Book quotes
21K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Chapter One. The Bride." He held up the book then. "I'm reading it to you for relax." He practically shoved the book in my face. "By S. Morgenstern. Great Florinese writer. The Princess Bride. He too came to America. S. Morgenstern. Dead now in New York. The English is his own. He spoke eight tongues." Here my father put down the book and held up all his fingers. "Eight. Once in Florin City..."
"One way an author dies a little each day is when his books go out of print."
"It is so human a book that I don't see how belief in its divine authority can survive the reading of it."
"The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos."
"O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy . . . In finishing it I found . . . such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim."
"I've always liked getting away with just a little bit of what you're not supposed to. Like my first book, Billy's Booger, got me in trouble with the principal's office."
"It's difficult to write a book where a character is on virtually every page of the book but you cannot refer to his or her gender. It gets rid of every his, her, she and he."
"When I went to an Aspen seminar on "American Scriptures" - the bicentennial of the Declaration and they discussed the preamble and the Gettysburg Address and much more, but not Lincoln's Second Inauguration, I challenged that omission and they said find something on it and to my astonishment, at that time, there was no book or long article that really did it. So I wrote one that attempted to do it justice. Although obscurely published, that essay got a nice bounce. Somehow David Donald saw it, and in his notes to his biography singled it out."
"After I published a book called Lincoln's Virtues a wit said that my next book should be Lincoln's Vices. But in my opinion that would be a short book!"
"We read to know we're not alone."
"Always remember, there's no point trying to be faithful to the book because film and writing are just two completely different things. Any film stands on its own, apart from whether it's based on a novel."
"There's a book called Mummy and the people actually seem to have become addicted to mummy dust. And mummy dust was somehow made from people who've died of the most loathsome diseases. It's too bad that [David] Cronenberg didn't see this book, see I only saw it after the film was made. It might have been of interest to him."
"The underground press serves as the only effective counter to a growing power, and more sophisticated techniques used by establishment mass media to falsify, misrepresent, misquote, rule out of consideration as a priori ridiculous, or simply ignore and blot out of existence: data, books, discoveries that they consider prejudicial to establishment interest."
"I'm against Capitol Punishment in all forms, and I have written many pamphlets on this subject in the manner of Swift's Modest Proposal pamphlet incorporated into Naked Lunch; these pamphlets have marked Naked Lunch as an obscene book."
"Cut word lines — Cut music lines — Smash the control images — Smash the control machine — Burn the books — Kill the priests — Kill! Kill! Kill!"
"It's a tract against capital punishment in the genre of Swift's Modest Proposal. I was simply following a formula to its logical conclusion. Some people appear to have understood it. The publication of Naked Lunch in England practically coincided with their abolition of capital punishment. The book obviously had a certain effect."
"Exorcism is a subject that interests me, and books on shamanism, I've read through."
"A beggar's book outworths a noble's blood."
"Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord, That would reduce these bloody days again And make poor England weep in streams of blood! Let them not live to taste this land's increase That would with treason wound this fair land's peace! Now civil wounds are stopped, peace lives again: That she may long live here, God say amen!"
"Myself will straight aboard, and to the state This heavy act with heavy heart relate."
