Books Quotes
The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it -- when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.
She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full.
There is no book that contains absolutely nothing bad, and there is no book that contains absolutely nothing good.
Books are preserved parts of minds.
Five daily newspapers arrive in my California driveway. The New York times and the Wall Street Journal are supplemented by three local papers. As for magazines, I read, or at least skim, Business Week, Forbes, The Economist, INC; Industry Week, Fortune. Other subscriptions include Sales and Marketing Management, Modern Health Care, Progressive Grocer, High Tech Business, and Sloan Management Review from MIT. I religiously read Business Tokyo, Asia Week, and Far Eastern Economic Review. I glance at Newsweek and Time ... but I devour the New Republic, Policy Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, and Public Interest. How about books? A dozen or more each month.
Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book -- I call that vicious!
A book calls for pen, ink, and a writing desk; today the rule is that pen, ink, and a writing desk call for a book.
Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth, a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.
The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books, is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings -- as some savage tribes determine the power of muskets by their recoil; that being considered best which fairly prostrates the purchaser.
Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouse holes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.
I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read, but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.
Borrowers of books -- those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.
Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.
There be some men are born only to suck out the poison of books.
Then I thought of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.