"Writing for me, even what you call serious writing, is play."
"I think libraries are more vital now than they have ever been. And whatever form books take in the centuries and millennia to come, we will always need librarians."
"I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers – there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader."
– Julian Barnes (via prettybooks)
(Source: Guardian, via prettybooks)
"Here’s to books, the cheapest vacation you can buy."
– Charlaine Harris (via kari-shma)
(via prettybooks)
"By now, I probably preferred secondhand books to new ones. In America such items were disparagingly referred to as “previously owned”; but this very continuity of ownership was part of their charm. A book dispensed its explanation of the world to one person, then another, and so on down the generations; different hands held the same book and drew sometimes the same, sometimes a different wisdom from it."
– Julian Barnes (via prettybooks)
(Source: Guardian, via prettybooks)
"We love books for what they carry within them, not for what they’re made of."
– Rebecca Joines Schinsky (via prettybooks)
(Source: The Huffington Post, via prettybooks)
"Children have always read books written for adults, even while their own body of literature has grown. Why even have a separate juvenile literature if children are exposed to the adult world daily? Because children can and do benefit from a literature that meets their interests and the context of their lives. What they do not benefit from is literature that is “dumbed down” on the assumption that they cannot handle complexities."
– Radical Change: Books for Youth in a Digital Age (1999) by Eliza Dresang (via presentingbooks)
(Source: noonewilleverbelieveyou, via prettybooks)
"His father was always urging him to go outside, to do something physical, always perplexed by the solemn stacks of books he brought home. But books gave him documentation, proof of other places, other times, that had nothing to do with this one."
– Zachary Lazar, Sway (via prettybooks)
(Source: ohinsomnia.tumblr.coma, via prettybooks)
"There are certain emotions in your body that not even your best friend can sympathize with, but you will find the right film or the right book, and it will understand you."
– Björk (via paxetlux)
(Source: timeofalbion, via prettybooks)
"Books help to form us. If you cut me open, you will find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me. Alice in Wonderland. the Magic Faraway Tree. The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Book of Job. Bleak House. Wuthering Heights. The Complete Poems of W.H. Auden. The Tale of Mr Toad. Howard’s End. What a strange person I must be. But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA."
– Susan Hill, Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home (via cystallineambermoments)
(via fuckyeahreading)
"There are books that have defined moments in my life, books which have carved out pieces of my heart and took up unapologetic residence. I have this irrational fear…that if I re-read it, I’ll lose the magic of that book. I don’t want to tarnish the memories. Each re-read of a book speaks to you differently, and I want to hold onto exactly how these books spoke to me at a specific moment in time."
"A library card is the start of a lifelong adventure."
– Lilian Jackson Braun (via prettybooks)
(via prettybooks)
"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 to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and 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."
– Nora Ephron (via atomos)
(via prettybooks)
