"I'm as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way."
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Book quotes
Book
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Book quotes (page 137 of 1049)
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"A transition from an author's book to his conversation, is too often like an entrance into a large city."
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"Many useful and valuable books lie buried in shops and libraries, unknown and unexamined, unless some lucky compiler opens them by chance, and finds an easy spoil of wit and learning."
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"Books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten; but when they are opened again, will again impart their instruction: memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. Written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. Tradition is but a meteor, which, if once it falls, cannot be rekindled."
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"I try to weave a secret into each plot. It's the thread that holds the rest of the story fabric together. In fact, it's the reason for the story. I hint at the secret early on. Immediately I want the reader to get the feeling that something here isn't quite right. It helps maintain the suspense if a puzzling element is introduced in the first few pages of the book, but the answer isn't revealed until the final ones. Hopefully, readers want to know what the heck is really going on, and it's the desire to find out that keeps them turning pages."
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"I have no personal knowledge of, or experience with, paramilitary hate groups, or heart transplantation, or escapees from maximum security prisons, or what it's like to be profoundly deaf. But I've written about all these topics, and the books became bestsellers. I figure that if something interests me, there's a reasonably good chance that it's going to interest the reader, too. As I approach my keyboard each day, I remind myself to have a good time - as good a time as one can have doing the hardest work there is."
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"If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people readingfor the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching."
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"A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading."
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"...so now, Mrs. Ramsay thought, she could return to that dream land, that unreal but fascinating place, the Manning's drawing-room at Marlow twenty years ago; where one moved about without haste or anxiety, for there was no future to worry about. She knew what had happened to them, what to her. It was like reading a good book again, for she knew the end of that story, since it had happened twenty years ago, and life, which shot down even from this dining-room table in cascades, heaven knows where, was sealed up there, and lay, like a lake, placidly between its banks."
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"It looked the sort of book described in library catalogues as 'slightly foxed,' although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had beed badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well."
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"Jeremy tried to be an interesting person. The trouble was that he was the kind of person who, having decided to be an interesting person, would first of all try to find a book called How to Be An Interesting Person and then see whether there were any courses available."
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"I think we are waiting for an e-book that even non-techies can be comfortable with. From my point of view, the biggest change is that I don't have to spend most of the day printing out and packaging a manuscript. I think I almost miss that."
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"The point is that if a book that had been published three years ago started to sell twice as many all of a sudden it probably wouldn't even get noticed. People wouldn't be tracking it. The system has cleaned up its act an awful lot but the best-seller list system is not an entirely foolproof thing."
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"So there you have it, a lifetime of first smelling the books, they all smell wonderful, reading the books, loving the books, and remembering the books."
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"I have something to fight for and live for; that makes me a better killer. I've got what amounts to a religion now. It's learning how to breathe all over again. And how to lie in the sun getting a tan, letting the sun work into you. And how to hear music and how to read a book. What does your civilization offer?"
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"Do you ever read any of the books you burn?" He laughed. "That's against the law!" "Oh. Of course."
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"Garrett," said Stendahl, "do you know why I've done this to you? Because you burned Mr. Poe's books without really reading them. You took other people's advice that they needed burning. Otherwise you'd have realized what I was going to do to you when we came down here a moment ago. Ignorance is fatal, Mr. Garrett."
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"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... are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book."
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"The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers."
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"Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless."
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