BOOK QUOTES VII

quotations about books

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Books are all right, but dead men's brains are no good unless you mix a live one's with them.

GEORGE HORACE LORIMER

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He who possesses good books without gaining any profit from them, is like an ass that carries a rich burden and feeds upon thistles.

JOHN THORNTON

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I'm much more willing to buy a novel electronically by someone I don't know. Because if halfway through I think, I don't really like this, I can just stop. I can't throw books out, even if I think they're crummy. I feel like I've got to give it to the library. I've got to loan it to somebody, or I keep it on my shelf. It's like a plant.

SUSAN ORLEAN

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The thing one reads and likes, and then forgets, is of no account. The thing that stays, and haunts one, and refuses to be forgotten, that is the sincere thing.

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH

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There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.... Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

RAY BRADBURY

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When you’re reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners?

ELIF BATUMAN

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A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That's a sign of a good novel. Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.

ALAN LIGHTMAN

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Books are not seldom talismans and spells.

WILLIAM COWPER

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Books are influential in proportion to their obscurity, provided that the obscurity be that of inexpressible Realities. The Bible is the most obscure book in the world. He must be a great fool who thinks he understands the plainest chapter of it.

COVENTRY PATMORE

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Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason--they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON

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One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.

GEORGE W. BUSH

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The covers of this book are too far apart.

AMBROSE BIERCE

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The greatest advantage of books does not always come from what we remember of them, but from their suggestiveness. A good book often serves as a match to light the dormant power within us.

ORISON SWETT MARDEN

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Books are the training weights of the mind.

EPICTETUS

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I want to do something splendid ... something heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead ... I think I shall write books.

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT

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One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.

GRAHAM GREENE

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Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.

W. H. AUDEN

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An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only.

C. S. LEWIS

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For books are more than books, they are the life
The very heart and core of ages past,
The reason why men lived and worked and died,
The essence and quintessence of their lives.

AMY LOWELL

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For out of old fields, as men saith,
Cometh all this new corn from year to year;
And out of old books, in good faith,
Cometh all this new science that men learn.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

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