"A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen."
- Charles Baxter (via writingquotes)
"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….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
(Source: facebook.com)
"What we preserve of books we read — whether we take notes, or not, and even if we sincerely believe we remember them faithfully — is in truth no more than a few fragments afloat, like so many islands, on an ocean of oblivion."
- Pierre Bayard, “How to talk about books you haven’t read” (via writedrunk)
(via bookporn)
Do you ever look up from reading a book and get disoriented because you’re actually in your bedroom or class or somewhere that isn’t the story?
all the time :|
(via justcallmesweetpee)
"Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us."
- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (via bookmania)
(via sassybraavosi)
"One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time."
- Carl Sagan (via tatqiq)
(via bookporn)
"The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours."
- Alan Bennett, The History Boys (via iwanttocatchastar)
"Reading, he says, is this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead…"
- If on a winter’s night a traveler - Italo Calvino (via libroabrazos)
(via bookporn)
