I wanted to pull down a book, open it proper, and gobble up page after page
Remind me not to piss you off Red. You might aim for the heart and shoot me in the balls.
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
Remember, when you don’t know what to do, it never hurts to play Scrabble. It’s like reading the I Ching or tea leaves.
If you`re wondering how you`ll find time, it means you don`t really want to read. Because nobody`s ever got time. Children certainly haven`t, nor have teenagers or grown-ups. Life always gets in the way. <...> Time to read is always time stolen. <...> Stolen from what? From the tyranny of living.”- p.125
Books are magical keys to open up worlds and change perspectives.
Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine.
No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.
Books. People have no idea how beautiful books are. How they taste on your fingers. How bright everything is when you light it with words.
One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.
In reading he found solitude. In reading he could dispel the blare of the world.
And he loves to read. He loves the whisper of the pages and the way his fingertips catch on rough paper, the pour of the words up from the leaves, through soft light, into his eyes, the mute voice in his ears.
After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels.
And how could anyone consent to give up the smell of open books, old or new?
I think I’m always so much more happy with books and movies and stuff. I think I get more excited about well-done representations of life than life itself. - Celine
So I kept reading, just to stay alive. In fact, I'd read two or three books at the same time, so I wouldn't finish one without being in the middle of another -- anything to stop me from falling into the big, gaping void. You see, books fill the empty spaces. If I'm waiting for a bus, or am eating alone, I can always rely on a book to keep me company. Sometimes I think I like them even more than people. People will let you down in life. They'll disappoint you and hurt you and betray you. But not books. They're better than life.
A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones.
Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head.
What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?
In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.
