, they came back with twenty-five volumes of knowledge. This potentate looked at it and he said, "No. It's too long. Make it shorter." So the wise men went off for another year. When they came back, they gave the potentate a piece of paper with one sentence on it. A single sentence. You know what the sentence was?"
Bob looked at me. I shook my head.
"The sentence was: "This too shall pass."
Bob paused, let it sink in: "I heard that when I was very young and it has always stuck with me. ~ A. J. Jacobs

...their voices are quieter than the other groups around them, but their body language speaks volumes. ~ Sandy Hall

You and I won't ever find ourselves on that cross, but we repeatedly find ourselves at the foot of it. And how we act there will speak volumes about what we think of Christ's character and His call for us to be His disciples. ~ Jeffrey R. Holland

I received her sewing kit and pins and brooches; a blank diary purchased especially for me; "Advice to a Young Married Woman", by a minister, which she asked me not to read till I was older----; "Exemplary Letters for Sundry Occasions"; "The Whole Duty of Woman"; and some volumes of Walter Scott's novels, which I might enjoy when my reading had improved. With a glance at Rev. Fowler, whose advice she had sought in this matter, she said that, for a sensible girl such as she knew me to be, novels by respectable authors could provide harmless amusement, but I must remember not to neglect my duties for them, not to demand that my life be a romance, or over strain myself with too much reading. ~ Phillip Margulies

Are we not like two volumes of one book? ~ Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

The library made me feel safe, as if every question had an answer and there was nothing to be afraid of, as long as I could sort through another volume. ~ Dee Williams

I spent the afternoon in a bookstore. There were no books in it. None had been printed for nearly half a century. And how I have looked forward to them, after the micro films that made up the library of the Prometheus! No such luck. No longer was it possible to browse among shelves, to weigh volumes in hand, to feel their heft, the promise of ponderous reading. The bookstore resembled, instead, an electronic laboratory. The books were crystals with recorded contents. They can be read the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it. But optons were little used, the sales-robot told me. The public preferred lectons - like lectons read out loud, they could be set to any voice, tempo, and modulation. ~ Stanislaw Lem

What then? Are we only to buy the books that we read? The question has merely to be thus bluntly put, and it answers itself. All impassioned bookmen, except a few who devote their whole lives to reading, have rows of books on their shelves which they have never read, and which they never will read. I know that I have hundreds such. My eye rests on the works of Berkeley in three volumes, with a preface by the Right Honourable Arthur James Balfour. I cannot conceive the circumstances under which I shall ever read Berkeley; but I do not regret having bought him in a good edition, and I would buy him again if I had him not; for when I look at him some of his virtue passes into me; I am the better for him. A certain aroma of philosophy informs my soul, and I am less crude than I should otherwise be. This is not fancy, but fact.

[…..]

"Taking Berkeley simply as an instance, I will utilise him a little further. I ought to have read Berkeley, you say; just as I ought to have read Spenser, Ben Jonson, George Eliot, Victor Hugo. Not at all. There is no 'ought' about it. If the mass of obtainable first-class literature were, as it was perhaps a century ago, not too large to be assimilated by a man of ordinary limited leisure _in_ his leisure and during the first half of his life, then possibly there might be an 'ought' about it. But the mass has grown unmanageable, even by those robust professional readers who can 'grapple with whole libraries.' And I am not a prof ~ Arnold Bennett

A poet could write volumes about diners, because they're so beautiful. They're brightly lit, with chrome and booths and Naugahyde and great waitresses. Now, it might not be so great in the health department, but I think diner food is really worth experiencing periodically. ~ David Lynch

It is fascinating that Baghdad had more than 100 public libraries in the year 891, Cordoba had 70 public libraries at the end of 10th century, while the royal library of Caliph al-'Aziz, in the year 988, of the Fatimids in Cairo perhaps had more than 100,000 volumes collection arranged in classified order. ~ Balqis Suja'

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Even if we grant that digital natives think and learn somewhat differently than older generations, we may be doing them a disservice to de-emphasize 'legacy' content such as reading, writing, and logical thinking, or to say that the methodologies we have used in the past are no longer relevant ... Digital immigrants and natives alike are bombarded with vast volumes of information in today's electronic society, which ... calls for an even greater emphasis on critical thinking and research skills
the very sort of 'legacy' content that teachers have focused on since classical times ~ Timothy VanSlyke

We met our partners in Europe, and they are signaling to us that supplies from traditional European gas production sources is falling, and falling substantially. Without new volumes of Russian gas, they simply cannot cope. ~ Alexey Miller

And then when I got home I burrowed about among my books, arranging their volumes and loving the feel of them. ~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

Then, idly scratching his nose, he walks to the bookcase in the living room and stoops before a set of drab brown Victorian volumes gathering dust on the second shelf from the bottom.

How amusing, he thinks, as he withdraws one of them-amusing that a key to dark and ancient rites should survive in such innocuous-looking form.

A young fool like Freirs would probably refuse to believe it. Like the rest of his doomed kind, he'd probably expect such lore to be found only in ancient leather-bound tomes with gothic lettering and portentously sinister titles. He'd search for it in mysterious old trunks and private vaults, in the "restricted" sections of libraries, in intricately carved wood chests with secret compartments.

But there are no real secrets, the Old One knows. Secrets are ultimately too hard to conceal. The keys to the rites that will transform the world are neither hidden nor rare nor expensive. They are available to anyone. You can find them on the paperback racks or in any second-hand bookshop. ~ T.E.D. Klein

There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

He saw a square room furnished as a library. The entire section of the walls which he could spy was covered from floor to ceiling with books. There were volumes of every size, every shape, every colour. There were long, narrow books that held themselves like grenadiers at stiff attention. There were short, fat books that stood solidly like aldermen who were going to make speeches and were ashamed but not frightened. There were mediocre books bearing themselves with the carelessness of folk who are never looked at and have consequently no shyness. There were solemn books that seemed to be feeling for their spectacles; and there were tattered, important books that had got dirty because they took snuff, and were tattered because they had been crossed in love and had never married afterwards. There were prim, ancient tomes that were certainly ashamed of their heroines and utterly unable to obtain a divorce from the hussies; and there were lean, rakish volumes that leaned carelessly, or perhaps it was with studied elegance, against their neighbours, murmuring in affected tones, "All heroines are charming to us. ~ James Stephens

Cablegate is 3,000 volumes of material. It is the greatest intellectual treasure to have entered into the public record in modern times. ~ Julian Assange

His manners were less pure, but his character was equally amiable with that of his father. Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than ostentation. ~ Edward Gibbon

Whatever doubt there may be as to the quality or purpose of our free speech we certainly have ample volumes in production. ~ Herbert Hoover

Precepts or maxims are of great weight; and a few useful ones on hand do more to produce a happy life than the volumes we can't find. ~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

To make a library It takes two volumes And a fire. Two volumes and a fire, And interest. The interest alone will do If logs are few. ~ Carolyn Wells

The sheer volumes of songs have come from the hours of cold and darkness that one spends inside with the lights on. ~ Paul Westerberg

To be really realistic a description would
have to be endless. Where Stendhal describes in one phrase Lucien Leuwen's entrance into a room, the
realistic artist ought, logically, to fill several volumes with descriptions of characters and settings, still
without succeeding in exhausting every detail. Realism is indefinite enumeration. By this it reveals that its
real ambition is conquest, not of the unity, but of the totality of the real world. Now we understand why it
should be the official aesthetic of a totalitarian revolution. But the impossibility of such an aesthetic has
already been demonstrated. Realistic novels select their material, despite themselves, from reality,
because the choice and the conquest of reality are absolute conditions of thought and expression. To
write is already to choose. There is thus an arbitrary aspect to reality, just as there is an arbitrary aspect to
the ideal, which makes a realistic novel an implicit problem novel. To reduce the unity of the world of
fiction to the totality of reality can only be done by means of an a priori judgment which eliminates form,
reality, and everything that conflicts with doctrine. Therefore so-called socialist realism is condemned by
the very logic of its nihilism to accumulate the advantages of the edifying novel and propaganda
literature. ~ Albert Camus

The French fairy tale writers were so popular and prolific that when their stories were eventually collected in the 18th century, they filled forty–one volumes of a massive publication called the Cabinet des Fées. Charles Perrault is the French fairy tale writer whom history has singled out for attention, but the majority of tales in the Cabinet des Fées were penned by women writers who ran and attended the leading salons: Marie–Catherine d'Aulnoy, Henriette Julie de Murat, Marie–Jeanne L'Héritier, and numerous others. These were educated women with an unusual degree of social and artistic independence, and within their use of the fairy tale form one can find distinctly subversive, even feminist subtext. ~ Terri Windling

Yale University is famous for its Sex Week. It does not have a Dignity of the Worker Week or even a Save the Planet Week. This self-involved focus speaks volumes about the preoccupations of today's ruling class. ~ R. R. Reno

Adieu, valour: rust, rapier: be still, drum, for your manager is in love: yea, he loveth. Assist me, some extemporal god of rhyme, for I am sure I shall turn sonnet. Devise, wit: write, pen, for I am for whole volumes in folio. ~ William Shakespeare

The information capacity recorded in DNA is of a size which
astonishes scientists. There is enough information in a single human
DNA molecule to fill a million encyclopedia pages or 1,000 volumes.
To put it another way, the nucleus of a cell contains information, equivalent
to that in a 1 million-page encyclopedia. It serves to control all
the functions of the human body. To make a comparison, the 23-volume
Encyclopedia Britannica, one of the largest encyclopedias in the world,
contains a total of 25,000 pages. Yet a single molecule in the nucleus of
a cell, and which is so much smaller than that cell, contains a store of
information 40 times larger than the world's largest encyclopedias.
That means that what we have here is a 1,000-volume encyclopedia,
the like of which exists nowhere else on Earth. This is a miracle of
design and creation within our very own bodies, for which evolutionists
and materialists have no answer. ~ Harun Yahya

Whenever there's a new music, there's a new way of listening. And whenever there's a new way of listening, there are new musics that follow from that. And people start listening differently - that can either mean in different places or at different volumes or in different social groups or through different technologies. ~ Brian Eno

Elegance? It may seem odd to non-scientists, but there is an aesthetic in software as there is in every other area of intellectual endeavour. Truly great programmers are like great poets or great mathematicians - they can achieve in a few lines what lesser mortals can only approach in three volumes ~ John Naughton

I suppose it was the worst book any man has ever written. It was a colossal tome and faulty from start to finish. But it was my first book and I was in love with it. If I had had the money, as Gide had, I would have published it at my own expense. If I had had the courage that Whitman had, I would have peddled it from door to door. Everybody I showed it to said it was terrible. I was urged to give up the idea of writing. I had to learn, as Balzac did, that one must write volumes before signing one's own name. I had to learn, as I soon did, that one must give up everything and not do anything else but write, that one must write and write and write, even if everybody in the world advises you against it, even if nobody believes in you. Perhaps one does it just because nobody believes; perhaps the real secret lies in making people believe. That the book was inadequate, faulty, bad, terrible, as they said, was only natural. ~ Henry Miller

The world was a glorious place this morning. The birds were particularly noisy in their greeting to the day. The sky was a cloudless blue, the color of delphiniums.
He'd never before equated the color of the sky to a flower.
This morning he would show Ellice some of the rare volumes in the Forster collection. He hoped she would be impressed at the illuminated scrolls or the Bible he suspected was one of the first Gutenberg volumes. Would she be interested in the Latin poetry he'd found? One of his ancestors had evidently collected erotic poetry. ~ Karen Ranney

Being all talk speaks volumes about you ~ Frank Sonnenberg

A selection of quotes from The Night of Harrison Monk's Death (Jane Hetherington's Adventures in Detection: 1)
"Is this one of the more unusual cases of safe-breaking you've been asked to investigate, Mrs Hetherington?"
"Remember your private detective wants to be able to sleep soundly at night and in their own bed, not one supplied as her Majesty's pleasure."
"It seems to be an open and shut case doesn't it? But it's not you know? How do you know if anything is what it seems?"
"But where is Cheung kin?"
"When I first set eyes on your father, he was spying on a man from between two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica."
"I don't think I need say more." "On the contrary, if you want me to have any idea what you're talking about, I think you do."
"Why don't you report it to the police?" "Because I stole it in the first place didn't I?"
"It's something of a mystery, I admit."
"Vanished into thin air!"
"You sound so sensible Mrs Hetherington. Please help us get to the bottom of this."
Ah, thought Jane – the old story.
"No body was found?"
"Shall I put the kettle on?" "Only if you fill it with whiskey."
"The course of true love didn't run smoothly for me either, you know."
"Life has its tragedies for sure."
"… What do I want? I want money that's what I want. I want money."
She was even more horrified by the words she heard next.
Callum MacCallum knew what it was like to be an outsider. ~ Nina Jon

I can't explain the birds to you even if I tried. In the early morning, when the sun's rays peek over the mountain and subtly light up the landscape in a glow that, if audible, would sound like a hum, the birds sing. They sing in a layered symphony, hundreds deep. You really can't believe how beautiful it is. You hear bass notes from across the farm and soprano notes from the tree in front of you all at once, at varying volumes, like a massive choir that stretches across fifty acres of land. I love birds. But not as much as my wife loves them. My wife thinks about them, whereas I only notice them once they call for attention. But she looks for them, builds fountains for them, and saves them after they crash into windows. I've seen her save many birds. She holds them gently in the palm of her hand, and she takes them to one of the fountains she's built especially for them and holds their beaks up to the gentle trickle of water to let them drink, to wake them up from their dazed stupor. No matter how much time it takes, she doesn't leave them until they recover. And they mostly always do. ~ Portia De Rossi

His name is Carl! Hello, Carl.' Here I hold a dummy mic to Carl.... Standing on my tiptoes. I'm a small person, five foot two- this makes carl look even bigger than he is. Carl says nothing.
'A robot of few words, but your appearance speaks volumes ~ Hank Green

Your internal dialogue has got to be different from what you say. And, you know, in film, hopefully that registers and speaks volumes. It's always the unspoken word and what's happening behind someone's eyes that makes it so rich. ~ Viola Davis

As regards the efficacy of the art and the theories of it, I promise and expect that in these volumes I shall undoubtedly show myself of very considerable importance not only to builders but also to all scholars. ~ Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

When I should have been producing obscure volumes of verse entitled the Triumph of Humpty Dumpty or the Nose with the Luminous Dong! Or at best, like Clare, "weaving fearful vision" ... A frustrated poet in every man. Though it is perhaps a good idea under the circumstances to pretend at least to be proceeding with one's great work on "Secret Knowledge," then one can always say when it never comes out that the title explains the deficiency. ~ Malcolm Lowry

Kafka: cries of helplessness in twenty powerful volumes. ~ Mason Cooley

I flopped on the overstuffed kitchen couch and watched him go. I wondered what would happen to all his films and photographs in the upstairs closet - the documentaries on homelessness and drug addiction, the funny short subjects, the half-finished romantic comedy, the boxes of slice-of-life photographs that spoke volumes about the human condition. I wondered how you stop caring about what you've ached over, sweated over. (Thwonk) ~ Joan Bauer

There is no greater example in apologetics than the apostle Paul speaking at Mars Hill. The irony of the talk Paul gave is in the difference in reaction the Easterner has when reading Paul's address to that of a Westerner. The Easterner is thrilled at how the apostle wove the message starting from where the listeners were to bring them to where he was in his thinking. The average Westerner is quick to point out that few of his hearers responded. Such an attitude says volumes about why the church in the West has been so intellectually weak. To those in the West, the bigger the number of respondents, the more replicated the technique. The bigger the statistic, the greater the success. Westerners are enamored by size, largesse, number of hands raised, and so on. When the sun has set on these reports, we seem rather dismayed when statistics show the quality of the life of the believer is no different from that of the unbeliever. ~ Ravi Zacharias