The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
If you wanna fight, do it on your own time, in a parking lot or somewhere. Not in a school, surrounded by books.
TV: Eastbound and Down
Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
…the books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation—a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.
in a letter to Oskar Pollak
The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practised at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness.
Children don’t read to find their identity, to free themselves from guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion or to get rid of alienation. They have no use for psychology…. They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff…. When a book is boring, they yawn openly. They don’t expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish illusions.
I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
Article: “Enough Bookshelves,” New York Times, 7 August 1991
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself… You bring to a novel—anything you read—all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them. As it is, the act of purchasing them is often mistaken for the assimilation and mastering of their content.
Books don’t behave. We have long needed a medium for expressing theories about behaving systems. Now we have one, and a few years of programming explorations can resolve or clarify some issues which have survived centuries of disputation.
Book: “The Computer Revolution in Philosophy”, by Aaron Sloman
October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or of shutting a book, did not end a tale.
Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: “It is simply a matter,” he explained to April, “of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content.”
Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: “It is simply a matter,” he explained to April, “of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content.”
Comic: “Sandman #28” by Neil Gaiman
Outside of a dog, books are man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.
Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.
You must write every single day of your life … You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads … .may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
The man who enters a library is in the best society this world affords; the good and the great welcome him, surround him, and humbly ask to be allowed to become his servants.
There are books in which the footnotes or comments scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margin are more interesting that the text. The world is one of these books.
I do note with interest that old women in my books become young women on the covers… this is discrimination against the chronologically gifted.
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.
We forfeit the chief source of dignity and sweetness in life if we do not seek converse with the greater minds that have left their vestiges on the world.
A book is a friend; a good book is a good friends. It will tlak to you when you want it to talk, and it will keep still when you want it to keep still; and there are not many friends who know enough to do that.
No two people read the same book.
There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.
Book: Dune - from “Collected Sayings of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan
Logic is a wonderful thing, but doesn’t always beat actual thought.
Pullling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.
You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.
Book: “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” by J.K. Rowling