Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no can’t in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion, the raw material of possible poems and histories.
He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is.
Most of the classical citations you shall hear or read in the current journals or speeches were not drawn from the originals, but from previous quotations in English books...
Some of the sweetest hours in life, in retrospect will be found to have been spent with books.
Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.
I feel like I own all the kids in the world because, since I’ve never grown up myself, all my books are automatically for children.
The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.
My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I’m so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don’t have the guts to take their names out of the book.
There is no future for e-books, because they are not books. E-books smell like burned fuel.
A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.
Sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.
There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.
When rivers flooded, when fire fell from the sky, what a fine place the library was, the many rooms, the books. With luck, no one found you. How could they! – when you were off to Tanganyika in ’98, Cairo in 1812, Florence in 1492!?
In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.
A book is a loaded gun.
I love the musical form of books. It’s a different way of doing things, it’s very beautiful. You’re able to sing things instead of saying them. So what the heck – why not do them?
The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.
We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.
With a book tucked in one hand, and a computer shoved under my elbow, I will march, not sidle, shudder or quake, into the twenty-first century.