... la alegría infantil de sumergirse en una conversación inesperada con un completo desconocido para descubrirse, horas después -y bajo toneladas hipercalóricas de "¿leíste a tal?". "¡Sí! ¿Y leíste a tal?". "¡Sí! ¿Y leíste a tal?"-, pensando que ése, sí, es el comienzo de una gran amistad.
October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or of shutting a book, did not end a tale. Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: "It is simply a matter," he explained to April, "of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content.
I try to find the books that I lost or forgot more than 30 years ago on another continent, with the hope and dedication and bitterness of those who search for their first lost books, books that if found I wouldn't read anyway, because I've already read them over and over, but that I would look at and touch just as the miser strokes the coins under which he's buried...Books are like ghosts
Do you know what it is?' [Toby] said thoughtfully. 'It's that they haven't had anything really awful happen to them. No wonder they seem so superficial and unfeeling.' It was certainly an interesting theory, ... [but] surely one didn't need to have suffered in order to possess empathy for those who had? All it required was a bit of imagination and a well-stocked library.
I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose.
We read in slow, long motions, as if drifting in space, weightless. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling gaps, mending faults. And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder... as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us--the recognition of something we never knew was there...
...a book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. If for a hundred and a hundred years everyone had been able freely to handle our codices, the majority of them would no longer exist. So the librarian protects them not only against mankind but also against nature, and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion, the enemy of truth.
There is no greater feeling of accomplishment than to create a world that solely exists in your imagination and be able to pull someone into this hidden place inside of my thoughts. To make someone care for a person that has manifested from my dreams, to make them hate me for putting them in danger, and for them to ask to be taken on another journey with me when it is all said and done is why I write.
All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.
To live fully your well-read life -at any age- it is essential to take your selection of books seriously. When you drift from book to book, you're lulled into thinking that this lack of focus is right and natural - but it's as wrong as can be. Some serendipity in your reading is delightful, but if you wanted to build a house, would you wait for the materials to assemble themselves? - Steve Leveen
I got it! I got it!” Heeb declared triumphantly. Evan stopped in the middle of his kitchenette to hear Heeb’s idea. “Sex in the Title.”“Yeah, that’s what you’ve been saying I need.”“No, that’s the title: ‘Sex in the Title.’”“You want me to call my novel ‘Sex in the Title?’”“Yeah. Isn’t it great?
Books are like people: fascinating, inspiring, thought-provoking, some laugh, some meditate, others ache with old age, but still have wisdom: some are disease-ridden, some deceitful; but others are a delight to behold, and many travel to foreign lands; some cry, some teach, others are lots of fun, they are excellent companions and all have individuality - Books are friends. What person has too many friends?
We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And someday we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddamn steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in it and cover it up.
My ears become my conduit to the world. In the darkness I listen—to thrillers, to detective novels, to romances; to family sagas, potboilers and historical novels; to ghost stories and classic fiction and chick lit; to bonkbusters and history books. I listen to good books and bad books, great books and terrible books; I do not discriminate. Steadily, hour after hour, in the darkness I consume them all.
The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that don't, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like, and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a test paper.
