“Age is artificial. It s soulless. It doesn t matter one bit.”
“..reading a book doesn’t mean just turning the pages. It means thinking about it, identifying parts that you want to go back to, asking how to place it in a broader context, pursuing the ideas. There’s no point in reading a book if you let it pass before your eyes and then forget about it ten minutes later. Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions, imagination.”
“Life had sure been simpler when I hadn t dated.”
“Why do I write? To be somewhere else To get free of ourselves To stop To stop being anything or anywhere at all To disappear”
“كانت تشعر برغبة جامحة لأن تقول له كما تقول أتفه النساء: «لا تتركني، احتفظ بي إلى جوارك، استعبدني، كن قوياً». ولكنها لا تستطيع ولا تعرف أن تتلفظ بمثل هذه الكلمات.”
“Librarians save lives: by handing the right book, at the right time, to a kid in need”
“A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.”
“The map was just an accessory. She knew exactly where she was.”
“I am in all truthfulness attempting to be cheerful about this whole topic, though most people find themselves hindered in believing me, no matter my protestations. Please, trust me. I most definitely can be cheerful. I can be amiable. Agreeable. Affable. And that s only the A s. Just don t ask me to be nice. Nice has nothing to do with me.”
“You ve come to give me a piece of your mind. You know that phrase is really beautiful. The mind is the most powerful thing in the body. Whatever the mind believes, the body can achieve. So to give someone a piece of it... well thank you. Funny how people are always intent on giving it to the people they dislike when it really should be for the ones they love.”
“In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.”
“Sometimes, before you make any plans or resolutions, before you declare your heroic intent to persevere, you just have to cry.”
“A good laugh overcomes more difficulties and dissipates more dark clouds than any other one thing.”
“Just beyond the ticket booth Father had painted on a wall in bright red letters the question: DO YOU KNOW WHICH IS THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL IN THE ZOO? An arrow pointed to a small curtain. There were so many eager, curious hands that pulled at the curtain that we had to replace it regularly. Behind it was a mirror.”
“While there may not be a book in every one of us, there is so often a damned good short story.”
“Some people say, ‘Do not judge the book by its cover!’ Well, I say not to judge at all. People can say anything they want to say, but for me, cover does matter.”
“An English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, ‘What’s your alma mater?’ I told him, ‘Books.”