I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.
As for my next book, I won’t write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.
At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.
They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.
Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become.
Why does one write these books after all? The drudgery, the misery, the grind, are forgotten everytime; and one launches another, and it seems sheer joy and buoyancy.
Thus Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Douglas and Mr. Joyce partly spoil their books for women readers by their display of self-conscious virility; and Mr. Hemingway, but much less violently, follows suit.
People only become writers if they can’t find the one book they’ve always wanted to read.
Nothing shakes my opinion of a book. Nothing – nothing. Only perhaps if it’s the book of a young person – or of a friend – no, even so, I think myself infallible.
I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don’t budge though armies cross them.
Wat a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever.
Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading – I like reading books in the bulk.
Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?
Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?
To stand in a great bookshop crammed with books so new that their pages almost stick together, and the gilt on their backs is still fresh, has an excitement no less delightful than the old excitement of the second-hand bookstall.
Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.
I read the book of Job last night, I don’t think God comes out well in it.
Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.
The best fashion accessory is a book.