Book Quotes
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I read this book a few decades ago, on a trip to some of the territories of the old Byzantine Empire, during which an emotional relationship came to an emotionally draining end, so it may retain some of the hectic inanity of my personal life, but great works are fractal, reflecting both our grand ambitions and our petty failures.
Alexander Jablokov
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I've done 80 books and if anyone has entertained the idea of owning one of my books, I think this is the book that covers all the bases. I'm very proud of it.
Art Wolfe
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People don't like it when you compare the miracle of childbirth to writing a book, but I think there is some overlap in the two because they are both pure agony.
Colson Whitehead
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The rain was dashing in torrents against the window-panes, and the wind sweeping in heavy and fitful gusts along the dreary and deserted streets, as a party of three persons sat over their wine, in that stately old pile which once formed the resort of the Irish Members, in College Green, Dublin, and went by the name of Daly's Clubhouse.
Charles Lever
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Religion obviously played a role in this book and the previous book, too.
Studs Terkel
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We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.
Ray Bradbury
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But a book suggests conversation: one person is speaking to another, and audible sound is, or should be, natural to that exchange. So I read aloud with myself as the audience, and gave voice to another's words.
Teju Cole
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The best one-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln is still Benjamin Thomas's 1952 biography. David Donald's 1995 biography is a close second, and close enough that if you can only obtain the Donald rather than the Thomas, your book club will still be doing just fine.
Allen C. Guelzo
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When liberals' presidential nominees consistently fail to carry Kansas, liberals do not rush to read a book titled "What's the Matter With Liberals' Nominees?" No, the book they turned into a bestseller is titled "What's the Matter With Kansas?" Notice a pattern here?
George Will
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A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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With a book I am the writer and I am also the director and I'm all of the actors and I'm the special effects guy and the lighting technician: I'm all of that. So if it's good or bad, it's all up to me.
George R. R. Martin
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Our book technology has Gutenberg at one end and the Ford assembly lines at the other. Both are obsolete. (p. 99)
Marshall McLuhan
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When I'm writing a book, you can't think about your audience. You're going to be in big trouble if you think about it. You're got to write from deep inside.
Judy Blume
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I read that book 'Fat is a Feminist Issue', got a bit desperate halfway through and ate it.
Jo Brand
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The one thing I would like more credit for is being part of a movement which involves recognising the importance of plot and asserting that books of literary worth could be written that had plots.
Scott Turow
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Whatever we may say against collections, which present authors in a disjointed form, they nevertheless bring about many excellent results. We are not always so composed, so full of wisdom, that we are able to take in at once the whole scope of a work according to its merits. Do we not mark in a book passages which seem to have a direct reference to ourselves? Young people especially, who have failed in acquiring a complete cultivation of mind, are roused in a praiseworthy way by brilliant passages.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Very conscious of the fact that an effort was being made to destroy my mind, because I was deprived of books, deprived of any means of writing, deprived of human companionship. You never know how much you need it until you're deprived of it.
Wole Soyinka
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If I revise a children's book, if I'm spending three hours on the first draft, I'm probably spending 30 minutes revising it. I mean, come on! But to redo a painting? That's hard work.
Michael Ian Black
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Not in this specific form. But all great cities are inhabited by ghosts. A book of this kind could probably be written about Jakarta, Manila, or London by anyone who had a feeling for the invisible truths of those places.
Teju Cole
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The text moves like a small crustacean with compound eye and complex nervous system; throbbing, involuted, it becomes a parasite on a different body, animal, using ‘filiform protrusions through which it sucks the vital juices of its host.’ Parasite or creature in mutation on the shore, torrid / delirium: mordant mortality, systematic competition the narrator against the I, leaking gas, a lapse of memory against a promise, an inset in a book. A muscular, involuntary bulging in the breast, circling all its inner surface: mesoblast: visceral.
Nicole Brossard
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I actually think that Bandbox, by far the silliest of my books, is the best constructed of them.
Thomas Mallon
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While one can lose oneself in a book one can never be thoroughly unhappy.
Edith Roosevelt
