Bookshelves Quotes - Page 2

Wouldn't it be wonderful if every home had good books instead of knick-knacks and plastic flowers on the bookshelves? And wouldn't it be great if every child heard good speech and received thoughtful answers to their questions instead of 'be quiet' or 'go to bed'?

Ernest L. Boyer

Education, Children, Flower

Ernest L. Boyer (1997). “Ernest L. Boyer, Selected Speeches, 1979-1995”, Jossey-Bass

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Right up to the middle of this century all perceptions of the world around us were delivered via the bookshelf or the paper route.

Theodore Bikel

Perception, World, Paper

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I grew up in the 'hood around prostitutes, drug dealers, killers, and gangbangers, but I also grew up juxtaposed: On the doorknob outside of our apartment, there was blood from some guy who got shot; but inside, there was National Geographic magazines and encyclopedias and a little library bookshelf situation.

Lupe Fiasco

Blood, Guy, Drug

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Love After Love all your life, whom you have ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott

Heart, Mirrors, Letters

Derek Walcott (2014). “The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013”, p.227, Macmillan

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If I walk into a place, a party, say, and there's a bookshelf, I immediately gravitate toward it. Unless there's a bar. But even then, it's only a matter of a few rounds before I make my way to the bookshelf. If there are good books on it, I may never leave the spot all night. Anybody I really want to talk to is going to make his or her way to that bookshelf sooner or later, anyway, right? Books are a nexus. They start conversations, and they continue conversations, and they make people better conversationalists. I have not found this to be the case with Iron Chef, or even alcohol.

Jonathan Evison

Party, Book, Night

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Richard's bookshelves weren't alphabetized. He never had time to alphabetize them. He was always too busy- looking for books he couldn't find.

Martin Amis

Book, Busy, Too Busy

Martin Amis (1995). “The Information”

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Every time I get mad, I grab my hammer and make a bookshelf or something.

Anthony Mackie

Mad, Hammers

"Anthony Mackie: 'There are a lot of limitations placed on young black actors'" by Hermione Hoby, www.theguardian.com. February 26, 2011.

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I source images and ideas from different parts of my experiences, and sometimes they are things that are made-up, or just appear out of nowhere, like out of a dream or an image that I've seen in a book, or even the title of a book that I'm staring at on a shelf. It's a good way to write songs, just stare at a bookshelf!

Julia Stone

Dream, Song, Book

"Angus and Julia Stone Synch Up". Interview with Olivia Fleming, www.interviewmagazine.com. July 31, 2014.

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In design-speak, 'a library' means a room lined with books, floor-to ceiling, but it all depends on the space you have. You may have a free-standing bookshelf of your favorite books if that's all you have room for.

Nate Berkus

Book, Mean, Space

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My study is a converted garage which is largely lined with bookshelves and cardboard boxes filled with manuscripts of my film scripts, plays and books.

William Nicholson

Book, Play, Scripts

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[T]hat I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf--felt akin to an instance of religious grace.

Jonathan Franzen

Religious, Grace, Hats

Jonathan Franzen (2007). “How to Be Alone: Essays”, p.57, Macmillan

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During the fifteen or twenty years in which I tried - it was not always easy with publishers, newspapers, etc. - to forbid photographs, it was not at all in order to mark a sort of blank, absence, or disappearance of the image; it was because the code that dominates at once the production of these images, the framing they are made to undergo, the social implications (showing the writer's head framed in front his bookshelves, the whole scenario) seemed to me to be, first of all, terribly boring, but also contrary to what I am trying to write and to work on.

Jacques Derrida

Writing, Order, Years

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Brad got me this great thing for Christmas. It's a bookshelf that has a book on every religion. That's how we plan to raise our kids. Teach them about all religions. They can pick one or be a student of all of them. We'll celebrate Kwanzaa for our girl. We'll celebrate moon and water festivals for our boys. We'll take them to temples in certain countries. Also to church.

Angelina Jolie

Girl, Country, Book

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I don't really have a domestic inclination. Even my apartment has a semblance of a storage facility. It's just stacks, there are no bookshelves, just books and piles of stamp collections and weird little sewing and knitting projects.

Sufjan Stevens

Book, Knitting, Littles

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Her library filled her bookshelves and then overflowed into waist-high stacks of books everywhere, piled haphazardly against the walls. If just one of them moved... the domino effect could engulf the three of us in an asphyxiating mass of literature.

John Green

Wall, Book, Library

John Green (2008). “Looking for Alaska”, p.21, Penguin

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A framed photo on a dusty bookshelf caught his attention; he moved closer and picked it up silently. A small girl with long blond hair was standing under a tree, her face tilted up in delight as its feathery leaves brushed across her face, framing it. A willow tree. Willow.

L.A. Weatherly

Girl, Hair, Long

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Oh, do you have A Tale of Two Cities?" "That silly thing? Men going around getting their heads chopped off for love? Ridiculus." Will unpeeled himself from the door and made his way toward Tessa where she stood by the bookshelves. He gestured expansively at the vast number of volumes all around him. "No, here you'll find all sorts of advice about how to chop off someone else's head if you need to; much more useful.

Cassandra Clare

Silly, Men, Doors

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Then I celebrated my Wall of Books. I counted the volumes on my twenty-foot-long modernist bookshelf to make sure none had been misplaced or used as kindling by my subtenant. “You’re my sacred ones,” I told the books. “No one but me still cares about you. But I’m going to keep you with me forever. And one day I’ll make you important again.” I thought about that terrible calumny of the new generation: that books smell.

Gary Shteyngart

Wall, Book, Smell

Gary Shteyngart (2010). “Super Sad True Love Story”, p.45, Granta Books

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If on a friend’s bookshelf You cannot find Joyce or Sterne Cervantes, Rabelais, or Burton, You are in danger, face the fact, So kick him first or punch him hard And from him hide behind a curtain.

Alexander Theroux

Faces, Firsts, Facts

Alexander Theroux (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.527, Fantagraphics Books

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I stretched out my hand towards the little bookshelf where I kept cookery and devotional books, the most comfortable bedside reading.

Barbara Pym

Book, Reading, Hands

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His eyes gravitated towards the wall-to-wall bookshelf at one end of the room. 'You folks like books, I see.

Regina Doman

Wall, Book, Eye

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We can see the film stars of yesterday in yesterday’s films, hear the voices of poest and singers on a record, keep the plays of dead dramatists upon our bookshelves, but the actor who holds his audience captive for one brief moment upon a lighted stage vanishes forever when the curtain falls.

Daphne du Maurier

Stars, Fall, Play

Daphne Du Maurier (1980). “The Rebecca notebook and other memories”, Book Sales

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Thousands of volumes have been written about aviation, but we do not automatically have thousands of true and special friends in their authors. That rare writer who comes alive on a page does it by giving of himself, by writing of meanings, and not just of fact or of things that have happened to him. The writers of flight who have done this are usually found together in a special section on private bookshelves.

Richard Bach

Writing, Airplane, Giving

Richard Bach (2012). “A Gift of Wings”, p.94, Dell

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...Mr. Wodehouse is a prose stylist of such startling talent that Frankie nearly skipped around with glee when she first read some of his phrases. Until her discovery of Something Fresh on the top shelf of Ruth's bookshelf one bored summer morning, Frankie's leisure reading had consister primarily of paperback mysteries she found on the spinning racks at the public library down the block from her house, and the short stories of Dorothy Parker. Wodehouse's jubilant wordplay bore itself into her synapses like a worm into a fresh ear of corn.

E. Lockhart

Summer, Morning, Block

E. Lockhart (2014). “The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks”, p.72, Hot Key Books

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There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in...We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.

Graham Greene

Lying, Doors, Childhood

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