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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When my books were translated, it was always about the characters, because the unique language aspect was lost in translation.
Etgar Keret
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I used to sleep with my books in piles all over my bed and sometimes they were the only thing keeping me warm and always the only thing keeping me alive. Books are the best and worst defense.
Sherman Alexie
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You feel like you're trying to show off your cool by mentioning the five bands that you know are great and the five books that will reflect well on you. I can't do it. I should take the time to but I don't want to take the time to do that.
Emily Haines
Broken Social Scene
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We possess books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves.
David L. Ulin
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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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Corliss had never once considered the fate of library books. She'd never wondered how many books go unread. She loved books. How could she not worry about the unread? She felt like a disorganized scholar, an inconsiderate lover, an abusive mother, and a cowardly soldier.
Sherman Alexie
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So, the kind of precious memories about being black for my generation won't exist for my kids' and grandkids' generations unless we preserve them through fiction, through film, through comic books, and every other form of media we can possibly utilize to perpetuate the story of the great African-American people.
Henry Louis Gates
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When I was nine I spent a lot of my time reading books about the history of comedy, or listening to the Goons or Hancock, humour from previous generations.
Paul Merton
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I hate books; they only teach people to talk about what they don't understand.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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The early commentators who put down the pre-presidential Roosevelt as an empty-headed young lightweight, all ambition and no talent, now seem comically wrong to a modern book-reading, movie-going, television-watching, legend-loving American public conditioned to think of him as one of the presidential giants on the order of Washington and Lincoln.
Russell Baker
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The greatest pleasure in life is that of reading while we are young. I have had as much of this pleasure perhaps as any one.
William Hazlitt
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Life is not bad, and it doesn't look more real if it's ugly or it's gritty. Think of your own life. Most of what's in your own life, hopefully, is exactly that. Friendship and love and passion for movies and cartoons and comic books, whatever it is that you love. Most of the way we live our lives involves looking for pleasure and beauty and happiness and affection. Real artists don't use reflexive clichés about things. It's about honoring the reality of people's lives, which defies conventions and clichés and expectations. People are interesting, period.
Daniel Mendelsohn
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Barry Crump wrote a lot of books and they were really special. They were kind of the quintessential, mild for the most part, kind of southern man, kind of the true heart of what it meant to be a Kiwi kind of farmer; very kind of outdoor man living off the land. That kind of thing, you don't see so much anymore these days with everyone being metrosexual and lattes and laptops.
Rhys Darby
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They say in that book (Keneally's Schindler's List) that I gave the Jews the food in their mouths. I never had time to find out who was sick and who had to be fed (by hand). I am no good as a nurse, I tell you frankly. I have no talent for nursing . . . I bought the food for everyone.
Emilie Schindler
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I think that Hick was in love with Eleanor, and Eleanor was in love with Hick. I think it's very important to look at the letters that are in my book, because unlike some of the recent published letters, I have both the personal and the political. And their relationship is about ardor. It's about fun. And it's also about politics.
Blanche Wiesen Cook
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After long absence, of return / To my dear home - Oh, happiness! / To lie in blissful consciousness / Of all around: The picture there - / The books - the flower-glass filled with care / By a kind hand - And then to know, / 'Twas but to rise, and meet below / Such a heart's welcome!
Caroline Anne Southey
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If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?
Emily Dickinson