Deanna Raybourn Quotes

I've noticed that, with many of the authors I like, I tend to think I would dislike them as human beings or that there'd be a healthy amount of debate if I ever did meet them.

All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool.

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

There are things I read doing research, and there are certain books and writers I just love to read. There are books of Brian Morten's that I love, for instance. There's a wonderful book by an Australian writer named Helen Garner called 'The Children's Bach,' and I just love the way she uses language in it.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Now, to read poetry at all is to have an ideal anthology of one's own, and in that possession to be incapable of content with the anthologies of all the world besides.

There are people out there who genuinely love literature, who genuinely love to read and read widely, who will never like, or even necessarily get, my books. That was a hard one to swallow, to not feel slighted by.

Your failure to enjoy a highly rated novel doesn't mean you're dim - you may find that Graham Greene is more to your taste, or Stephen Hawking or Iris Murdoch or Ian Rankin. Dickens, Stephen King, whoever.

I liked 'The Sun Also Rises.'

So I would choose to be with you, That's if the choice were mine to make, But you can make decisions too, And you can have this heart to break

Every time I read a Jane Austen novel, I feel like a bartender at the gates of heaven.

Books woke me up. Books are my favorite man-made objects. I fetishize their design, smell, feel. And that they can contain such burning, complex communications is a miracle to me.

He that has his chains knocked off, and the prison doors set open to him, is perfectly at liberty, because he may either go or stay, as he best likes; though his preference be determined to stay, by the darkness of the night, or illness of the weather, or want of other lodging.

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.

Taste is to literature what bon ton is in society.

Speculative fiction is where my heart lies. It's what I read growing up, and it's what I read as an adult.

She would bring you some great book because she was a book matchmaker, because she loved books the way other girls loved clothes.

And he knew that at that moment, they understood each other perfectly, and when he told her what he was going to do now, she would not say ‘be careful’ or ‘don’t do it’, but she would accept his decision because she would not have expected anything less of him.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Traditionally, the love of reading has been born and nurtured in high school English class

The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

I am so constituted that I had rather read bad stuff than nothing.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

Let's talk about a decision that women have to make every morning- Big purse or little purse?

Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.