I prefer the society of one faithful person to an association of rapid talkers, who more than anything else seek admiration from one another.
Imagine! It is the real power of a book – not what is on the page, but what happens when a reader takes the pages in, makes it part of himself. That is the definition of literature.
Strangers talking over piles of books do not remain strangers for long.
Yes, we rather condemn people for eternity without the courtesy of informing them.
He was outwardly calm but inwardly bleeding to death.
Shakespeare brings us to know ourselves. Dante, with his dissection of all others, bids us to know one another.
Remember that there are two things in this life that are never worth crying about: what can be cured and what cannot be cured.
A man’s library opens up his character to the world.
When they dreamed of turning iron and metal into gold, they called it alchemy. The much more far-fetched dream of turning bound sheafs of plain paper into fortunes, they call publishing.
Before long, I had lost my youth and my patience for indulging others. Books were everything in life; books were better than wine.
They always blamed my reading, you know, for my having fewer friends than my brother and for my weak eyes, never thinking that because I had weak eyes and because I was shy, having a book at the ready rescued me.
Strangers talking over piles of books do not remain strangers for long. Had I never learned to like books, I would have become the dullest sort of hermit.
What they don’t realize is that sequels are bound to disappoint those who have waited for them.
An obscure character by the name of Belial. He is interpreted as a minion of the devil by some scholars, but that is wrong. It is ignorance. The name means, literally speaking, ‘one who cannot be yoked,’ and it is really every one of us who takes control of our own destiny while others blow in the wind. We may be punished for it, but we would never do it another way. We are all Belials.
The books do pretend, Mr. Branagan. Surely. But that is not all. Novels are filled with lies, but squeezed in between is even more that is true – without what you may call the lies, the pages would be too light for the truth, you see?
How odd it must be to go through life believing that a book is a book.
Obsession of a strong-hearted woman, Mr. Dolby, can be more dangerous than ten men.
These people build as if they were immortal and eat as if they were to die instantly.
I was looking for something else in books. I could not really say what, but I think I can say why: a notion started in my own brain was probably wrong, but an answer read in a work of literature would be right. That was my conviction at nineteen, and only in later years would I come to trust myself over a book.
You are always better off to read a book, anyway, than to meet the person behind it.