“Come to the book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it and draw your own map.” “But what if I don’t like it?” Ted shrugged. “Then don’t finish it. A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. You prime a pump […]
Books Quotes
You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.
People seldom read a book, which is given to them. The way to spread a word is to sell it at a low price.
Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message 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, comfort us, and open their hearts to us […]
Ideally, we should like to define a good book as one which ‘permits, invites, or compels’ good reading.
Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and puts down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.
Though hardly scientific, (my survey) tended to confirm my suspicion that people like buying books more than they like reading them. And of course, in the famous formulation (credited to Gloria Steinem, among others), writers don’t like writing – they like having written. They like having written under the impression that this means they will […]
To enjoy a book… I find I have to treat it as a sort of hobby and set about it seriously. I begin by making a map on one of the end leafs; then I put in a genealogical tree or two. Then I put a running headline at the top of each page. Finally […]
There is not so poor a book in the world that would not be a prodigious effort were it wrought out entirely by a single mind, without the aid of prior investigators.
Vince Nasco sat in an elaborately carved Italian chair with a deep glossy finish that had acquired its remarkable transparency only after a couple of centuries of regular polishing. To his right was a sofa and two more chairs and a low table of equal elegance, arranged before a backdrop of bookcases filled with leather-bound […]
