I think it is good that books still exist, but they do make me sleepy.
Books Are Good For Lots Of Uses, Not For Dropping In The Toilet.
The gains in education are never really lost. Books may be burned and cities sacked, but truth, like the yearning for freedom, lives in the hearts of humble men.
If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free.
Books cannot be killed by fire.
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.
We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle.
Books are a narcotic.
I believe that we should only read those books that bite and sting us. If a book does not rouse us with a blow then why read it?
A book should serve as an axe to the ice inside us.
We need the books that affect us like a disaster.
If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?
I see, these books are probably law books, and it is an essential part of the justice dispensed here that you should be condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance.
Like a house in the rain, books were havens of permanence and protection from whatever it was that as a child I needed protection from.
Gail Godwin has written a book about the heaviest matters of loss, grief, and loneliness with a touch so light that I was as often deeply amused by it as I was deeply moved.
A book calls for pen, ink, and a writing desk; today the rule is that pen, ink, and a writing desk call for a book.
We do not belong to those who only get their thought from books, or at the prompting of books, – it is our custom to think in the open air, walking, leaping, climbing, or dancing on lonesome mountains by preference, or close to the sea, where even the paths become thoughtful.
Very early in my life I took the question of the relation of art to truth seriously: even now I stand in holy dread in the face of this discordance. My first book was devoted to it. The Birth of Tragedy believes in art on the background of another belief.
Ultimately, no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows.