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;void(0)) BOOKS . . . see: "AUTHORS" see: "JOURNALISM" see: "LETTERS" see: "PEN (THE)" see: "POETRY" see: "READING" see: "STYLE" see: "WORDS" see: "WRITING" see: "KNOWLEDGE" for other related links If you are reading in order to become a better reader, you cannot read just any book or article. You will not improve as a reader if all you read are books that are well within your capacity. You must tackle books that are beyond you, or, as we have said, books that are over your head. Only books of that sort will make you stretch your mind. --Mortimer J. Adler (19022001) American philosopher, educator, and editor. _How to Read a Book_ [1940] "Reading and the Growth of the Mind" That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit. --[Amos] Bronson Alcott (17991888) American philosopher, teacher, and reformer; father of Louisa May Alcott. _Table Talk_, bk. 1 [1877] Beware of the man of one book. --attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas (12251274) Catholic philosopher and theologian. - The monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power, or of the hands. For have not the verses of Homer continued twenty-five hundred years or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter; during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities have been decayed and demolished? --Francis Bacon (15611626) English philosopher and essayist. _Essex's Device [1595] Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that age appears to be best in four things old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read. --Francis Bacon (15611626) English philosopher and essayist. _Apothegms_, No. 97 [1624] Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books may also be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others. --Francis Bacon (15611626) English philosopher and essayist. "Of Studies", _Essays_ [1625] - - You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive. --James Baldwin (19241987) American author and playwright. Quoted in "Life" (mag.) [24 May 1963]. & note: Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry. --J.D. Salinger (19192010) American novelist and short-story writer. _Catcher in the Rye_ [1951], ch. 24, spoken by the character Mr. Antolini. - - Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. --Henry Ward Beecher (18131887) American Congregational minister; brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, son of Lyman Beecher. _Eyes and Ears_ [1862] "The Duty of Owning Books" Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore! --Henry Ward Beecher (18131887) American Congregational minister; brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, son of Lyman Beecher. "Subtleties of Book Buyers" _Star Papers_ [1855] - The covers of this book are too far apart. --Ambrose Bierce (18421914) American newspaperman, wit, and satirist. A one-sentence review, in C.H. Grattan, _Bitter Bierce_ [1929]. There are persons who honestly do not see the use of books in the home, either for information have they not radio and even television? or for decoration is there not the wallpaper? --Pearl S. Buck (18921973) American author noted for her novels of life in China; winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature. "In Search of Readers" in Helen Hull _The Writer's Book_ [1950]. The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self-activity. --Thomas Carlyle (17951881) Scottish historian and political philosopher. Attributed in James Wood (ed.) _Dictionary of Quotations ..._, p. 417 [1899]. If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come. --Raymond Chandler (18881959) American writer of detective fiction. In "Atlantic Monthly" [12 December 1945]. - It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of all. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. --William Ellery Channing (17801842) American Unitarian clergyman and author. "Self Culture", address delivered in Boston [September 1838]. No matter how poor I am; no matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling; if the sacred writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof, if Milton will cross my threshold to sing to me of Paradise; and Shakespeare to open to me the worlds of imagination and the workings of the human heart, and Franklin to enrich me with his practical wisdom, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live. --William Ellery Channing (17801842) American Unitarian clergyman and author. "Self Culture", address delivered in Boston [September 1838]. - San Francisco's posh Stanford Court Hotel has never lost a Bible but since it put dictionaries in its 402 rooms last month, 41 have been swiped. --Chicago Sun-Times [12 April 1987] After three days without reading, talk becomes flavorless. --Chinese Proverb [Santiago] swept the floor with his jacket and lay down, using the book he had just finished reading as a pillow. He told himself that he would have to start reading thicker books: they lasted longer, and made more comfortable pillows. --Paulo Coelho (b. 1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist. _The Alchemist_, pt. 1 [1993] Why are not more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books are not in everybody's reach; and though it is better to know them thoroughly, than to know them only here and there; yet it is a good work to give a little to those who have neither time nor means to get more. Let every bookworm, when in any fragrant, scarce old tome he discovers a sentence, a story, an illustration, that does his heart good, hasten to give it. --Samuel Taylor Coleridge (17721834) English poet, critic, and philosopher. Quoted in _Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature Science and Arts_ Edited by William and Robert Chambers, Vol. IX, p. 96 [JanuaryJune 1858]. - He that studies books alone, will know how things ought to be; and he that studies men will know how things are. --C.C. Colton (17801832) English clergyman and writer. _Lacon: or, Many Things in Few Words_ [1821 ed.] "Preface" We should have a glorious conflagration if all who cannot put fire into their works would only consent to put their works into the fire. --C.C. Colton (17801832) English clergyman and writer. _Lacon: or, Many Things in Few Words_ [1824 ed.] "Preface" Next to acquiring good friends, the best purchase is useful books. --C.C. Colton (17801832) English clergyman and writer. Attributed by anon. author in _Laconics: or Instructive Miscellanies_ [Philadelphia: William Brown, 1827]. - Wouldst thou find my ashes? Look In the pages of my book; And, as these thy hands doth turn, Know here is my funeral urn. --Adelaide Crapsey (18781914) American poet. "The Immortal Residue" [1915] - Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope- taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master's call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality. --Robertson Davies (19131995) Canadian author and playwright. _Tempest-Tost_, ch. 6 [1951] A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight. --Robertson Davies (19131995) Canadian author and playwright. "Too Much, Too Fast" in _Peterborough Examiner_ (Canada) [16 June 1962] To be a book collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope-fiend with those of a miser. --Robertson Davies (19131995) Canadian author and playwright. _The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks_ [1985] - 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. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead. --Clarence Day (18741935) American author. _The Story of the Yale University Press_ [1920] The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest men of past centuries. --Renι Descartes (15961650) French philosopher and mathematician. _Discours de la mιthode_ (Discourse on Method) [1637] There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away, Nor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing poetry. --Emily Dickinson (18301886) American poet. "There is no frigate like a book" [c. 1873] - Kitty Packard (Jean Harlow): I was reading a book the other day. Carlotta Vance (Marie Dressler): Reading a book? Kitty: Yes. It's all about civilization or something. A nutty kind of a book. Do you know that the guy said that machinery is going to take the place of every profession? Carlotta: Oh my dear, that's something you need never worry about. --"Dinner at Eight" [1933 film] Screenplay by Frances Marion and Herman Mankiewicz. - - Memoirs are inherently wistful, but Larry McMurtry's reminiscences of his life with books not as a novelist but as a reader, book scout, and bookstore owner are especially valedictory. Nearly every page sounds a note of farewell, of stoic, weary resignation, of time running out. While McMurtry's voice remains modest, low-key, and immensely sympathetic, no amount of charm can disguise a pervasive melancholy in his pages. As he says, "A bookman's love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them." But, he fears, the age of eagerly turned pages is passing: Today the sight that discourages book people most is to walk into a public library and see computers where books used to be. In many cases not even the librarians want books to be there. What consumers want now is information, and information increasingly comes from computers. That is a preference I can't grasp, much less share, though I'm well aware that computers have many valid uses. They save lives, and they make research in most cases a thing that's almost instantaneous. They do many good things. But they don't really do what books do, and why should they usurp the chief function of a public library, which is to provide readers access to books? Books can accommodate the proximity of computers but it doesn't seem to work the other way around. Computers now literally drive out books from the place that should, by definition, be books' own home: the library. --Michael Dirda (b. 1948) "The Treasure Hunter", a book review of Larry McMurtry's _Books: A Memoir_ [2008] in _The New York Review of Books_ [14 August 2008]. - There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and at the bottom of the Spanish Main [...] and, best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life. --Walt Disney (19011966) American film producer, cartoon artist and the creator of Disneyland. Quoted in _Democracy in Action_, vols. 19-20 [1961]. - Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action. We cannot learn men from books. --Benjamin Disraeli (18041881) British Tory statesman, novelist, and Prime Minister [1868, 18741880]. _Vivian Grey_ [1827] Many thanks; I shall lose no time in reading it. --Benjamin Disraeli (18041881) British Tory statesman, novelist, and Prime Minister [1868, 18741880]. Acknowledging receipt of an unsolicited manuscript, in Wilfrid Meynell, _The Man Disraeli_ [1927]. - Men love better books which please them than those which instruct. Since their ennui troubles them more than their ignorance, they prefer being amused to being informed. --Jean-Antoine Dubois (17651848) French missionary in India. Quoted in _The New Era_, vol. III [January 1873]. For every £3 of consumer spending in Britain only 1 p goes on books12 times as much goes on beer. _The Economist_ [27 April 1985] Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who read too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. --attributed to Albert Einstein (18791955) German-American physicist. Books are the quietest and most constant of friends, and the most patient of teachers. --Charles William Eliot (18341926) American educator and president of Harvard University [18691909]. "The Durable Satisfactions of Life", Address at Harvard University [3 October 1905] - Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age. --Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882) American philosopher and poet. "Books" in _Society and Solitude_ [1870] The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it. --Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882) American philosopher and poet. _Letters and Social Aims_ [1876] "Quotation and Originality" Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit. --Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882) American philosopher and poet. _Lectures and Biographical Sketches_ [1883] "The Man of Letters" - - When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes. --Desiderius Erasmus (14691536) Dutch humanist and theologian. Attributed in Tryon Edwards _A Dictionary of Thoughts_ [1891]. However one may sing the praises of those who by their virtue either defend or increase the glory of their country, their actions only affect worldly prosperity, and within narrow limits. But the man who sets fallen learning on its feet (and this is almost more difficult than to originate it in the first place) is building up a sacred and immortal thing, and serving not one province alone but all peoples and all generations. Once this was the task of princes, and it was the greatest glory of Ptolemy. But his library was contained between the narrow walls of its own house, and Aldus is building up a library which has no other limits than the world itself. --Desiderius Erasmus (14691536) Dutch humanist and theologian. Praising the Aldine Press, the first modern publishing house; quoted in Daniel J. Boorstin _The Discoverers_ [1983]. - When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in *you* than there was before. --Clifton Fadiman (19041999) American critic and author. _Any Number Can Play_ [1957] - We are as liable to be corrupted by our books as by our companions. --Henry Fielding (17071754) English novelist and dramatist. "A Fragment of a Comment on Lord Bolingbroke's Essays" [1755] & see: Be as careful of the books you read as of the company you keep, for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter. --Edwin Paxton Hood (18201885) English Congregational minister and writer. _Self-Formation_ [4th ed., 1858] - 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. [Edward Morgan] Forster (18791970) English novelist. _Two Cheers for Democracy_ [1951] Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are those that other people have lent me. --Anatole France [Jacques Anatole Thibault] (18441924) French novelist, man of letters, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921. _La vie littιraire_ [1888] A house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body. --[Sarah] Margaret Fuller (18101850) American critic, teacher, and woman of letters. _Woman in the Nineteenth Century_ [1845] I have asked Mr Bernstein, who is an excellent blesser to bless you all and say that in a country where Illiteracy is on the rise and the economy is sinking low and Chastity is out the window it is comforting to know that though the frost is on the pumpkin and civilization is on the skids you guys are ferociously working underground smuggling books into the hands of kids. --Theodor Seuss Geisel [Dr. Seuss] (19041991) American writer and illustrator of children's books. "A Rather Short Epic Poem (size 6 and 7/8)" delivered by Robert Bernstein at the American Booksellers Association meeting [1988]. You may have tangible wealth untold; Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I you can never be I had a mother who read to me. --Strickland Gillian (18691954) "The Reading Mother" Books are a delightful society. If you go into a room filled with books, even without taking them down from their shelves, they seem to speak to you, to welcome you, to tell you that they have something inside their covers that will be good for you, and that they are willing and desirous to impart it to you. --attributed to William Gladstone (18091898) British Liberal statesman, Prime Minister [18681874, 18801885, 18921894]. A library is a repository of medicine for the mind. --Greek proverb Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. --Alfred Whitney Griswold (19061963) American historian and educator. _Essays on Education_ [1954] - Thank you for sending me a copy of your book I'll waste no time reading it. --attributed to Moses Hadas (19001966) Professor, Columbia University, literary classicist, and writer. This book fills a much-needed gap. --attributed to Moses Hadas (19001966) Professor, Columbia University, literary classicist, and writer. I have read your book and much like it. --attributed to Moses Hadas (19001966) Professor, Columbia University, literary classicist, and writer. - In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. ... 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. (Samuel Ichiye) Hayakawa (19061992) English professor and academic; U.S. Senator from California [19771983]. _Language in Thought and Action_ [1978] From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover you have wings. --attributed to Helen Hayes (19001993) One of the most popular American stage actresses of the 20th century. If you would understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely. --Sir Arthur Helps (18131875) English writer and clerk of the Privy Council. Quoted in Connie Robertson _The Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotations_ p. 165 [1998]. To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves. --attributed to Claude-Adrien Helvιtius (17151771) French philosopher. What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred? --Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (18091894) American physician, poet, and essayist. _Over the Teacups_, ch. 7 [1891] It is just those books which a man possesses, but does not read, which constitute the most suspicious evidence against him. --Victor Hugo (18021885) French poet, dramatist, and novelist. _Toilers of the Sea_, bk. 1, iv [1866] - I cannot live without books. --Thomas Jefferson (17431826) American statesman and president [18011809]. Letter to John Adams [10 June 1815]. Books constitute capital. A literary book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital. and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital. --Thomas Jefferson (17431826) American statesman and president [18011809]. Letter to James Madison [September 1821]. - - It was the maxim, I think, of Alphonsus of Aragon, that dead counsellors are safest. The grave puts an end to flattery and artifice, and the information that we receive from books is pure from interest, fear, or ambition. Dead counsellors are likewise most instructive, because they are heard with patience and with reverence. --Samuel Johnson (17091784) English poet, critic, and lexicographer. _The Rambler_ (English twice-weekly journal) [15 January 1751] "Paradise Lost" is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. --Samuel Johnson (17091784) English poet, critic, and lexicographer. _Lives of the English Poets_ "Milton" [1781] I am always for getting a boy forward in his learning; for that is a sure good. I would let him at first read any English book which happens to engage his attention; because you have done a great deal when you have brought him to have entertainment from a book. Hell get better books afterwards. --Samuel Johnson (17091784) English poet, critic, and lexicographer. In James Boswell _The Life of Samuel Johnson_ "16 April 1779" [1791]. - - The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known. People often say that a set of books looks ugly if all volumes are in the same format, but I was impressed to hear the Abbot Koyu say, 'It is typical of the unintelligent man to insist on assembling complete sets of everything. Imperfect sets are better.' --Yoshida Kenko (c. 1283c. 1350) Japanese poet and essayist. _Tsurezure-gusa_ (Essays in Idleness) [c. 1330]. In M.J. Cohan and John Major {eds} _History in Quotations_ [2004]. Cohan & Major add: The priest Kenko notes the Japanese preference for irregularity: 'In everything, no matter what it may be, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth. Someone once told me, "Even when building the imperial palace, they always leave one place unfinished. ' " - Fiction is truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till somebody had told a story. --Rudyard Kipling (18651936) English writer and poet. _A Book of Words_ "Fiction" [1928] Don't judge a book by its cover. --"L.A. Times" [14 March 1897] - Your borrowers of books those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes. --Charles Lamb (17751834) English essayist. _Essays of Elia_ [1823] "The Two Races of Men" There is more reason for saying grace before a new book than before dinner. --Charles Lamb (17751834) English essayist. _Essays of Elia_ [1823] "Grace Before Meat" - - The book has been man's greatest triumph. Seated in my library, I live in a time machine. In an instant I can be transmitted to any era, any part of the world, even to outer space. I have lived in every period of history. I have listened to Buddha speak, marched with Alexander, sailed with the Vikings, ridden in canoes with the Polynesians. I have been at the courts of Queen Elizabeth and Louis XIV; I have been a friend to Captain Nemo and have sailed with Captain Bligh on the Bounty. I have walked in the agora with Socrates and Plato, and listened to Jesus deliver the Sermon on the Mount. Best of all, I can do it all again, at any moment. The books are there. I have only to reach up to the shelves and take them down to relive the moments I have loved. --Louis L'Amour [Louis Dearborn LaMoore] (19081988) American author of Western fiction. _The Sackett Companion_ [1988] - The writings of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander. --Walter Savage Landor (17751864) English poet. _Imaginary Conversations_, vol. 1 [1824] [On the classic formula for a novel:] A beginning, a muddle, and an end. --Philip Larkin (19221985) English poet. In "New Fiction" [January 1978]. - A book is a mirror: when a monkey looks in, no apostle can look out. --Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (17421799) German scientist and drama critic. _Aphorisms_ [17751779] People who have read a good deal rarely make great discoveries. I do not say this in excuse of laziness, but because invention presupposes an extensive independent contemplation of things. --Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (17421799) German scientist and drama critic. In J. P. Stern's _Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions_ [1959], "Further Excerpts from Lichtenberg's Notebooks". - - Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all. --Abraham Lincoln (18091865) American Republican statesman, President [18611865]. Quoted in _Pennsylvania School Journal_, vol. 46, no. 7 [January 1898]. [Upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe in November, 1862:] So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war! --Abraham Lincoln (18091865) American Republican statesman, President [18611865]. Quoted in "McClure's Magazine" [April 1911]. - 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. --attributed to Arnold Lobel (19331987) Author of children's books. The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books. --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (18071882) American poet. _The Masque of Pandora_ [1875] "Morituri Salutamus" - All books are either dreams or swords, You can cut or you can drug, with words. --Amy Lowell (18741925) American poet. Posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1926. "Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds" [1914] 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 (18741925) American poet. Posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1926. _A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass_ [1912] "The Boston Athenaeum" - Cicero described a room without books, as a body without a soul. --Sir John Lubbock (18341913) The First Lord and Baron Avebury who was a British banker, politician, and archaeologist. "A Song of Books" (essay) in Ralph Waldo Emerson _In Praise of Books_ [1860]. If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. --Thurgood Marshall (19081993) American jurist and first African-American to serve on the Supreme Court [19671991]. "Stanley v. Georgia" 394 U.S. 557 [1969] 'Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are' is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you re-read. --attributed to Franηois Mauriac (18851970) French poet, novelist, and dramatist. When you sell a man a book you don't sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue you sell him a whole new life. --Christopher Morley (18901957) American journalist, novelist, and poet. _Parnassus on Wheels_, ch. 4 [1917] As sheer casual reading matter, I still find the English dictionary the most interesting book in our language. --Albert Jay Nock (18701945) American libertarian author and social critic. _Memoirs of a Superfluous Man_, ch. 1, pt. 4 [1943] Back in the nineteen-hundreds it was a wonderful experience for a boy to discover H. G. Wells. There you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers, with your future employers exhorting you to 'get on or get out', your parents systematically warping your sexual life, and your dull-witted schoolmasters sniggering over their Latin tags; and here was this wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of the planets and the bottom of the sea, and who _knew_ that the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined. --George Orwell [Eric Blair] (19031950) English novelist. _Horizon_ [August 1941] [In a book review:] This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force. --Dorothy Parker (18931967) American critic and humorist. Quoted in _The Algonquin Wits_ (ed.) Robert E. Drennan [1968]. - kap posts to USENET newsgrouup: When Alyssa was born I bought 'Grimm's Fairy Tales.' I thought this was the book that my mother read to me when I was very young. Pleased with myself, I sent it to Greg and Annie. About two weeks later Annie calls up and says "why the heck did you send me this book!" I said it was for Alyssa and they were nice fairy tales. Turns out they weren't. They were very depressing fairy tales with a lot of killing and general mayhem. Very dark tales. That's when I remembered that it was 'Anderson's Fairy Tales' that were the good ones. And Aesop's Fables. The best laid plans ..... - A book that furnishes no quotations is, *me judice*, no book it is a plaything. --Thomas Love Peacock (17851866) English satirist and author. _Crochet Castle_, ch. 9 [1831] Books have led some to learning and others to madness. --Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) (13041374) Italian scholar, poet, and Humanist. Quoted in Charles Isaac Elton & Mary Augusta Elton _The Great Book-Collectors_, p. 45 [1893]. A borrowed book is like a guest in the house; it must be treated with punctiliousness, with a certain considerate formality. You must see that it sustains no damage; it must not suffer while under your roof. You cannot leave it carelessly, you cannot mark it, you cannot turn down the pages, you cannot use it familiarly. And then, some day, althought this is seldom done, you really ought to give it back. --William L. Phelps (18651943) American educator, journalist, and man of letters. Radio broadcast [6 April 1933]. The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head. --Alexander Pope (16881744) English poet. _An Essay on Criticism_, pt. III, l. 53 [1711] The thing about Tom Clancy is that you can start reading a Tom Clancy book when the plane takes off in London and you're still reading it when the plane lands in Sydney. And then you can use it to beat snakes to death. --attributed to Terry Pratchett (b. 1948) English science fiction writer. I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. --Anna Quindlen (b. 1952) American writer. "Enough Bookshelves", in _New York Times_ [7 August 1991]. Books, that paper memory of mankind. --Arthur Schopenhauer (17881860) German philosopher. "The Art of Literature: On Men of Learning," _Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer_, tr. T. Bailey Saunders [1851] The best gift to give is intellectual aid, a gift of useful knowledge. . . . Nothing becomes truly "one's own" except on the basis of some genuine effort or sacrifice . . . . The gift of material goods makes people dependent, but the gift of knowledge makes them free. --E.F. Schumacher (19111977) German-born British economist. Referring to aid to people in poor countries in _Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered_ [1973]. A bookstore is one of the only pieces of physical evidence we have that people are still thinking. --Jerry Seinfeld (b. 1954) American actor, writer, and comedian. _SeinLanguage_ [1993] No furniture so charming as books. --Sydney Smith (17711845) English clergyman and essayist. In Lady Holland (Smith's daughter) _Memoir_, vol. I, ch. 9 [1855]. Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. --Robert Louis Stevenson (18501894) Scottish essayist, poet, and novelist. "An Apology for Idlers" _Virginibus Puerisque_ [1881] How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. --Henry David Thoreau (18171862) American essayist, poet, and practical philosopher. _Walden_ [1854] "Reading" Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure. --Edward Thorndike (18741949) American educator and psychologist. Quoted in "Forbes" [1950]. Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. --Barbara Tuchman {nθe Wertheim} (19121989) American historian and author. "Papyrus to Paperbacks: The World That Books Made" in _The Washington Post Book World_. - Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. --Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (18351910) American humorist, novelist, journalist, and river pilot. "Notice," _The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ [1884] 'Classic.' A book which people praise and don't read. --Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (18351910) American humorist, novelist, journalist, and river pilot. _Following the Equator_ [1897], ch. 25 epigraph: "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar" Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. --Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (18351910) American humorist, novelist, journalist, and river pilot. In _Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays 1891-1910_, p. 943 [Library of America, 1992], as quoted in _When in Doubt, Tell the Truth, and other quotations from Mark Twain_, collected by Brian Collins [1996]. The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. --attributed to Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (18351910) American humorist, novelist, journalist, and river pilot. (Ralph Keyes in _The Quote Verifier_ [2006] opines that Abigail Van Buren may have been the first to say this.) A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat. --attributed to Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (18351910) American humorist, novelist, journalist, and river pilot. - It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part; the rest are confounded with the multitude. --Voltaire (Franηois Marie Arouet) (16941778) French writer and philosopher. _The Philosophical Dictionary_, sec. 1 "Books" [1764] If the books which you read are your own, mark with a pen or pencil the most considerable things in them which you desire to remember. Then you may read that book the second time over with half the trouble, by your eye running over the paragraphs which your pencil has noted. It is but a very weak objection against this practice to say, 'I shall spoil my book'; for I persuade myself that you did not buy it as a bookseller, to sell again for gain, but as a scholar, to improve your mind by it; and if the mind be improved, your advantage is abundant, through your book yields less money to your executors. --Isaac Watts (16741748) English hymn writer. _Logic On the Right use of Reason in the Enquiry after Truth_ [1724] During the blitz I was asked if I wanted to have my books or my son evacuated to the safety of the country. I chose my books because many of them were irreplaceable but I could always have another son. --attributed to Evelyn Waugh (19031966) English novelist. Beware you are not swallowed up in books: an ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge. --John Wesley (17031791) English preacher and founder, with his brother Charles, of the Methodist movement in the Church of England. Letter to Joseph Benson [7 November 1768]. Damn all expurgated books, the dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book. --Walt Whitman (18191892) American poet. Quoted in Morris L. Ernst & William Seagle _To the Pure: A Study of Obscenity and the Censor_ [1928]. - There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all. --Oscar Wilde (18541900) Anglo-Irish dramatist and poet. _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ [1891] "Preface" The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means. --Oscar Wilde (18541900) Anglo-Irish dramatist and poet. _The Importance of Being Earnest_, act 2 [1895] - I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it. --Woodrow Wilson (18561924) American Democratic statesman and President [19131921]. Speech to Princeton University students [1910]. Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi. --attributed to Oprah Winfrey (b. 1954) American TV host and businesswoman. To Herbert Westbrok, without whose never-failing advice, help, and encouragement, this book would have been finished in half the time. --P.G. [Pelham Grenville] Wodehouse (18811975) English humorist; American citizen from 1955. _A Gentleman of Leisure_, "Dedication" [1910] ^^ Alexander Woollcott (signing a first edition of his book): "Ah, what is so rare as a Woollcott first edition?" Franklin Pierce Adams: "A Woollcott second edition." ^^ I own enough books to put the Library of Congress out of business, yet I continue to get more and more. It's an alarming trait, among many in my personality. I've tried to come clean and sober, but sooner or later the pull of vice calls, and I become the Mr. Hyde of book-hunting. ... don't leave your books unattended around me. --Carlos Ruνz Zafσn (b. 1964) Spanish novelist. Interview in "The Advertiser Saturday Review" [August 2004]. For him that stealeth a book from this library, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck by palsy and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease for his agony until he sinks into dissolution. Let book-worms gnaw his entrails in token of the worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of hell consume him for ever and aye. --Warning displayed in the library of the Popish Monestary of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain. Quoted in _Old Librarians Almanack_ [1773]. -- All the characters in this book are entirely fictitious, and any person claiming to be any one of them will be prosecuted. --unknown author's note in a book -- Two goats are walking in the Hollywood hills and they find a tin of film. The first goat eats it. The second goat asks "How'd it taste?" The first goat answers,"Not bad, but I liked the book better." -- Shortest Books "Things I Love About My Country" By Jane Fonda & Cindy Sheehan Illustrated by Michael Moore "My Little Book of Personal Hygiene" By Osama Bin Laden "Things I Cannot Afford" By Bill Gates "Amelia Earhart's Guide to the Pacific" "All the Men We Have Loved Before" By Ellen de Generes & Rosie O'Donnell "Guide to Dating Etiquette" By Mike Tyson "My Plan to Find The Real Killer" By O. J. Simpson "How to Drink and Drive Over Bridges" By Ted Kennedy -- ----- abibliophobia (noun) [κ-bi-bli-κ-'fo-bee-yκ] The morbid fear of running out of reading material. antiquarian [an-tuh-KWAIR-ee-uhn], noun: 1. One who collects, studies, or deals in objects or relics from the past. 2. Of or pertaining to antiquarians or objects or relics from the past. 3. Dealing in or concerned with old or rare books. bibliophile (noun) A lover of books; a collector of books codex (noun) A handwritten book, esp. of classical, medieval, or religious texts. Related: manuscript enchiridion (noun) [en-kκ-'ri-di-yκn] A book small enough to be carried in the hand (handbook) for reference, especially one used for music or theology. incunabulum (noun) [in-kyκ-'nζ-byU-lκm] 1. A book printed in the earliest period of printing, especially from Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1436 up to 1500; an incunable; 2.Any product of the earliest stage of development; 3. A cocoon. longueur [long-GUR], noun: A dull and tedious passage in a book, play, musical composition, or the like. Ex.: "One of the commentators compared my speech to one of Gladstone's which had lasted five hours. 'It was not so long, but some of the speech's . . . longueurs made Gladstone seem the soul of brevity,' he wrote." --Lord Lamont of Lerwick, "Been there, done that," Times (London) [6 March 2001] noir (adj.) ['nwa(r)] Gloomy crime fiction or film featuring cynical characters in sleazy settings. vade mecum [vay-dee-MEE-kuhm; vah-dee-MAY-], noun: 1. A book for ready reference; a manual; a handbook. 2. A useful thing that one regularly carries about. vellum (noun) 1: A fine-grained calfskin, lambskin, or kidskin that has been treated to serve as book pages or covers. 2: A heavy, cream-colored paper that resembles this. 3. A manuscript written or printed on vellum. Related: paper, bond end page | BABIES - BARTENDERS | BASEBALL | BASTARDS - BEATLES (THE) | BEAUTY | BED - BEGINNINGS | BEHAVIOR - BELIEF | BENNY (JACK) - BIBLE | BICYCLES - BIRDS | BIRTH - BITTERNESS | BLAME - BLOGGING | BLONDES - BOOK BURNING | BOOKS | BOOMERS (THE) - BOXING | BOYS - BREAKING UP | BREASTS - BRITAIN | BROADWAY - BROTHERLY LOVE | BUGS BUNNY - BUREAUCRACY | BURMA SHAVE - BUSYBODIES | | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The Reviews | |
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