Quotessence
Home / Topics / Old Books Quotes

Old Books Quotes

Browse 90 quotes about Old Books.

Related topics

Old Books Quotes

“Most people these days chase new things - new houses, new cars, new objects. But, they don't realise that old houses, old cars, and old objects have something that new things don't have - their history and culture. We must look at life from each other's perspective. New things will make you feel good but maybe for a short time. There is nothing fascinating about chasing new things. Which is why some people, like my parents, love old things, because these things have emotions, and sentiments attached to them. My Mom and Dad choose to stay in our old house in my hometown, because it was the house they built with their hard work and love. It is the house where my mother writes her beautiful poetry. It is the house where my father treats his patients. It is a house which has books, culture, cracks and yes history.”

“The “olden times” are only such in reference to us. The past is rendered strange, mysterious, visionary, awful from this great gap in time that parts us from it, and the long perspective of waning years. Things gone by and almost forgotten, look dim and dull, uncouth and quaint, from our ignorance of them, and the mutability of customs. But in their day—they were fresh, unimpaired, in full vigour, familiar and glossy.”

“A second-hand bookshop draws me in a as a moth to a candle. Each shop is a small shrine to the power of beauty and words. Tightly packed shelves of old hardback novels; heavy tomes on art and design; teetering piles of poetry. There are copies of the Children's Encyclopedia used as a doorstop and wooden crates of paperbacks going for a song. Some are rare, with a price to match, others a fraction of their original cost. A book for everyone, I guess. Yes, it's the thought of words put together with such care, the pages whose surface has been worn by years of handling; the tired bindings and torn-edged covers where a book has been in less kind hands than it should. (A chance to give a damaged book a kinder home.) But even more, it is the smell that makes me want to enter every second-hand bookshop I pass. A smell that is dusty, a cross between an old leather saddle and a country church.”

“Most people these days chase new things - new houses, new cars, new objects. But, they don't realise that old houses, old cars, and old objects have something that new things don't have - their history and culture. We must look at life from each other's perspective. There is nothing fascinating about chasing new things. My Mom and Dad choose to stay in our old house in my hometown, because it was the house they built with their hard work and love. It is the house where my mother writes her beautiful poetry. It is the house where my father treats his patients. It is a house which has books, culture, cracks and yes history.”

“To make a tarte of strawberyes," wrote Margaret Parker in 1551, "take and strayne theym with the yolkes of four eggs, and a little whyte breade grated, then season it up with suger and swete butter and so bake it." And Jess, who had spent the past year struggling with Kant's Critiques, now luxuriated in language so concrete. Tudor cookbooks did not theorize, nor did they provide separate ingredient lists, or scientific cooking times or temperatures. Recipes were called receipts, and tallied materials and techniques together. Art and alchemy were their themes, instinct and invention. The grandest performed occult transformations: flora into fauna, where, for example, cooks crushed blanched almonds and beat them with sugar, milk, and rose water into a paste to "cast Rabbets, Pigeons, or any other little bird or beast." Or flour into gold, gilding marchpane and festive tarts. Or mutton into venison, or fish to meat, or pig to fawn, one species prepared to stand in for another.”

“Who are you? She asked silently, as she laid away the collector's quotations, his drawings, his scraps of famous poetry: "Come live with me and be my love..." interleaved with menus: 'oysters, fish stew, tortoise in its shell, bread from the oven, honey from the honeycomb.' The books were unsplattered but much fingered, their pages soft with turning and re-turning, like collections of old fairy tales. Often Jess thought of Rapunzel and golden apples and enchanted gardens. She thought of Ovid, and Dante, and Cervantes, and the Pre-Raphaelites, for sometimes McClintock pictured his beloved eating, and sometimes sleeping in fields of poppies, and once throned like Persephone, with strawberry vines entwined in her long hair.”

“I love to read the dedications of old books written in monarchies for they invariably honor some (usually insignificant) knight or duke with fulsome words of sycophantic insincerity, praising him as the light of the universe (in hopes, no doubt, for a few ducats to support future work); this old practice makes me feel like such an honest and upright man, by comparison, when I put a positive spin, perhaps ever so slightly exaggerated, on a grant proposal.”

“How thrilling to discover one had depths, how consoling to find them less polluted than the shallows, how encouraging to identify the enemy not as a fissure in the will but as a dead fetus in the specimen jar of the unconscious. My attention was being paternally led away from the excruciating present to the happy, healthy future that would be enabled by an analysis of the sick past, as though the priest had nothing to do but study old books and make bright forecasts, the present not worthy of notice.”

“No author, I think, is deserving of much censure for vanity if, taking down one of his ten-year-old books, he exclaims: "Great heavens, did I write as well as that then?" for the implication always is that one does not write any longer so well and few are so envious as to censure the complacencies of an extinct volcano.”

“I got into comics about the same time as music. By 12 years old, I had discovered my dad's killer comic book collection filled with Silver Age books from his youth...early Spider-Man, Thor, Fantastic Four, The Hulk, Detective Comics, Action Comics, you name it. Seeing those old books got me interested in new comics, so my friends and I would hit the local comic shop every Saturday to pick up the cool titles of my generation.”

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all.”

“Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”

“Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity.”

“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.”

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”