Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.
Write it down, boy. If you come across a passage in your reading that you’d like to remember, write it down in your little book; then you can read it again, memorize it, and have it whenever you wish.
A censor is an expert in cutting remarks. A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.
I hate most people. And I don’t want to, it’s an awful way to be. But the human race gives me no comfort. I find myself turning to books and films for comfort still. It’s repulsive, because one’s life consists of people, not things.
There was something appealing in thinking of a character with a secret life that her author knew nothing about. Slipping off while the author's back was turned, to find love in her own way. Showing up just in time to deliver the next bit of dialogue with an innocent face.
Unpacking books is a revelatory activity.
Success is no proof of virtue. In the case of a book, quick acclaim is presumptive evidence of a lack of substance and originality.
I love staring at my books for hours just trying to decide which book to read next. Doing that is almost as fun as actually reading them.
Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.
It was books that kept me from taking my own life after I thought I could never love anyone, never be loved by anyone again.
I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.
Maybe Heaven will be a library and then I might get to finish my ‘to-read’ list.
I was so getting tired of fighting for my life in the library.
If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them – peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.
There's no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature.
anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
A book is a wonderful present. Though it may grow worn, it will never grow old.
Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.
Learning became her. She loved the smell of the book from the shelves, the type on the pages, the sense that the world was an infinite but knowable place. Every fact she learned seemed to open another question, and for every question there was another book.
