anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
All my life, books had been the life raft, the safe haven, the place I ran to when nothing else worked.
— Elyn R. Saks, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (Hachette Books, August 14, 2007)
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
Books are the best means—private, discreet, reliable—of overcoming reality.
Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
Imagine going to a magical buffet and there’s tons of delicious delicacies and you know you can’t eat everything, but you want to! The secret of this magic buffet is that the food will never go off, it’s magic, the food will never spoil! So you can take home as much as you can carry, as much as you can afford and you will one day eat all this amazing food!
That’s what happens when I walk into a bookstore or a library sale, or second hand store that carries books… I want to eat and taste, and swallow all the books, and now I have just so so many books… when will I read them all? I don’t know, but they just all look so ripe and juicy and promising… and maybe I’m not craving a mystery right now, or I don’t have an appetite for poetry at the moment but I will, I will and one day I will devour all my books.
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
One cannot pick up a single one of her books and read a page without feeling more alive. If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be?
May Sarton, talking about Virginia Woolf in Journal of a Solitude: The Journals of May Sarton
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
The first time I sat in that library, holding a book published before 1500, I felt something akin to the way I have felt next to oceans: tiny, and in right proportion to the world. Handling books from centuries before is a poignant reminder that, not only have people loved books for as long as they have existed, they will continue to do so long into the future. Perhaps today, bibliomania does not feel like an irrational behaviour, as books have become less venerated and libraries rarer. Rather, as it was for others before us, it is a careful act of preservation for those who come after.
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.
There is warmth there too – a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm.
Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
Today at the library a man got one of the huge coffee table books of the shelf, took it over to the corner, lay it on the floor, then sat, with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, and stared down at a huge full spread picture of an alligator for several minutes.
#husband material
#reaaallyyy ??!!#uughg ffs children#hmm... maybe boyfriend ??#or gbf... or just friend#which is Fine and Great#???#honestly people#stop with the flippant legally binding contract references#i am so fecking sick of this shite#you know what they say...#it's a book/alligator recommending a person#books#on books
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
Opening the book, I inhaled. The smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it.
Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
On bad days I just held onto the thinning rope.
The rope was poetry [...]
If poetry was a rope, then the books themselves were my rafts. At my most precarious I balanced on a book, and the books rafted me over the tides of feelings that left me soaked and shattered.
Feeling. I didn't want to feel.
Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
Books, / books, / books–
(to lean on, to run to, to hide in)
Gebre Kristos Desta, from ‘Solace’ (trans. Solomon Deressa)
Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home -- they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.
There is warmth there too -- a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm.
Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and non-dull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
Barbara W. Tuchman, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 34, No. 2 (1980)
She liked getting hold of some book which neither her father or mother had read, and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her thoughts with any one, or having to decide whether the book was a good one or a bad one.
Virginia Woolf, Night and Day