All Quotes By Tag: Books

“It is time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a sea of unremarkable men and women, anonymous faces on the street, a hundred thousand unalphabetized things, a million forgotten hours.”

“Knowledge drifts in and out of my mind”, said Lestat with a little look of honest distress and a shake of his head. “I devour it and then I lose it and sometimes I can’t reach for any knowledge that I ought to possess. I feel desolate, but then knowledge returns or I seek it out in a knew source.”(…)”But you love books, then”, Aunt Queen was saying. I had to listen.”Oh, yes,” Lestat said. “Sometimes they’re the only thing that keeps me alive.””What a thing to say at your age”, she laughed.”No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don’t you think? The young are eternally desperate,” he said frankly. “And books, they offer one hope – that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.”

“I dont write books so that you can be fascinated with me. I write them so you can be fascinated with YOU!”

“if a book isn’t self-explanatory, then it isn’t worth reading.”

“Writing is as much about painting a picture as anything Van Gogh or Picasso ever did. For writers, description is our brush and words become our paint.”

“Being a writer is a good, good thing.”

“Better to keep it in the old heads, where no one can see it or suspect it. We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law. Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli, or Christ, it’s here. And the hour’s late. And the war’s begun. And we are out here, and the city is there, all wrapped up in its own coat of a thousand colors… All we want to do is keep the knowledge we think we will need intact and safe. We’re not out to incite or anger anyone yet. For if we are destroyed, the knowledge is dead, perhaps for good… Right now we have a horrible job; we’re waiting for the war to begin and, as quickly, end. It’s not pleasant, but then we’re not in control, we’re the odd minority crying in the wilderness. When the war’s over, perhaps we can be of some use in the world.”

“What is more important to a library than anything else — than everything else — is the fact that it exists.”[The Premise Of Meaning, American Scholar; Washington, DC, June 5, 1972]”

“We are all born geniuses. Genius in Latin literally means to give birth to.”

“The complexities of adult life get in the way of the truth.”

“A winner is not someone who wins. It’s someone who tries and isn’t afraid to lose.”

“Once you can write an alphabet, you can write a book of 100 million pages. It’s just a matter of believing it as possible, and taking the cross millimetre by millimetre.”

“I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow”

“Well, right now I’m not dead. But when I am, it’s like…I don’t know, I guess it’s like being inside a book that nobody’s reading. […] An old one. It’s up on a library shelf, so you’re safe and everything, but the book hasn’t been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody’ll pick it up and start reading.”

“…and Jo laid the rustling sheets together with a careful hand, as one might shut the covers of a lovely romance, which holds the reader fast till the end comes, and he finds himself alone in the work-a-day world again.”