[comrades] are ashes, entrails, dung, stove smoke, clay, and they’ll all return to clay. They’re full of dirt, candle oil, droppings, dust.
You, O Book, my pure, shining precious, my golden singing promise, my dream, a distant call—
O tender specter, happy chance,
Again I heed the ancient lore,
Again with beauty rare in stance,
You beckon from the distant shore!”
You, Book! You are the only one who won't deceive, won't attack, won't insult, won't abandon! You're quiet--but you laugh, shout, and sing; you're obedient--but you amaze, tease and entice; you're small but you contain countless peoples. Nothing but a handful of letters, that's all, but if you feel like it, you can turn heads, confuse, spin, cloud, make tears spring to the eye, take away the breath, the entire soul will stir in the wind like a canvas, will rise in the waves and flap its wings! Sometimes a kind of wordless feeling tosses and turns in the chest, pounds its fists on the door, the walls: I'm suffocating! Let me out! How can you let that feeling out, all fuzzy and naked? What words ca you dress it in? We don't have any words, we don't know! Just like wild animals, or a blindlie bird, or a mermaid--no words, just a bellowing. But you open a book--and there they are, fabulous, flying words:
O city! O wind! O snowstorms and blizzards!
O azure abyss all raveled and tattered!
Here am I! I'm blameless! I'm with you forever...
...Or there's bile and sadness and bitterness. The emptiness dries your eyes out and you search for the words, and here they are:
But is the world not all alike?
From the Cabbala of Chaldaic signs
Throughout the ages, now and ever more,
To the sky where the even star shines.
The same old wisdom--born of ashes,
And in that wisdom, like our twin,
The face of longing, frailty, fear, and sin,
Stares straight across the ages at us.
Tags: books
...books possess an ounce-of-weight to minute-of-entertainment ratio that compares quite favorably to intoxicants.
Jon KrakauerTags: books backpacking
More than at any other time, when I hold a beloved book in my hand my limitations fall from me, my spirit is free.
Helen KellerTags: words reading books literature
A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning’s flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,--and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.
Henry David ThoreauTags: words reading books knowledge nature literature perfection
Goodreads helps quite a few people that love to giveaway their books. I donate some of the books that I get from goodreads.
William MancheeTags: books
It was wrong, but sometimes you have to break a few eggs in order to make an omelette.
Stephen KingTags: inspirational books
Reading books would be boring if you lack imagination...
HimmiliciousTags: imagination reading books
And that's the most horrible thing about censorship: To avoid falling afoul of the censors, we question ourselves and censor ourselves and make a big deal out of things in our heads. We do the work of the control freaks for them, out of a desire to avoid them.
G.R. ReaderTags: books censorship book-burning goodreads
In books, often the bad guys have a story too, and sometimes it is just as tragic as the hero’s.
Jennifer Megan VarnadoreTags: books bad-guys anithero tragic-backstory
No, I have never had a problem finding books to read. But I have had a problem finding people who understand what it's like to really LOVE reading. Maybe even need it. People who associate periods of their life with the kinds of things they were reading then, whether in school or in dusty old rooms of a house in Holland. The kind of people who take personal journeys into books and write responses that are part review, part stories in themselves. This is what Goodreads has always given me.
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