#books

DEAR DI­ARY You are greater than the Bible And the Con­fer­ence of the Birds And the Up­an­ishads All put to­geth­er You are more se­vere Than the Scrip­tures And Ham­mura­bi’s Code More dan­ger­ous than Luther’s pa­per Nailed to the Cathe­dral door You are sweet­er Than the Song of Songs Might­ier by far Than the Epic of Gil­gamesh And braver Than the Sagas of Ice­land I bow my head in grat­itude To the ones who give their lives To keep the se­cret The dai­ly se­cret Un­der lock and key Dear Di­ary I mean no dis­re­spect But you are more sub­lime Than any Sa­cred Text Some­times just a list Of my events Is holi­er than the Bill of Rights And more in­tense ↗

— Leonard Cohen

#diary #scripture

Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow. ↗

— Orhan Pamuk

#insight #sorrow #mistakes

Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species. ↗

— John Green

#books #fiction #on-fiction #effort

Books, books, books! I had found the secret of a garret room Piled high with cases in my father’s name; Piled high, packed large,--where, creeping in and out Among the giant fossils of my past, Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there At this or that box, pulling through the gap, In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, The first book first. And how I felt it beat Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark, An hour before the sun would let me read! My books! ↗

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

#literature #reading #terrorism

The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#magic #universe #magic

Beware the man of a single book. ↗

— St. Thomas Aquinas

#ignorance #illiteracy #limitation #ignorance

Yes, when I get big and have my own home, no plush chairs and lace curtains for me. And no rubber plants. I'll have a desk like this in my parlor and white walls and a clean green blotter every Saturday night and a row of shining yellow pencils always sharpened for writing and a golden-brown bowl with a flower or some leaves or berries always in it and books . . . books . . . books. . . . ↗

— Betty Smith

#reading #flowers

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#library #wild

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#dramatist #morality #novelist #poet #wild

I always gave her a book. An old hardback from the same section in the used bookstore where you'd find Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and musty scrawled-in Hobbits, the painted paper covers often ripped or gone... My favorite was a sort of illustrated guidebook of pond creatures on which a very young child had written in pencil on each page under the picture of an otter I love otter Under a muskrat: I love muskrat Beaver: I love beaver ↗

— Peter Heller

#love #love