Books

Famous quotes containing the word books:

    A book should long for pen, ink, and writing-table: but usually it is pen, ink, and writing-table that long for a book. That is why books are so negligible nowadays.
    Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

    Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books, unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.
    Victor Null, South African educator, psychologist. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, introduction, Yale University Press (1988)

    Only my books anoint me,
    and a few friends,
    those who reach into my veins.
    Anne Sexton (1928–1974)