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Books Quotes

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Books Quotes

“Books are the mind's ballast, for so many of us--the cargo that makes us what we are, a freight that is ephemeral and indelible, half-forgotten but leaving an imprint. They are nutrition, too. My old age fear is not being able to read--the worst deprivation. Or no longer having my books around me: the familiar, eclectic, explanatory assemblage that hitches me to the wide world, that has freed me from the prison of myself, that has helped me to think, and to write.”

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Book:Ammonites And Leaping Fish: A Life In Time
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“I read not with any particular object in mind, nor really with the intention of retaining any information about the subjects that I chose, but rather because the act of reading was a habit, and because it was soothing and, perhaps, from a lifetime's inculcated faith in the explanatory power of books, the half-held belief that somewhere in those hectares upon hectares of printed pages I might find that fact which would make sense of my growing unhappiness, allowing me to peel back the obscurant layers of myself and lay bare at last the solid structure underneath.”

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Book:Sight
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“From my father I had learned that books were to be either adored or exiled. Books that were of God—books written by the Mormon prophets or the Founding Fathers—were not to be studied so much as cherished, like a thing perfect in itself. I had been taught to read the words of men like Madison as a cast into which I ought to pour the plaster of my own mind, to be reshaped according to the contours of their faultless model. I read them to learn what to think, not how to think for myself. Books that were not of God were banished; they were a danger, powerful and irresistible in their cunning. To write my essay I had to read books differently, without giving myself over to either fear or adoration. Because Burke had defended the British monarchy, Dad would have said he was an agent of tyranny. He wouldn’t have wanted the book in the house. There was a thrill in trusting myself to read the words. I felt a similar thrill in reading Madison, Hamilton and Jay, especially on those occasions when I discarded their conclusions in favor of Burke’s, or when it seemed to me that their ideas were not really different in substance, only in form. There were wonderful suppositions embedded in this method of reading: that books are not tricks, and that I was not feeble.”

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Book:Educated
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“But suddenly, Pentunia spied the Book. The firecrackers had blown it open so that the pages showed. She had never seen them before. Now she saw that there was something written inside the Book which she could not read. So she sat down and thought and thought and thought, until at last she sighed, 'Now I understand. It was not enough to carry wisdom under my wing. I must put it in my mind and in my heart. And to do that I must learn to read.”

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Book:Petunia
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“Every event in life — the rejections, the relationships, all the embarrassing things you do will lead you to the person you are destined to be with. You may want to change certain things about your past, but everything has been just another chapter in your book of life. If you don’t believe me, buy a book — any book — and rip out an entire chapter — any chapter — and read it. Now, get a full copy of the same book and read it again. Odds are you’ll find that chapter pieced everything together the way it was supposed to be.”

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Author:Mike Zacchio
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“Many more looked around at happy and unhappy things alike, left the room, and agreed to the pen. It’s a weird occasion, writing is. It appears as peaceful, silent years of nothing, but implies the valor of someone fighting a lifelong monster. To decide to wield the pen is a win with no victory. But some lines of theirs were more important than satisfaction. What is a bookshelf but a place for us to see all the nights our dearest of friends did not see their own?”

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Book:The Goodbye Song
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“If rewriting equals rereading, we must logically conclude that writing is reading. If this is indeed the case, how could we possibly write under a ban on reading? The only way left is mouth-to-mouth – poets and storytellers recite their pieces and before we can commit them to memory, everything vanishes into thin air.”

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Author:Kyoko Yoshida
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