#book

I inhaled the musty, leathery, old-papery scent and a shiver passed over me. If I had any idea of heaven, it was this: shelves and shelves of books, ten times as many as were upstairs, each with stories or pictures more exciting and beautiful than the next, and two overstuffed chairs big enough for me to sleep in. ↗

— Clay Carmichael

#reading #shelves #beauty

In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be. ↗

— Marcel Proust

#reading #beauty

The world was made in order to result in a beautiful book. ↗

— Stéphane Mallarmé

#life #philosophy-of-life #world #beauty

In fiction, beauty was run-of-the-mill. ↗

— Eileen Favorite

#books #fiction #on-fiction #beauty

Give me a book, a drink, and a beautiful woman. Then throw me in the sea. Ha-ha. The book will spoil the effect of the drink, the beautiful woman, and the sea. ↗

— نجيب محفوظ

#beauty

But even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight — matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows. ↗

— Leon Wieseltier

#reading #beauty

There was something beautiful and timeless to her about a hardback without its jacket, a book that could be known in no way except by reading it. ↗

— Christopher R. Beha

#beauty

Besides, I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all round me. ↗

— Roger Zelazny

#library #words #beauty

She liked books more than anything else, and was, in fact, always inventing stories of beautiful things and telling them to herself. ↗

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

#books #invention #stories #things #beauty

There were heavy beams - planks of sun - falling randomly, wonderfully, onto the road. Clouds arched their backs to lok behind as they started again to move on. 'It's such a beautiful day,' he said, and his voice was in many pieces. A great day to die. A great day to die, like this. ↗

— Markus Zusak

#the-book-thief #beauty