To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions—there we have none.
A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.
He began to read at haphazard. He entered upon each system with a little thrill of excitement, expecting to find in each some guide by which he could rule his conduct; he felt himself like a traveller in unknown countries and as he pushed forward the enterprise fascinated him; he read emotionally, as other men read pure literature, and his heart leaped as he discovered in noble words what himself had obscurely felt.
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?
She was addicted to literature like some people were addicted to heroin.
What a glut of books! Who can read them?
Books are a finer world within the world. (1863)
Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.
On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favourite book.
Books and movies, they are not mere entertainment. They sustain me and help me cope with my real life.
Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.
Take my books away, and I should be desperate!
No encounter occured that day, and I was glad of it; I took out of my pocket a little Homer I had not opened since leaving Marseilles, reread three lines of the Odyssey, learned them by heart; then, finding sufficient sustenance in their rhythm and reveling in them at leisure, I closed the book and remained, trembling, more alive than I had thought possible, my mind numb with happiness.
This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.
The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know — the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be…. The thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever.
Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.
Pinapakita nyong mga dayuhang libro pa rin at mga dayuhang libro lang ang tinatangkilik ng mga tao. Bakit magsusugal ang mga publisher sa Pilipinong manunulat kung hindi naman pala mabili ang mga kwentong isinusulat ng mga Pilipino? At kung walang mga publisher na tatanggap ng mga trabaho ng mga Pilipinong manunulat, sino pa ang gugustong magsulat? Kung walang magsusulat, ano ang kahihinatnan ng panitikan sa bansa at sa kakayanan nating bumasa't sumulat?
We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.
You'll never be alone if you’ve got a book.
Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes–characters even–caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you
