Tahani > Tahani's Quotes

“We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.”
― John Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life

“Like all collectors, I exist in a perpetual state of want that bears no reasonable relationship to the quantity of unread books mounting up on my shelves.”
― Pamela Paul, My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Have you ever had that feeling—that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“The world is a book, and those who don't travel only read one page.”
― St Augustine

“I'll belong to libraries wherever I go. Maybe eventually I'll belong to libraries on other planets.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you.”
― Terry Pratchett

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop.”
― Bohumil Hrabal

“How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“O my darling books…how dear to me are they all! For have I not chosen them one by one, gathered them in with the sweat of my brow? I do love you all! It seems as if, by long and sweet companionship, you had become part of myself.”
― Antoine Issac, Baron Silvestre de Sacy

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“To build up a library is to create a life. It's never just a random collection of books.”
― Carlos María Domínguez, The House of Paper

“As book collectors know all too well: We only regret our economies, never our extravagances.”
― Michael Dirda

“For us, the playground of fiction is just as important as reality”
― Ryohgo Narita

“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”
― William Styron, Conversations with William Styron

“Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.”
― Anatole France

“Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.”
― Ray Bradbury

“The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.”
― Albert Einstein

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
― W.B. Yeats

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
― St. Augustine

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Always be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle.”
― Plato

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
― Ian MacLaren

“Books may well be the only true magic.”
― Alice Hoffman