It is often much harder to get rid of books than to acquire them. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witnesses to a moment in our lives we will never see again. While they are still there, it is part of us.
I am not writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them.
Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.
I no longer know the author of this book, for simply stopping long enough and writing it down was where I changed from a boy with his eyes squeezed shut to a man with his eyes wide open so that the sunlight might reach my heart despite all that darkn...
Certain unique books seem to be without forerunners or successors as far as their authors are concerned. Even though they may profoundly influence the work of other writers, for their creator they're complete, not leading anywhere.
My TV’s remote control didn’t have a source of energy, so I poured coffee in it. Now I can read any book I want.
He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the p...
I turned the page in Slaughterhouse Five, a forbidden book at Belmont because we were too young to read about soldiers swearing and bombs dropping and bodies blowing up and war sucking.
I believe that many who find that "nothing happens" when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a p...
Books had taught me new ideas and had shown me ways of life that I would not have known about otherwise, and they offered a refuge when, like now, real life seemed too hard.
For twenty years I strove to free myself from what I retained of my education; I indulged my curiosity by reading books less to learn than to efface from my memory the ideas that had been thrust upon it.
A greater awareness in architects and planners of their real value to society could, at the present, result in that rare occurrence, namely, the improvement of the quality of life as a result of architectural endeavour.
Strategy is about out-thinking your competition. Mark Zuckerberg, while at Harvard, built a website called Facemash ‘for fun’. Even today, Facebook believe that ‘done is better than perfect’.
And all you can do is just read," she said. She raised her voice an screamed, "You just read and read and read!" Then she threw herself down on the table and wept.
I liked being with the books: they reminded me of how many ways of thinking existed outside my own - how small and fleeting my pulse was when set alongside those ageing spines.
He reads every book in his home but it is not enough. The country boy craves stories. He devours every poem and fable in his school and library. Still he hungers. For stories.
Librarians who are arguing and lobbying for clever e-book lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending the library-as-warehouse concept, as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, conne...
I have an impulse to write all over the orange walls- I need an alphabet of endings ripped out of books, of hands pulled off of clocks, of cold stones, of shoes filled with nothing but wind.
In 1846 on of his Academy exhibits was a painting called . Turner found this passage for the Academy catalogue in the Book of Revelation: . To reinforce the note of voracious doom, he added two lines from Samuel Rogers' :
He builds whole world of imagery and passion, any one of which would have served another writer for a whole book, only to pull each of them to pieces and pour scorn on it.
'You're there, but the books draw you in to whole other worlds. I mean, I know you study more serious things than the silly stories I read, but when you're there, you can be anywhere. It fascinates me.'
