My grandfather had a particularly important influence on my life, even though I didn’t visit him often, since he lived about three miles out of town and he died when I was six. He was remarkably curious about the world, and he read lots of books.
Books always speak of other books.
Naturally, everything depends on one’s background books and on what one is looking for.
You can be obsessed by remorse all your life, not because you chose the wrong thing- you can always repent, atone : but because you never had the chance to prove to yourself that you would have chosen the right thing.
When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.
Books are menaced by books. Any excess of information produces silence.
A book is a fragile creature. It suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands.
The good of a book lies in its being read.
After years of practice, I can walk into a bookstore and understand its layout in a few seconds. I can glance at the spine of a book and make a good guess at its content from a number of signs.
I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.
So, I am independently well-off and don’t have to do anything, but I still do. I write books, lecture around the world, work with scientists and governments.
If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.
I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind.
A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They’d rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.
We read books to find out who we are.
After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male.
The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.
You know, I don’t think a lot about why one book connects with its readers and another doesn’t. Probably because I don’t want to start thinking, “Am I popular?” I spent way too much time thinking about that in high school.
Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.
By and large books are mankind’s best invention.