“Jack shook his head. 'Books. What is it with women and books? My sisters were the same. They were always buying books for boys they fancied.'
Ellie bent down and picked up the stone and put it on the table. 'It's like sending a love letter without having to write it yourself,' she said softly.”
Source: Who's Afraid of Mr Wolfe?
“There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction. As Police Commissioner it was my duty to deal with all kinds of squalid misery and hideous and unspeakable infamy, and I should have been worse than a coward if I had shrunk from doing what was necessary; but there would have been no use whatever in my reading novels detailing all this misery and squalor and crime, or at least in reading them as a steady thing. Now and then there is a powerful but sad story which really is interesting and which really does good; but normally the books which do good and the books which healthy people find interesting are those which are not in the least of the sugar-candy variety, but which, while portraying foulness and suffering when they must be portrayed, yet have a joyous as well as a noble side.”
Source: Theodore Roosevelt's Letters to His Children
“Just give me a thousand words and you may make your own pictures.”
“I go downstairs and the books blink at me from the shelves. Or stare. In a trick of the light, a row of them seems to shift very slightly, like a curtain blown by the breeze through an open window. Red is next to blue is next to cream is adjacent to beige. But when I look again, cream is next to green is next to black. A tall book shelters a small book, a huge Folio bullies a cowering line of Quartos. A child's nursery rhyme book does not have the language in which to speak to a Latin dictionary. Chaucer does not know the words in which Henry James communicates but here they are forced to live together, forever speechless.”
Source: Howards End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home
“Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed.”
Source: The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
“In 1800s Paris, women were prohibited from studying the nude human form, because this would've ruined the wedding-night surprise. (Surprise! It's a penis.)”
Source: You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News
“After this, Boy became very curious about the mansion where the clothes and the food came from. He made me describe everything. Then he asked Good Thing 'Are there books in this mansion, too?'
'And pictures and jewels,' Good Thing said through me. 'What does Master wish me to fetch? There is a golden harp, a musical box like a bird, a—'
'Just books,' said Boy. 'I need to learn. I'm still so ignorant.”
Source: Unexpected Magic: Collected Stories – Riveting Fantasy Tales About Heroes, Wizards, and Beasts for Kids
“Let there be silence. Let there be misunderstandings. Let there be distance. I am done fixing what you keep breaking. I don’t care about you, or this so-called relationship, anymore.”
Source: Life Simplified: Quote - Unquote
“She was too tired to feel anything more, she wanted a book to do to her what books did: take away the world, slide it aside for a little bit, and let her please, please just be somewhere and somebody else”
Source: The Magician's Land
“Books are more precious than jewels. She truly believed this. What did a diamond bring you? A momentary flash of brilliance. A diamond scintillated for second; a book could scintillate forever.”
Source: How to Find Love in a Bookshop