| Inspiring Words for Readers |
| "It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish." S.I. Hayakawa "It is within the grasp of well-written books that we may travel anywhere, and to any age, and return unmolested but forever changed." Unknown "A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us." Franz Kafka "Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo." Don Marquis "My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects." Ralph Waldo Emerson "Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)" Elizabeth Bishop "You're going to read; just watch your soul." Lou Reed in Perfect Day "This book is not written in anger. It is written in fury." Peter Blake "There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest, “I want you to love her, too!” It is a jealous passion also. He feels a little indignant if he finds that any one else has discovered the book, too." Christopher Morley "A good heavy book holds you down. It’s an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic." Roy Blount Jr "A special feature of the structure of our book is the monstrous but perfectly organic part that eavesdropping plays in it." Vladimir Nabokov |
| Many of which alternately display at Bookcrossing.com |
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| The printed word transforms whomever dares to behold. Annonymous |
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| "Oh, it is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read." Oscar Wilde "All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been in lyings as in magical preservation in the pages of books." Thomas Carlyle "I love to lose myself in other people's minds. Books think for me." Charles Lamb "The book is good / Which puts me in a working mind" Emerson "Nothing links man to man like the frequent passage from hand to hand of a good book." Walter Sickers "We all know books burn - yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory... In this war, we know books are weapons." Franklin D. Roosevelt "All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hours, and the books of all time." John Ruskin "A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured upon purpose to a life beyond life." John Milton "Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature. God's image. But he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye." John Milton "He felt about books as doctors feel about medicines, or managers about plays - cynical but hopeful." Dame Rose Macauley "To every man who struggles with his own soul in mystery, a book that is a book flowers once, and seeds, and is gone." D.H. Lawrence "A book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it." T.S. Eliot "A good book is the purest essence of a human soul." Thomas Carlyle "Child! Do not throw this book about; refrain from the unholy pleasure of cutting all the pictures out! Preserve it as your chiefest treasure." Hilaire Belloc "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." Francis Bacon "We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibres connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibres as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects." Herman Melville "There are books in which the footnotes or comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin are more interesting that the text. The world is one of these books." George Santayanna "The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame." Oscar Wilde "When I am dead, I hope it may be said: 'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.'" Hilaire Belloc "Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen." Samuel Paterson "The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones." Joseph Joubert "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them." Mark Twain "My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) Everybody drinks water." Mark Twain "Never judge a book by its movie." J. W. Eagan "The paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace the hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop." Alfred Hitchcock "She unbent her mind afterwards - over a book." Charles Lamb "When you read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before." Clifton Fadiman "I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book." Groucho Marx "Thank you for sending me a copy of your book - I'll waste no time reading it." Moses Hadas - book reviewer "The covers of this book are too far apart." Ambrose Bierce "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read." Groucho Marx "After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations." H.L. Mencken - on Shakespeare "If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers, who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can't be in books. Books need you!" Gary Paulson - The Winter Room "History will be kind to me for I intend to write it." Sir Winston Churchill "I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it." Toni Morrison "Substitute damn every time you're inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be." Mark Twain "The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense." Tom Clancy "The great American novel has not only already been written; it has already been rejected." Frank Dane "Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it." G.K. Chesterton "Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny." Guy Davenport "I took a speed reading course and read 'war and peace' in twenty minutes. It involves Russia." Woody Allen "A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read." Mark Twain "From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it." Groucho Marx "People disagreeing everywhere you look, makes you wanna stop and read a book." Bob Dylan "The best time for planning a book is when you're doing the dishes." Agatha Christie "My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy." Anne Tyler "Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard." Daphne Du Maurier "I wrote the story myself. It's all about a girl who lost her reputation but never missed it." Mae West "I was gravely warned by some of my female acquaintances that no woman could expect to be regarded as a lady after she had written a book." Lydia M. Child "The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say." Anais Nin "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force." Dorothy Parker "Writing is so difficult that I often feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape punishment in the hereafter." Jessamyn West "It's difficult to beat making your living thinking and writing about subjects that matter to you." Eleanor Holmes Norton "If I couldn't read, I couldn't live." Thelma Green "All books are either dreams or swords. You can cut or you can drug with words." Amy Lowell "Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it." Russell Lynes "Why do writers write? Because it isn't there." Thomas Berger "Every novel should have a beginning, a muddle and an end." Peter De Vries "In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others." Andre Maurois "He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I ever met." Abraham Lincoln "If a writer has to rob his mother he will not hesitate; the ODE ON A GRECIAN URN is worth any number of old ladies." William Faulkner "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library." Jorge Luis Borges "Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy." F. Scott Fitzgerald "Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good." Samuel Johnson "Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research." Wilson Mizner "There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are." W. Somerset Maugham "Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." Mark Twain "The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it." Leo Rosten "Nobody ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have while trying to write one." Robert Byrne "No two persons ever read the same book." Edmund Wilson, critic "Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can read." Mark Twain "Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body." Joseph Addison "Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures." Jessamyn West "Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance." Carl Sandburg "A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious, and marvellous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen." Henry David Thoreau "The wise man reads both books and life itself." Lin Yutang "If you would know what nobody knows, read what everybody reads just one year afterward." Emerson "A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom." Robert Frost "Let us read and let us dance - two amusements that will never do any harm to the world." Voltaire. "October is crisp days and cool nights, a time to curl up around the dancing flames and sink into a good book." John Sinor "It is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can't do anything else, read all that you can." Jane Hamilton "A book is a mysterious object, I said, and once it floats out into the world, anything can happen. All kinds of mischief can be caused, and there's not a damned thing you can do about it. For better or worse, it's completely out of your control." Paul Auster - Leviathan "People without curiosity are like houses without books: there's something unsettling about them." Nikki Gemmell in "Cleave" "Every farmer, every laborer, every fisherman can both read and write — and we think that books instead of being locked up in cupboards, far from the sight of students, should be distributed as widely as possible. The books of our library are therefore passed from hand to hand without returning to the library shelves perhaps for years." Jules Verne - Journey to the Center of the Earth "Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill." Barbara Tuchman "You are the same today that you are going to be in five years from now except for two things: the people with whom you associate and the books you read." Charles Jones "The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all." François Marie Arouet (Voltaire) "Sometimes we don’t pick the books we read; they pick us." The Hurricane (1999 movie with Denzel Washington) "Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint." Mark Twain "There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island ... and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life." Walt Disney "Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic." Ernest Hemingway (from Death in the Afternoon) "These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice...and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart." Gilbert Highet "I always thought the joy of reading a book is not knowing what happens next." Guy Pearce (from the movie Memento) "When you read a book as a child, it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your whole life does." Meg Ryan (from the movie You've Got Mail) "The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading." Edith Wharton "All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you have read one them you will feel that all that happened, happened to you and then it belongs to you forever." Ernest Hemingway "Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life feel free, significant and interesting." Aldous Huxley "Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack." Virginia Woolf "He who destroys a good book kills reason itself." John Milton "Book lovers never go to bed alone." Unknown "When I get a little money I buy books. If any is left, then I buy food and clothes." Erasmus "Words that enlighten the soul are more precious than jewels." Hazrat Inayat Khan "One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time." Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer (1934-1996) "The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others." Clarence Day "Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can read only the title." Virginia Woolf "According to Politian, Lorenzo wished that he might be allowed to spend his entire fortune, even to pledge his furniture, in the purchase of books." Will Durant "The way a book is read ... which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book ... can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it. Anyone who can read can learn how to read more deeply and thus live more fully." Norman Cousins "Reading in a waiting room makes waiting worthwhile, and it’s much cheaper than pretending to talk on a cell phone." August Busch "Those who cultivate letters must be supplied with the books necessary for their purpose; and until this supply is secured I shall not rest." Aldus Manutius "What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it." J.D. Salinger, writer (1919- ) "Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them." Samuel Butler, writer (1835-1902) "Novels... teach you the secret, that the best of life is conversation." Ralph Waldo Emerson "A room uncluttered with books is a room with great potential." August Busch "Read in order to live." Gustave Flaubert "The First Book: Go ahead, it won't bite. Well... maybe a little. More a nip, like. A tingle. It's pleasurable, really. You see, it keeps on opening. You may fall in. Sure, it's hard to get started; remember learning to use knife and fork? Dig in: you'll never reach bottom. It's not like it's the end of the world - just the world as you think you know it." Rita Dove, Poet Laureate of the US 1993-1995 "A good book is the best of friends the same today and forever. " Martin Tupper "A room without books is like a body without a soul." Cicero "Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens ..." Carlos Ruiz Zafon (The Shadow of the Wind) "Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind." James Russell Lowell, poet, editor, and diplomat "From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover that you have wings." Helen Hayes "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 "I would rather be poor in a cottage full of books than a king without the desire to read." Thomas Babington Macaulay "The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking." Christopher Morley "To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is a pleasure beyond compare." Kenko Yoshida "I am a part of all I have read." John Kieran "Wear the old coat and buy the new book." Austin Phelps "A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?" Alexander McCall Smith "It is as easy to dream a book as it is hard to write one." Honore de Balzac "Books are funny little portable pieces of thought." Susan Sontag "Can you grow kumquats here?" Wei-Ching asked. "I've always liked kumquats." "I can grow just about anything you like!" Hsun-ching boasted. "You tell me what you want, and I'll plant it." Wei-Ching laughed and said, "Too bad you can't plant books." Mark Salzman in The Laughing Sutra "A good book contains more wealth than a good bank." Roy L. Smith "Why do we read? We read to know we are not alone." C.S. Lewis "A real book is not one that we read but one that reads us." W.H. Auden "To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting." Edmund Burke "A library is thought in cold storage." Herbert Samuel "When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, 'Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.'" Virginia Woolf "A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum." Henry Miller "In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you." Mortimer Adler "Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once." Cyril Connolly, critic and editor "I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now--only that place where the books are kept." John Steinbeck "A house without books is like a room without windows." Horace Mann "Be you writer or reader, it is very pleasant to run away in a book." Jean Craighead George "There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight." Ezra Pound "These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves." Gilbert Highet "No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting." Mary Wortley Montagu "Literature is the language of society, as speech is the language of man." Louis de Bonald "A man is known by the books he reads" Ralph Waldo Emerson "Books to the ceiling Books to the sky. My pile of books Are a mile high. How I love them! How I need them! I'll have a long beard By the time I read them." Arnold Lobel "Books may well be the only true magic." Alice Hoffman "I love to read. My education is self-inflicted" Groucho Marx "Good books don't give up all their secrets at once." Stephen King "Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are." John Milton "The perils of ambulatory reading. If you have never said Excuse me to a parking meter or bashed your shins on a fireplug, you are probably wasting too much valuable reading time." Sherri Chasin Calvo "The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one that looks as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more stairways than stories and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read." Terry Pratchett "Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand." Ezra Pound "The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book." Samuel Johnson "It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book." Friedrich Nietzsche "Reading is not walking on words, but grasping the soul of them." Paulo Freire "Great literature, if we read it well, opens us up to the world and makes us more sensitive to it, as if we acquired eyes that could see through things and ears that could hear smaller sounds." Donald Hall "I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves." E.M. Forster "Each of us has been designed for one of two immortal functions, as either a storyteller or as a cross-legged listener to tales of wonder, love, and daring. When we cease to tell or listen, then we no longer exist as a people." Bryce Courtenay "If we encountered a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he read." Ralph Waldo Emerson "One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read." John Kenneth Galbraith "The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page." Saint Augustine "Good prose is like a windowpane." George Orwell "Plant trees. They give us two of the most crucial elements for our survival: oxygen and books." A. Whitney Brown "I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork." Peter DeVries "You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me." C.S. Lewis "I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came, he opened to 'I hate to read new books,' and I hollered 'Comrade!' to whoever owned it before me." Helene Hanff "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all." Oscar Wilde "A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body." Sarah Margaret Fuller "Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness." Helen Keller "Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier." Kathleen Norris (Hands Full of Living, 1931) "There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them." Ray Bradbury "My stories run up and bite me on the leg-I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off." Ray Bradbury "Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.... You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms." Angela Carter "My two favorite things in life are libraries and bicycles. They both move people forward without wasting anything. The perfect day: riding a bike to the library." Peter Golkin, museum spokesman "Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, "Lighthouses" as the poet said "erected in the sea of time." They are companions, teachers,magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print." Arthur Schopenhauer "People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading." Logan Pearsall Smith, American essayist and critic "Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all" Henry David Thoreau "Books are engines of change,windows on the world, and (as a poet has said) “lighthouses erected in the sea of time.” They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print." Barbara W. Tuchman "Life is too short to read bad books." Anonymous "Books are packaged dreams." Dean Koontz "Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of one's own." Shopenhauer "When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing." Enrique Jardiel Poncela "A home without books is a body without soul." Marco Tulio Cicerón "Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life." Jesse Lee Bennett "You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend." Paul Sweeney "Reading is not work, not a chore, not drudgery; reading is the most joyful thing, yet, in the world." James Patterson "That is a good book which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit." Amos Bronson Alcott "My books are friends that never fail me." Thomas Carlyle "It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitation, with assurance, admire what is beautiful." Vincent Van Gogh "Children are made readers on the laps of their parents." Emilie Buchwald "I cannot live without books." Thomas Jefferson "One of the first things I associate with the reading of books is the struggle I waged to obtain them. Not to own them, mind you, but to lay hands on them." Henry Miller "What makes a book live? A book lives through the passionate recommendation of one reader to another. Nothing can throttle this basic impulse in the human being. Despite the views of cynics and misanthropes, it is my belief that men will always strive to share their deepest experiences." Henry Miller "Books are one of the few things men cherish deeply. And the better the man the more easily will he part with his most cherished possessions." Henry Miller "A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum--of both books and money! But especially books, for books represent infinitely more than money." Henry Miller "A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold." Henry Miller "Let us dare to read, think, speak and write." John Adams "In my experience, well-read people are less likely to be evil." Lemony Snicket "I suddenly had a little epiphany: all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal." Nick Hornby "The mere brute pleasure of reading is the sort of pleasure a cow must have grazing." G. K. Chesterton "Books are to be called for and supplied on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep; but in the highest sense an exercise, a gymnastic struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself." Walt Whitman "How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones." Henry David Thoreau "Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own." Julian Barnes "Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day." Carlos Ruiz Zafon "The only books that influence are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet to go ourselves." E.M. Forster "Libraries are the memory of mankind." Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe "Authors only begin books. Readers make them complete." Stephen Weeks |