#books

As with men, it has always seemed to me that books have their own peculiar destinies. They go towards the people who are waiting for them and reach them at the right moment. They are made of living material and continue to cast light through the darkness long after the death of their authors. ↗

— Miguel Serrano

#books #death

I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels. ↗

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#calling #describe #elsewhere #i #insist

A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe. ↗

— Madeleine L'Engle

#fire #star #universe #live

People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. ↗

— Diane Setterfield

#anger

But we do need a breather. 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. They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.’ Most of us can’t rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#fahrenheit- #art

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#morality #reading #writing #beauty

One must always be careful of books," said Tessa, "and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#change

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home. ↗

— Anna Quindlen

#journey #reading #travel #change

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life. ↗

— Walt Disney Company

#life

Learning became her. She loved the smell of the book from the shelves, the type on the pages, the sense that the world was an infinite but knowable place. Every fact she learned seemed to open another question, and for every question there was another book. ↗

— Robert Goolrick

#reading #love