Francois Mitterrand Quotes

A solitary child growing up in Africa, you're really quite dependent on books.

It's difficult to describe the weirdness of speaking to a man who appears to be perfectly in control of his faculties, who can deliver off-the-cuff repartee, and yet who is actually utterly disconnected from who he is.

Schizophrenia is a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo- social realities.

As long as we have books, we are not alone.

I've read only fiction, so I don't know anything actual.

A great reader seldom recognizes his solitude.

A recluse without books and ink is already in life a dead man.

The power of a book lies in its power to turn a solitary act into a shared vision. As long as we have books, we are not alone.

One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.

I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.

Schizophrenia is hearing voices, not doing voices.

Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves.

The homeless person or the schizophrenic person talking to themselves are disassociated from their immediate environment. They're off in a fantasy, and it's very similar to what happens on a cell phone.

I lived so completely in my mind - a place of unchecked delusion and complete fantasy!

Reading a good book helps us to feel un-alone.

Though many schizophrenics become curiously attached to their delusions, the fading of the nondelusional world puts them in loneliness beyond all reckoning, a fixed residence on a noxious private planet they can never leave, and where they can receive no visitors.

In describing one way of going mad, I shall try to show that there is a comprehensible transition from the sane schizoid way of being-in-the-world to a psychotic way of being-in-the-world.

you can not fully read a book without being alone. But through this very solitude you become intimately involved with people whom you might never have met otherwise, either because they have been dead for centuries or because they spoke languages you cannot understand. And, nonetheless, they have become your closest friends, your wisest advisors, the wizards that hypnotize you, the lovers you have always dreamed of. -Antonio munoz molinas, "the power of the pen

A man who finishes a book is always alone when he finishes it.

She said it out loud, the words distributed into a room that was full of cold air and books. Books everywhere! Each wall was armed with overcrowded yet immaculate shelving. It was barely possible to see paintwork. There were all different styles and sizes of lettering on the spines of the black, the red, the gray, the every-colored books. It was one of the most beautiful things Liesel Meminger had ever seen. With wonder, she smiled. That such a room existed!

[When] he's here, he's always reading. He says books stop time. I myself think he's crazy...Don't tell anyone, but when he reads something that he likes he gets real happy, turns on the music, and dances by himself, or with a broom sometimes.

Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had. And when you are reading a book, you and the author are alone together-just the two of you.

This is one of the defining sorrows of books: that we cannot see one another.

Reading brings us unknown friends

A schizophrenic is a person who already has a natural tendency to absent himself from this world.