wallflower’s most recent Quotables

To be given a book is like being given a ship: you become a Christopher Columbus and there's no saying what you'll find across the ocean.

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do things worth writing.

It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.

Surely there would be something eerie about a line of books were it not that familiarity has deadened our sense of it. Each is a mummified soul embalmed in cere-cloth, natron of leather and printer's ink. Each cover of a true book enfolds the concentrated essence of a man. The personalities of the writers have faded into the thinnest shadows, as their bodies into impalpable dust, yet here are their very spirits at your command.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?

...eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably. Of course not all books are suitable for mealtime reading. It would be a kind of blasphemy to read poetry at table.

Sometimes we feel like we know more people than we actually do, because we know the characters in well-written books. I would argue that sometimes a character in a book is well-worth meeting.

Reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life.

I read myself into a trance of perfect bliss.

Let us read and let us dance - two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.

I read only to please myself, and enjoy only what suits my taste.

There’s nothing more beautiful in the material world than the book.

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.

Read something no one else is reading, think something no one else is thinking, and do something no one else is doing.

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.

Wicked people never have time for reading. It's one of the reasons for their wickedness.

Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.

It is difficult, when faced with a situation you cannot control, to admit you can do nothing.

I spent my life folded between the pages of books.