BOOK QUOTES V

quotations about books

The popular books are the novels, dealing with life under all possible conditions, and they are widely read not only because they are entertaining, but also because they in a measure satisfy an unformulated belief that to see farther, to know all sorts of men, in an indefinite way, is a preparation for better social adjustment--for the remedying of social ills.

JANE ADDAMS

Democracy and Social Ethics


The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

ANITA BROOKNER

Novelists in Interview


Reading useless books is like sowing bad seed--your trouble does not reward you.

EDWARD COUNSEL

Maxims


In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

THOMAS MANN

letter


Books! The chosen depositories of the thoughts, the opinions, and the aspirations of mighty intellects; like wondrous mirrors that have caught and fixed bright images of souls that have passed away; like magic lyres, whose masters have bequeathed them to the world, and which yet, of themselves, ring with unforgotten music, while the hands that touched their chords have crumbled into dust. Books! they are the embodiments and manifestations of departed minds--the living organs through which those who are dead yet speak to us.

E. H. CHAPIN

Living Words


Books were the sustenance of God. And His munitions.

RéGIS DEBRAY

God: An Itinerary


Books that have become classics -- books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal -- always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH

Ponkapog Papers


A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

WILLIAM STYRON

attributed, Writers at Work


A book is a Fantastic Book, though time and space be commonplace enough, though the time be today and the place Camberwell, if only the mind perpetually travels, seeing one after another unexpected things in the consequences of human action or in the juxtaposition of emotions.

HILAIRE BELLOC

On Everything


Why not leave the reading of great books till a great age? Why plague and perplex childhood with complex facts remote from its experience and inapprehensible by its imagination?

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies


What's happening in digital books generally is that a whole bunch of rights that you would effectively have with ordinary books -- like I could loan it to my friend, I could destroy it, I could copy a chapter out of it, I could read it to my children, I could sell it somebody else - all of those rights are erased in the digital context because these shrink wrap licenses and the code built into these books makes it impossible for you legally to give it to a friend, or to sell it to somebody afterward or to copy a chapter out of it or in this case, to read it to your child. So what they are doing is using contracting code to restrict the rights that you used to have. The reason they can do this is that copyright law has always permitted some amount of contracting in addition to the rights granted by copyright. The fact is people didn't waste their time entering into those contracts before because they were essentially unenforceable. You could, in principle, write whatever you want into the shrink wrap license selling the book, but what are they going to do? You can't give this to a friend, how are they going to police that? So because it is impossible to police, there is no reason to require it. But now the technology makes it so that you can begin to police it, so the copyright interest says, "We've always been able to add these restrictions. Now we're adding these restrictions and they should be as enforceable as they were before."

LAWRENCE LESSIG

"Code + Law: An Interview with Lawrence Lessig", OpenP2P, January 29, 2001


What could be better, really, than to sit by the fire in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the windowpanes, and the lamp burns?... You forget everything ... and hours go by. Without moving, you walk through lands you imagine you can see, and your thoughts, weaving in and out of the story, delight in the details or follow the outlines of the adventures. You merge with the character; you think you're the one whose heart is beating so hard within the clothes he's wearing.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Madame Bovary


One only makes books in order to keep in touch with one's fellows after one has ceased to breathe, and thus to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that lives--transitoriness and oblivion.

STEFAN ZWEIG

Selected Stories


No man living in a world as interesting as this ever writes a book if he can help it.

GERALD STANLEY LEE

Crowds


I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the "vain and superstitious habit" of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines on the palms of one's hand.

JORGE LUIS BORGES

"The Library of Babel"


Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a dangerous enemy indeed.

ANNE RICE

The Witching Hour


Don't judge a book by its cover.

ENGLISH PROVERB


Bog-lights, vapours of mysticism, psychic overtones, soul orgies, wailings among the shadows, weird gnosticisms, veils and tissues of words, gibbering subjectivisms, gropings and maunderings, ontological fantasies, pan-psychic hallucinations--this is the stuff, the phantasms of hope, that fills your book shelves.

JACK LONDON

John Barleycorn


What makes the success of many books consists in the affinity there is between the mediocrity of the author's ideas and those of the public.

CHAMFORT

The Cynic's Breviary


We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.

JOHN LUBBOCK

The Pleasures of Life