19 quotes found
“Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.”
“I have never been able to resist a book about books.”
“Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.”
“I'd rather have a book, but in a pinch I'll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions.”
“But like balloons, they were excessively buoyant, and if you weren't careful, they floated away.”
“You're a romantic. What's romantic about a guy wanting to go somewhere and actually getting there?”
“A philosophy professor at my college, whose baby became enamored of the portrait of David Hume on a Penguin paperback, had the cover laminated in plastic so her daughter could cut her teeth on the ...”
“Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing ...”
“One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long a...”
“My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children's rooms are crammed with expensive book...”
“I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them.”
“Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.”
“It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the l...”
“In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.”
“My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closes...”
“His books commingled democratically, united under the all-inclusive flag of Literature. Some were vertical, some horizontal, and some actually placed behind others. Mine were balkanized by national...”
“When the corpses of [Sir John] Franklin's officers and crew were later discovered, miles from their ships, the men were found to have left behind their guns but to have lugged such essentials as mo...”
“...in the midst of the tumult, part ecstasy and part panic, into which all first-time mothers are thrown by sleep deprivation and headlong identity realignment.”
“I, on the other hand, believe that books, maps, scissors, and Scotch tape dispensers are all unreliable vagrants, likely to take off for parts unknown unless strictly confined to quarters.”
