One Book Quotes (page 15)
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I am afraid I am one of those people who continues to read in the hope of sometime discovering in a book a single—and singular—piece of wisdom so penetrating, so soul stirring, so utterly applicable to my own life as to make all the bad books I have read seem well worth the countless hours spent on them. My guess is that this wisdom, if it ever arrives, will do so in the form of a generalization.
Joseph Epstein
I am Plato's Republic. Mr. Simmons is Marcus. I want you to meet Jonathan Swift, the author of that evil political book, Gulliver's Travels! And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and-this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr. Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philosopher indeed. Here we all are, Montag. Aristophanes and Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confucius and Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Jefferson and Mr. Lincoln, if you please. We...
Ray Bradbury
This much is already known: for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences. (I know of an uncouth region whose librarians repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in books and equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's palm . . . They admit that the inventors of this writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but maintain that this...
Jorge Luis Borges
We don't need to have just one favorite. We keep adding favorites. Our favorite book is always the book that speaks most directly to us at a particular stage in our lives. And our lives change. We have other favorites that give us what we most need at that particular time. But we never lose the old favorites. They're always with us. We just sort of accumulate them.
Lloyd Alexander
THE POLITICIAN
If it wasn't for graft, you'd get a very low type of people in politics. Men without ambition. Jellyfish!
CATHERINE
Especially since you can't rob the people anyway.
THE POLITICIAN
Sure...How was that?
CATHERINE
What you rob, you spend. And what you spend goes back to the people. So where's the robbery? I read that in one of my father's books.
THE POLITICIAN
That book should be in every home!
Preston Sturges
He said when he went to sell a man a flue, he asked first about that man's wife's health and how his children were. He said he had a book that he kept thenames of his customers' families and what was wrong with them. A man's wife had cancer, he put her name down in the book and wrote 'cancer' after it and inquired about her every time he went to that man's hardware store until she died; then he scratched out the word 'cancer' and wrote 'dead' there. "And I say thank God when they're dead,"...
Flannery O'Connor
[[diving into the wreck]]First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade[...]And now: it is easy to forgetwhat I came foramong so many who have alwayslived here...[...]the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreckthe thing itself and not the myththe drowned face always staringtoward the sunthe evidence of damageworn by salt and away into this threadbare beautythe ribs of the disastercurving their assertionamong the tentative...
Adrienne Rich
A western buckaroo, I share his scorn for people who go camping by the book, relying on the authority of some half-assed assistant scoutmaster whose total experience outdoors probably consists of two overnight hikes and a weekend in the Catskills. But we have just had that confrontation. The one who goes by Pritchard's book is Sid's wife, and I am wary. It is not my expedition. I am a guest here.
Wallace Stegner
Go back and rid the word of that book. Fill it with words before spring comes, or winter will never end for you. And I will take not only your life for the Adderhead's but your daughter's, too, because she helped you bind the book. Do you undersand, Bluejay"Why two?" asked Mo hoarsely. "How can you ask for two lives in return for one?
Cornelia Funke
And now my old dog is dead, and another I had after him, and my parents are dead, and that first world, that old house, is sold and lost, and the books I gathered there lost, or sold- but more books bought, and in another place, board by board and stone by stone, like a house, a true life built, and all because I was steadfast about one or two things: loving foxes, and poems, the blank piece of paper, and my own energy- and mostly the shimmering shoulders of the world that shrug carelessly...
Mary Oliver