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Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.
JOHN MILTON, Areopagitica
- A man who keeps a diary pays,
- Due toll to many tedious days;
- But life becomes eventful—then,
- His busy hand forgets the pen.
- Most books, indeed, are records less
- Of fulness than of emptiness.
WILLIAM ALLINGHAM, A Diary
A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.
JOHN MILTON, Areopagitica
Books are not seldom talismans and spells.
What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.
RAY BRADBURY, Fahrenheit 451
Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.
GEORGE ORWELL, Confessions of a Book Reviewer
'Tis the good reader that makes the good book.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Society and Solitude
What I look for most in the books I read is a sense of consciousness. It's so I know that I've lived. At the end, I can say, "Yes, I have been here--I was here, and I was paying attention."
LILI TAYLOR, O Magazine, Aug. 2006
Books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI, Eragon
A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.
THOMAS CARLYLE, speech in support of the London Library, 1840
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