From Book Quotes

A book is a fragile creature. It suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands.

Perceval Press a publishing house I founded in 2002 and it's still going strong. Strong for us means not so many books per year, but each one we very carefully design and print.

My first reaction to finding Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in a book was, Wow, what a great photograph! I could not believe that someone had gone to so much trouble just to end up with a picture.

I'm a collecting maniac and I buy a lot of books and records. I have over thousand cds.

I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk treasure.

Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.

It is with books as with the fires of our grates, everybody borrows a light from his neighbor to kindle his own, which in turn is communicated to others, and each partakes of all.

Games are not about being told things. If you want to tell people things, write a book or make a movie. Games are dialogues - and dialogue requires both parties to take the floor once in a while

The gospel we preach must not be just something we hear from men or read from books or even conceived through our meditation. Unless it is delivered to us by God, it can serve no spiritual utility.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

I'm trying to find out what's actually true, which is nearly always something, if not a world of things, that you can't read in books.

Look for knowledge not in books but in things themselves.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

If you were a fully realized person-whatever the hell that would be-you wouldn't fool around writing books.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

In a world in which men write thousands of books and one million scientific papers a year, the mythic bricoleur is the man who plays with all that information and hears a music inside the noise.

Each book can make a life or a fragment of it more beautiful.

I'll note you in my book of memory.

O heaven! that one might read the book of fate, and see the revolution of the times.

Your face is a book, where men may read strange matters.

Up! up! my friend, and quit your books, Or surely you 'll grow double! Up! up! my friend, and clear your looks! Why all this toil and trouble?

We are born to die tomorrow, and yet through books we are able to know events of thousands of years.

Life on a lifeboat isn't much of a life.

Every morning, after a few sips of coffee and a bit of small talk, each of us retreats with our books, and travels centuries away from this place.

I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.

When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.

Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.

There is nothing in our book, the Koran, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent.

Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.

Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.

In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world.

Everything comes to him who waits, except a loaned book.

The first thing I did when I sold my book was buy a new wedding ring for my wife and asked her to marry me all over again.

It's a very good historical book about history.

There must be freedom for all to live, to think, to worship, no book, no avenue must be closed.

Creamy and leggy, with long azure hair and the eyes of a silent-movie star, she moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx.

Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.

Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.

We feel the same emotions for our ideas as we do for the real world, which is why we can cry while reading a book, or fall in love with movie stars.

Sometimes you read a book so special that you want to carry it around with you for months after you've finished just to stay near it.

It is as great a thing to love as it is to be loved. Love is not something that can be wasted.

We read privately, mentally listening to the author's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it.

I have written two nonfiction books, I'm embarrassed to say.

I must have books everywhere. They're the soul of a room-they reveal the taste, the interests, and the secrets of whoever lives there.

There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.

... old clothes, old friends, old books. One needs constants in a traveling life.

I'm of the glamorous ladies At whose beckoning history shook. But you are a man, and see only my pan, So I stay at home with a book.

I have a children's book already out and my autobiography.

I want to see books taken out of historical time and placed into a different timeline, such as evolutionary or geological time, as a means of putting the human experience in context.

I build a book the way coral reefs are built: millions of little calcareous skeletons piling up one atop another, though in my case the skeletons are drafts.