book

Reality doesn__ always give us the life that we desire, but we can always find what we desire between the pages of books.

No one stepping for the first time into a room made of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror--at the cluster or the vastness, the stillness, the mocking reminder of everything one doesn't know, the surveillance--and some of that overwhelming feeling may cling on, even after the rituals and conventions are learned, the geography mapped, and the natives found friendly.

Amanda took the torn page from Maniac. To her, it was the broken wing of a bird, a pet out in the rain.

Give up your thirst for books, so that you do not die a grouch.

In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.

Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

Have you never picked up a book you've read before, and found it speaks to you in a new way?

The world exists to end up in a book.

Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.

One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.

The function of a book is to provide a reading experience.

Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?

In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.

That's what this country needs -- more books!

Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading -- once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive -- is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.

Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers.

As we expand our knowledge of good books, we shrink the circle of men whose company we appreciate.