Aurora137’s most recent Quotables

I fell into the books, and left myself there for safekeeping.

The long read is a dying art, but there are so many claims on our attention. Very literate people admit they can't read books any more. And just as the literate brain is physically different to the illiterate brain, the digitally savvy brain is different again. It's a physiological change, not just a moral one.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape;...it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly in hand before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.

I spent my life folded between the pages of books.

It doesn’t matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.

The relationship of a girl and her favorite novel can be complex indeed.

Date a girl who doesn’t read. The girl who reads knows the importance of plot; can trace out the demarcations of a prologue, the sharp ridges of a climax. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission, expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end; is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with a twinge of sadness.

She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you...Books break the shackles of time...proof that humans are capable of working magic.

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

Books are a uniquely portable magic.

We're so busy watching out for what's just ahead of us that we don't take time to enjoy where we are.

Calvin: You can’t just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood.
Hobbes: What mood is that?
Calvin : Last-minute panic.

Did you ever wonder if the person in the puddle is real, and you're just a reflection of him?

I’m not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information.

People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world.

Hobbes: Do you think there is a God?
Calvin: Well, somebody’s out to get me.