Gertrude Stein Quotes

Blessings be the inventor of the alphabet, pen and printing press! Life would be -- to me in all events -- a terrible thing without books.

This object that we hold in our hands, a book... that tactile pleasure, it's just not going to go away.

The ability to write and read books is one of the things that transformed us as a species.

I crawled into my book and pulled the pages over my head.

Books are like tweets, except longer.

I was not scared of anything, when I read my book.

Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation, as it is generally in books the worst sort of reading.

I'm an expert at killing time on planes now. I do a lot of reading. My secret sort of nerdy side is I'm quite into history so I read a lot of history books. Now I write for a few things and I've had a few history things published, which is cool. I indulge my nerdy side and it's kind of as far away as you can get from the acting world so that's nice as well.

Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books.

The more I write, the more I've come to realize that books have a different place in our society than other media. Books are different from television or film because they ask you to finish the project. You have to be actively engaged to read a book. It's more like a blueprint. What it really is, is an opportunity... A book is a place where you're forced to use your imagination. I find it disappointing that you're not being asked to imagine more.

I like that you can open up any one of my books anywhere and immediately be lost. I just love them so much.

Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.

When I'm in the middle of a book it can go up from there. When you're putting in those hours, the real world kind of fades and the world you're creating becomes almost more real to you than the outside world.

Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.

I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.

For some of us, good books and beautiful writing are our ultimate solace, even more comforting than exquisite food.

Reading a book, for me at least, is like traveling in someone else's world. If it's a good book, then you feel comfortable and yet anxious to see what's going to happen to you there, what'll be around the next corner. But if it's a lousy book, then it's like going through Secaucus, New Jersey -- it smells and you wish you weren't there, but since you've started the trip, you roll up the windows and breathe through your mouth until you're done.

I was under twenty when I deliberately put it to myself one night after good conversation that there are moments when we actually touch in talk what the best writing can only come near. The curse of our book language is not so much that it keeps forever to the same set phrases . . . but that it sounds forever with the same reading tones. We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven't been brought to book.

Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.

I have this very moment finished reading a novel called The Vicar of Wakefield [by Oliver Goldsmith].... It appears to me, to be impossible any person could read this book through with a dry eye and yet, I don't much like it.... There is but very little story, the plot is thin, the incidents very rare, the sentiments uncommon, the vicar is contented, humble, pious, virtuous--but upon the whole the book has not at all satisfied my expectations.

You can't know what a book is about until the very end. This is true of a book we're reading or writing.

I have always loved reading. Ever since I was a young girl I had a book by my bed and would get lost in the world of make believe.

I doubt that VR will really replace the quality of books. If you want to go into let's say the Prado in Madrid and you want to go into Hieronymus Bosch or whatever, you'd rather go into books and you take your time and it's sitting there all day long and you go back and revisit it and it becomes part of your physical life.

You're never alone with a book, are you? It's a dialogue.

There is no remedy so easy as books, which if they do not give cheerfulness, at least restore quiet to the most troubled mind.