Penelope Lively Quotes

He fed his spirit with the bread of books

One should never underestimate the power of books.

A book is quite a beautiful thing, even more so learning. Together, however, all they amount to is called book-learning.

Anything worth anything can be found in books.

I can't imagine I could have become the person I am now without books. Books became synonymous with freedom. They showed that you could open doors and walk through.

I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst...They are for nothing but to inspire.

Give a kid a book, and you change the world. In a way, even the universe.

Books are a guide in youth, and an entertainment for age.

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

I think I learned a lot from reading in general - even from reading badly written books.

We still need to feed the public, both physically and intellectually.

Eating a lot makes you fat. Reading a lot makes you wise.

I've seen firsthand how books can change people's lives. It happened to me.

Books should be both enlightening and entertaining.

If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one's chances of survival increase with each book one reads.

When we learn to read, it's a real product of civilization and a civilized society. It affects your brain. It affects the way you think, and it gives you that capacity for self-reflection that you simply do not have without the agency of books.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind.

Yes! the books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill! The only years of my life that I can look back on with something like pride... Early and late, through the long winter nights and the quiet summer days, I drank at the fountain of knowledge, and never wearied of the draught.

Books are like truth serum-- if you don't read, you can't figure out what's real.

We need to read good books, and for that to happen, we need to share good books.

Books are ever available friends, ready to serve you at will.

Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes!

We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things.

Reading is the way out of ignorance, and the road to achievement.