“A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.”
“Reading is just a vacation you pay less for, with an agenda you have no control over.”
“She always wanted to be the kind of person who could play the Moonlight Sonata. She buries her failure in this, as she buries all her failures, in reading.”
“It wasn t that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured, collected here, and in all libraries -- and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library, time is dammed up--not just stopped but saved.”
“She scoured the Earth, wandering and ravenous, looking for doors. And she found them. She found them in abandoned churches and the salt-rimed walls of caves, in graveyards and behind fluttering curtains in foreign markets. She found so many her imagining of the world grew lacy and tattered with holes, like a mouse-chewed map.”
“Ah. I should have known. You’re one of us. … You’re someone who finds herself in the pages,”…”
“Sit down, have a nice cup of coffee read a book in another language - the fountain of youth!”
“When they arrived at the palace she had a word with Grant, the young footman in charge, who said it was security and that while ma am had been in the Lords the sniffer dogs had been round and security had confiscated the book. He though it had probably been exploded. Exploded? said the Queen. But it was Anita Brookner.”
“A reader reads a book. If it’s a good book, he forgets himself. That’s all a book has to do. When the reader can’t forget himself and keeps having to think about the writer the whole time, the book is a failure. That has nothing to do with fun. If it’s fun you’re after, buy a ticket for a roller coaster.”
“A great writer is a blitzed illusionist of portable magic. You re welcome.”
“When you watch a TV show or a movie, what you see looks like what it physically represents. A man looks like a man, a man with a large bicep looks like a man with a large bicep, and a man with a large bicep bearing the tattoo Mama looks like a man with a large bicep bearing the tattoo Mama. But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It s in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books, just as an egg becomes one of potentially a million different people when it s approached by a hard-swimming and frisky school of sperm.”
“Worries genius or happy simpleton? The moment you get caught with the reading bug and learning, you get addicted to it, and you have to know that your mind is going to process stuff and the debate starts happening [in the head] and it’s forever— it never stops. You lose a little bit of happiness when you get too interested in wanting to get certain questions answered in life because it’s never going to end. If you choose to subscribe to wanting to be a lifelong learner you must be ready to lose some happiness and freedom that you once had when you didn’t know everything.”
“Worried genius or happy simpleton? The moment you get caught with the reading bug and learning, you get addicted to it, and you have to know that your mind is going to process stuff and the debate starts happening [in the head] and it’s forever— it never stops. You lose a little bit of happiness when you get too interested in wanting to get certain questions answered in life because it’s never going to end. If you choose to subscribe to wanting to be a lifelong learner you must be ready to lose some happiness and freedom that you once had when you didn’t know everything.”
“We re not helpless. Novels are full of ragtag bands facing impossible odds.”
“It’s not how many books you read or even the type of books you read. It’s how the books make you feel.”
“In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits. His fancy grew full of what he used to read about in his books, enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies, and all sorts of impossible nonsense; and it so possessed his mind that the whole fabric of invention and fancy he read of was true, that to him no history in the world had more reality in it.”
“The Library is my haven. I can always find a corner of the stacks to call my own, to read and dream. I want to make sure everyone has that chance, most especially the people who feel different and need a place to call home.”