Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of reading is s...
Prayer seems to me a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down. I do not choose to admit weakness. I accept the challenge of responsibility. Life, as it...
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
I wanted to live among books.
I look over at my hero shelf and see Philip Levine, Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf, Shunryu Suzuki, Adrienne Rich, Pablo Neruda, Subcomandante Marcos, Eduardo Galeano, James Baldwin. These books a...
I just love the way those old-time authors like Mr. Dickens or George Eliot (who was actually a woman, in case you didn’t know) stop smack-dab in the middle of the story and say stuff like, patient re...
I have never been able to resist a book about books.
Each book was like an underwater cave, and when I rose again to the surface, I was pale and grumpy, resentful of everyone who hadn't been where I'd been.
Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm...
And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country...
An active mind didn't need distractions in its physical environment. It needed a collection of outstanding books and a good lamp. Maybe some cheese and crackers.
A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
I do not know any reading more easy more fascinating more delightful than a catalogue.
Do give books - religious or otherwise - for Christmas. They're never fattening seldom sinful and permanently personal.
The dust and silence of the upper shelf.
Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it no excess of explanation and it is full of suggestions the raw material of possible poems and histories.
Over the years I have collected so many books that, in aggregate, they can fairly be called a library.I don't know what percentage of them I have read. Increasingly I wonder how many of them I ever wi...
Some books are so familiar, reading them is like being home again.
Anyone who can see will see you beautiful.
The book to read is not the one that thinks for you but the one which makes you think.