Dedicated to the memory of MY FATHER. For if I had not believed that he would have wished me to give such help as I could toward making his life's work of service to mankind, I should never have been led to write this book.
But suppose it was truth double strong, it were no truth to me if I couldna take it in. I daresay there's truth in yon Latin book on your shelves; but it's gibberish and no truth to me, unless I know the meaning o' the words.
A table for TONIGHT should certainly have been booked years before-perhaps, it was implied, by Richard's parents. A table for TONIGHT was impossible: if the pope, the prime minister, and the president of France arrived this evening without a confirme...
She'd obviously read the book many times before, and so she read flawlessly and confidently, and I could hear her smile in the reading of it, and the sound of that smile made me think that maybe I would like novels better if Alaska Young read them to...
Like overzealous religious converts, climbers originally from the lower rungs of society tend to go overboard when they ape the upper class.
Polarities of the 'authentic' vs. the 'inauthentic' are easily discernible in recreational modes. The criteria of authenticity are not necessarily objective but rather have to do with the rules by which the self allows or disallows its own experience...
Learning to decipher words had only added to the pleasures of holding spines and turning pages, measuring the journey to the end with a thumb-riffle, poring over frontispieces. Books! Opening with a crackle of old glue, releasing perfume; closing wit...
You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.
Given the consumer-pleasing politics of today's universities, I have, in effect, seventy new bosses each semester; they're sitting at the desk in front of me.
They spent pork-barrel money like a tidal-wave sea, but no funds trickled down far enough to reach me. Our books numbered few and were falling apart, and I sat mending pages with a crestfallen heart.
Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday's.
But more importantly in my book of life, it's what you can't buy with money that is often more important than what you can buy.
For it was through books that she felt her life to be unjudged Look at all of the great mix-ups, messes, confinement, and double-dealings in Shakespeare, she thought.Identities disguised continually, in a combative dance of illusion and discovery.
His face clouded over when Calvin and Peachy tried to explain women. Peachy pressed on bravely. “Now, the purpose of the vagina,” he was saying. He stopped and said to Calvin, “Why can’t we just buy him a book?
Your problem is that you’re more like an empty book and you’re waiting on someone else to write your pages for you. For someone who doesn’t believe in fate, destiny and all that shit, you seem to spend an awful lot of time waiting for something...
Once he'd asked, "Don't you want to read? There are hundreds of books in the sitting room." She had laughed and said, "I've read them all. I want to remember them the way they were. If I read them now, the endings will have changed.
Check a phone book out of a library. Inside is a foggy castle covered by a black leather glove, watched over by a shaggy gray dog. My name is written in numbers in the sky by the hand of Hans H. Handey.
«She had Google, and she had Wikipedia. She could look up anything obscure, any words or phrases that she didn’t understand. A romance novel was just a book, while the Internet was the Internet. The Internet would crack these nuts for sure.»
...What you are is a force--a force that makes it possible for your body to live, a force that makes it possible for your whole mind to dream...You are life
A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book on a shelf; and, decades after we have read it even twenty times, it can open us up, by cut or caress, to a new truth.
The prefect evening...lying down on the couch beside the bookcase and reading himself sleepy...Jim lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other's presenc...
