Bookshelves Quotes - Page 3

• On more than one occasion David, in his urge to explore the darker corners of the bookshelves, had found himself wearing strands of spider silk in his face and hair, causing the web's creator to scuttle into a corner and crouch balefully, lost in thoughts of arachnoid revenge.

  John Connolly

  Revenge, Hair, Spiders

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• You know what the best kind of organic certification would be? Make an unannounced visit to a farm and take a good long look at the farmer’s bookshelf. Because what you’re feeding your emotions and thoughts is what this is really all about. The way I produce a chicken is an extension of my worldview. You can learn more about that by seeing what’s sitting on my bookshelf than having me fill out a whole bunch of forms.

  Joel Salatin

  Long, Would Be, Looks

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• People have libraries at home, they have bookshelves, they have CDs. And they sort of try, people try to bring great artists into their lives, into their physical houses and sort of live with portions of them. But they're not really deeply engaging with them.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Home, Artist, Cds

  "Oates Details Writers' Last Days in 'Wild Nights'". Interview with Liane Hansen, www.npr.org. April 27, 2008.

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• The first book by an African American I read was Carl T. Rowan's memoir, Go South to Sorrow. I found it on the bookshelf at the back of my fifth-grade classroom, an adult book. I can remember the quality of the morning on which I read. It was a sunlit morning in January, a Saturday morning, cold, high, empty. I sat in a rectangle of sunlight, near the grate of the floor heater in the yellow bedroom. And as I read, I became aware of warmth and comfort and optimism. I was made aware of my comfort by the knowledge that others were not, are not, comforted. Carl Rowan at my age was not comforted.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Morning, Book, Yellow

  "Brown : The Last Discovery of America". Book by Richard Rodriguez, 2003.

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• We have a generation of kids who may never see a bookshelf or never see books in houses. What are they going to think about books? How will books become meaningful in their lives except as yet another form of digitalized content? A book is not just digitalized content.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Meaningful, Book, Kids

  Source: americanlibrariesmagazine.org

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• At a tender age, I commandeered half a quire of foolscap from my father's desk and sat down to write a book. ...I had observed onprinted fly leaves the words "By the author of, etc." ...So under the title of my prospective work I wrote: By the author of "Les Miserables," "The Woman in White," "Dombey and Son," "Tom Brown's Schooldays" and "Our Life in the Highlands," the last-named being an opus of good Queen Victoria. I had not read all these works but they existed on our bookshelves, and I hoped to produce something worthy of comparison.

  Rheta Childe Dorr

  Queens, Father, Book

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• Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.

  Terry Eagleton

  Reading, Practice, Literature

  "Literary Theory: An Introduction". Book by Terry Eagleton, 1983.

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• I'm a gastronome first and foremost. I have several bookshelves in my home full of cookbooks, foodie magazines and food writer books and I am always on the hunt for a great recipe or local foodie haunt to try.

  Karen Walker

  Book, Home, Trying

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• My whole thing is, I collect what I know I want to read, and I have certain bookshelves in my bedroom that contain all the books I haven't read yet.

  June Squibb

  Book, Want, Bedroom

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• I hope for so much from every book I read. And time and again, I find myself disappointed. I look across my bookshelves and see hundreds of titles which in my memory seem merely mediocre or second-rate. Only occasionally does a novel appear for which I feel a lasting passion, a book that I think could in time become a classic.

  John Boyne

  Memories, Book, Passion

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• My own feminist revolution evolved slowly, and traveled the world with me. To this day I have no idea what dissident professor or librarian placed feminist tests on the bookshelves at the university library in Jeddah, but I found them there. They filled me with terror. I understood they were pulling at a thread that would unravel everything. Now that I am older, I can see that feeling terrified is how you recognize what you need. Terror encourages you to jump, even when you don't know if you will ever land.

  Mona Eltahawy

  Land, Ideas, Feminist

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• The crazy thing is that when we go to somebody's house, what's better than looking at their bookshelves? Nobody's ever going to say, "Can I see the index to your Kindle?" It's so depressing and so unsexy. Sure, it's there, but nobody is going to get excited by that.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Depressing, Crazy, House

  Source: americanlibrariesmagazine.org

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• If the Bible is what it claims to be, how can we allow it to remain on a bookshelf?

  Steven J Lawson

  Claims, Ifs

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• I have Margaery Tyrell's - I didn't take it, I was given it - but yes, David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] gave me Margaery Tyrell's wedding crown. So that is sitting on my bookshelf.

  Natalie Dormer

  Sitting, Crowns, Given

  Source: www.elle.com

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• I have a nice bookshelf in my office, but not my house. I'm crass, but not that crass.

  Jerry Seinfeld

  Nice, Office, House

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• A little more than a hundred years ago, "Tel Aviv" was not a city. It was a title of a novel written by an author. The "Return to Zion" was a name of another novel. There was a bookshelf. There was no country. There was no state. There was no nation. There was no physical Jewish reality in this country.

  Amos Oz

  Country, Reality, Cities

  "'Everybody comes from somewhere.' An Interview with Writer Amos Oz". Interview with Prashanth Ramakrishna, logger.believermag.com. October 20, 2016.

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• I try really hard to ask people to take a look at their bookshelves. Are there female writers on it? Gay writers? Writers of color? There should be.

  Jodi Picoult

  Gay, Color, People

  Source: nudge-book.com

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• Genre categorization is a capitalist (rather than artistic) thing, a symptom of marketing and major-chain bookshelf placement.

  Lee Klein

  Marketing, Artistic, Placement

  Source: www.identitytheory.com

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• When I read Jerome D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" that was the first time I felt my mind blow open. I thought that book was speaking to me. I was 12 or 13 when I read that. I read everything on my mother's bookshelves.

  Alice Hoffman

  Mother, Book, Blow

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• When I was twelve. And I was going through my parents' bookshelves, I found the most wonderful books and plenty of. Within those wonderful books that were real turn-on's. At 12 or 13, books were such turn-ons.

  Judy Blume

  Real, Book, Parent

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• The row of dolls watched her impassively from the bookshelf, their tea party propriety almost certainly offended.

  Holly Black

  Party, Tea, Dolls

  Holly Black (2012). “Tithe”, p.38, Simon and Schuster

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• I love gay and lesbian parents. But I think we need a law that says lesbians and gay men have to raise their children together. This way, the kids would not only know how to build bookshelves, but they'd also instinctively know how to decorate them.

  Joan Rivers

  Children, Kids, Gay

  Joan Rivers (2012). “I Hate Everyone...Starting with Me”, p.21, Penguin

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• Adrienne Mayor's inquiry into the myth--and surprising reality--of Amazon women begins with the fierce Greek huntress Atalanta, but takes us deep into the past and as far afield as the Great Wall of China. With the restless curiosity and meticulous scholarship that have become her hallmark, the author once again has found a gap in my bookshelf and filled it, admirably.

  Steven Saylor

  Wall, Past, Reality

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• I've always loved books. I'm passionate about them. I think books are sexy. They are smooth and solid and contain delightful surprises. They smell good. They fit into a handbag and can be carried around and opened at will. They don't change. They are what they are and nothing else. One day I want to own a lot of books and have them nbear to me in my house, so that I can stroll to my bookshelves and choose what I fancy. I want a harem. I shall keep my favourites by my bed.

  Sue Townsend

  Sexy, Book, Thinking

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• More people should visit Antarctica, metaphorically speaking, on their own. That is one of the conclusions I have reached, one of my recommendations: explore something, even if it's just a bookshelf. Make a stab in the dark. Read off the beaten path. Your attention is precious. Be careful of other people trying to direct how you dispense it. Confront your own values. Decide what it is you are looking for an then look for it. Perform connoisseurship. We all need to create our own vocabulary of appreciation, or we are trapped by the vocabulary of others.

  Phyllis Rose

  Appreciation, Dark, Vocabulary

  Phyllis Rose (2014). “The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading”, p.215, Macmillan

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