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Books and Reading Quotes and Quotations
 A lexicographer, a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.  All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you. All the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books. Books are the most mannerly of companions, accessible at all times, in all moods, frankly declaring the author's mind, without offense. Everyone who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, to multiply the ways in which they exist, to make their life full, significant, and interesting. Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes. He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the even more refined accomplishments of skipping and skimming. If a book is worth reading at all, it is worth reading more than once. Suspense is the lowest of excitants, designed to take your breath away when the brain and heart crave to linger in nobler enjoyment. Suspense drags you on; appreciation causes you to linger. If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing. Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestions, the raw material of possible poems and histories. Nothing links man to man like the frequent passage from hand to hand of a good book. Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered. The delight of opening a new pursuit, or a new course of reading, imparts the vivacity and novelty of youth even to old age. The dust and silence of the upper shelf. The fact of knowing how to read is nothing, the whole point is knowing what to read. The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade. The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it. The responsibility of a dictionary is to record a language, not set its style. To finish is both a relief and a release from an extraordinarily pleasant prison. What is reading but silent conversation? 'Sartor Resartus' is simply unreadable, and for me that always sort of spoils a book. You should read it, though there is much that is skip-worthy. The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order. When you read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before. Properly we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand. Best-sellerism is the star system of the book world. A (best-seller) is a celebrity among books. It is a book known primarily (sometimes exclusively) for its well-knownness. The central theme of the novel is that they were glad to see each other. Reading after a certain (time) diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book. Literature is news that stays news. Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier. Laws die, books never. Master books, but do not let them master you. Read to live, not live to read. A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. Any book which is at all important should be re-read immediately. Do give books - religious or otherwise - for Christmas. They're never fattening, seldom sinful, and permanently personal. Never lend books - nobody ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are those which people have lent me. Discretion is not the better part of biography. A dictionary should be descriptive, not prescriptive. Book lovers never go to bed alone. It circulated for five years, through the halls of fifteen publishers, and finally ended up with Vanguard Press, which as you can see is rather deep into the alphabet. The first book of the nation is the dictionary of its language. A novel is a mirror carried along a main road. - Stendhal I read part of it all the way through. A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new. First publication is a pure, carnal leap into that dark which one dreams is life. Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more. A good book has no ending. Oh that my words were now written! Oh that they were printed in a book! - Bible What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us! I hate books; they teach us only to talk about what we do not know. Tis the good reader that makes the good book. The telephone book is full of facts but it doesn't contain a single idea. In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you. Books think for me. Dictionaries are like watches. The worst is better than none at all and even the best cannot be expected to run quite true. Does it afflict you to find your books wearing out? I mean literally .. . the mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all. The true university of these days is a collection of books. I keep my books at the British Museum and at Mudies. One man is as good as another until he has written a book. If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought. The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them. A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out. The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore? Ordinary people know little of the time and effort it takes to learn to read. I have been eighty years at it, and have not reached my goal. - Goethe I am a part of all I have read. Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication. I do not know any reading more easy, more fascinating, more delightful than a catalogue. To me the charm of an encyclopedia is that it knows - and I needn't. A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well simply because it was selling well. A good title is the title of a successful book. Books should be tried by a judge and jury as though they were crimes. Reading, like prayer, remains one of our few private acts. My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out. A publisher is somebody looking for someone who has something to say. There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them: those we spent with a favourite book. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. If you would understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely. Camerado, this is no book. Who touches this, touches a man. A book is like a garden carried in the pocket. The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters. There are still a few of us booklovers around despite the awful warnings of Marshall McLuhan with his TV era and his pending farewell to Gutenberg. 
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