Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach Quotes

When I take up a book I have read before, I know what to expect; the satisfaction is not lessened by being anticipated. I shake hands with, and look our old tried and valued friend in the face,--compare notes and chat the hour away.

I think another problem people have is they are always searching for that high, and they don't realize they can get that same high with that same person again.

There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.

I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. (245)

I read "The Group" by Mary McCarthy. It had tons of sex in it, or so I thought at the time.

I doubt if I shall ever have time to read the book again -- there are too many new ones coming out all the time which I want to read. Yet an old book has something for me which no new book can ever have -- for at every reading the memories and atmosphere of other readings come back and I am reading old years as well as an old book.

Books are like flypaper, memories cling to the printed pages better than anything else.

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

Christmas poem to a man in jail hello Bill Abbott: I appreciate your passing around my books in jail there, my poems and stories. if I can lighten the load for some of those guys with my books, fine. but literature, you know, is difficult for the average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too); I don't like most poetry, for example, so I write mine the way I like to read it.

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book. Everything that seemed to fill them full for others we pushed aside, because it stood between us and the pleasures of the Gods.

There's a feeling that feels like what I've been told is love. It has to do with what Louis Schwartzberg said today about beauty, love, whether it's squirrels outside my door, the rabbits, or the birds. They're not trying to impress me or anything, and me watching them isn't getting me or advancing me in anything. It's just beautiful. When I think of the relationship I'm in, there's a feeling that comes over me sometimes.

Those moments when you feel you want to read something truly beautiful. The eyes make a tour of the library, and there is nothing. Then you decide to take no matter what, and it is full of beautiful things.

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.

Oklahoma is very beautiful, and Eric loves beauty, but he already has that in you.

Love of books is the best of all.

I like to read things I've read before. It's like listening over and over to your favorite song.

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

Any book, which is at all important, should be reread immediately.

Repeat reading for me shares a few things with hot-water bottles and thumbsucking: comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.

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

I think I wrote once that baseball in many ways is very much like reading. I said there are more bad books than bad ballgames, or maybe it was the other way around. I can't remember.

Reading brings us unknown friends

I would welcome a friendship with Lynne Hinton. I would welcome an invitation to sit down at her table, but mostly I would welcome her next book.

These books are my friends, my companions.