Ameen Rihani Quotes

The year after I graduated college I had a job in a library. When people underlined passages in the library books, or made notes in the margins, the books were sent to me. I erased the lines and the notes. Yes, that was my job.

I basically only read books that are over 2,000 years old.

Here we are signing autographs for people who essentially know know how to write their name and are functionally literate. But if you cease to teach cursive writing, how does one know how to, I don’t know, replicate the Declaration of Independence? Or the orations of Cicero? Is it just going to be on the internet?

November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.

The library would've cheered me up, most days. I loved the heavy oaken tables, the high walls stacked with books to the ceiling, the musty smell of old pages and the heavy brass fixtures that had gone dark with age and wear.

Dark, dark! The horror of darkness, like a shroud, wraps me and bears me on through mist and cloud.

I love old cookbooks. I just got such a kick out of them, how the color would be way off or fake looking. The cook books now look so much like magazines, you'll never make food that looks like that. I'd rather see it the ugly way than they way they do it now.

The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but thet are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought

Because each book has its own special perfume.

Preaching doom and gloom has been beneficial to the political class. They use it to gain more power and control.

But when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right horizontally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew.

The air smelled of paper and dust and years.

I'm still old-fashioned. I love dusty old books and libraries.

And light is mingled with the gloom, And joy with grief; Divinest compensations come, Through thorns of judgment mercies bloom In sweet relief.

As the moral gloom of the world overpowers all systematic gaiety, even so was their home of wild mirth made desolate amid the sad forest.

Lights of ships moved in the fairway-a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.

It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books. [] It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: he made the books and he died.

Only in the books written in earlier times did she sometimes think she found some faint idea of what it might be like to be alive.

The best cure for worry, depression, melancholy, brooding, is to go deliberately forth and try to lift with one's sympathy the gloom of somebody else.

The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.

I still read quite a few printed books, but if something is available in digital format I do not print it before I read it.

In the modern languages there was not, six hundred years ago, a single volume which is now read. The library of our profound scholar must have consisted entirely of Latin books.

I saw that bad handwriting should be regarded as a sign of an imperfect education.

I hate England and its hopelessness. I hate [Arnold] Bennett's resignation. Tragedy ought really to be a great big kick at misery.

I have left my book, I have left my room, For I heard you singing Through the gloom.