books

Literature recounts history, explores knowledge, narrates universal themes of human existence, actives human conscience, enhances understanding of human motives, and explicates the nuances of human behavior.

Stories shape the world.

I can imagine her memories of the novel, or, more likely, of who she was and how she felt when reading it.

Her seven-year-old self had decided that stealing books was morally bankrupt, but since the books hadn__ actually left the library__hey__ merely been relocated__t wasn__ technically stealing. Echo looked around at her sea of tomes, and a single word came to mind: Tsundoku. It was the Japanese word for letting books pile up without reading them all.

But even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight _ matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one__ own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows.

There is much to discover that's not on the back cover!

When you read a great book, you don__ escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape _ into different countries, mores, speech patterns _ but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life__ subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.

That's what sofas are for: sit down, drink a cup of tea, talk of literature. At least that's how I see it.

Quote from __UTURE GONE_:__I set the house on fire. It__ dark outside. The fire tears down the darkness. I turn my back to the place and leave, not knowing where. And suddenly I understand_All dreams are dead now_.

Time_Once it__ gone, it belongs to the past.We do not hold on to the now, andWe do not treasure the future_We keep receiving this present, but we never open and cherish it until it is too late.Until it comes no more.

The novel was set in an unspecified near future, because setting a novel in the present in a time of unprecedented technological and social dislocation seemed to me shortsighted.... To write a book set in the present, circa 2013, is to write about the distant past.

Books__l be back,_ Esther-in-Unalaq predicts. __ait till the power grids start failing in the 2030s and the datavats get erased. It__ not far away. The future looks a lot like the past.

I guess if there__ one thing I can say about the 21st century, it__ that the 21st century is all flash and no substance_ everything is digital, nothing but files of invisible electronic data on computers and mindless zombies on their cellular phones_ it__ sad how because of the digital age, society is ultimately doomed. Nothing in the digital age is real anymore, and you know, they say celluloid film and ray tube televisions and maybe even paper might become obsolete in this century? _What__ most annoying is that nobody cares, they__e just learned to accept the digital age and get addicted to it_ none of them are ever going to step up and say to the world, __ou__e all a bunch of sheep!_ and even if they did say anything, I doubt anyone would listen_ they__e all too obsessed and attached to their cellular phones and overly big televisions and whatever other moronic things they__e got these days_ it almost makes me want an apocalypse to happen, to erase digital technology and force the world to start over again.

I'll make a book on learning how to be a complete moron someday, and I'm sure no one will buy it, because everyone will have mastered that already by the time I gather enough moronism to process it into digestible upgrade instructions for your average village cyborg-idiot.

Never forget,' says Sugar Daddy, 'we are a nation built on sugar. It is our history and it is the source of our prosperity, now and in the future.'This is true. Our entire nation sits on reclaimed land made from sugar. Ours is an island that rose out of the sea, built on a hard core of toffee.

She pulls me further down. More trapped souls reach out to us, dressed in clothes from decades past. The girl ignores them as we descend along the timeline _ decade by decade _ towards the birth of the island.

Xas sighed. "But I don't want to talk about God. Why do I? Sometimes I feel God is all over me like a pollen and I go about pollinating things with God."Sobran opened his eyes and Xas smiled at him. Soban said, "I did think that you talked about God to persuade me you weren't evil. But I've decided that, for you, everything is somehow to the glory of God, whether you like it or not.""I feel that, yes. My imagination was first formed in God's glory. But I think God didn't make the world, so I think my feelings are mistaken."This was the heresy for which Xas was thrown out of Heaven. Sobran was happy it had finally appeared. It was like a clearing. Sobran could almost see this clearing - a silent, sunny, green space into which not a thing was falling, not even the call of a cuckoo. Xas thought the world was like this, an empty clearing into which God had wandered.

Your thoughts define the boundaries of your life. Think big.