Holbrook Jackson Quotes

A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.

I can't pick out one single book that had such a profound personal impact.

The first book we fall in love with shapes us every bit as much as the first person we fall in love with.

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.

At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.... The various qualities of my readings seem to permeate my every muscle, so that when I finally decide to turn off the library light, I carry into my sleep the voices and the movements of the book I've just closed.

You would have to be very optimistic to think that any of your books will be among the books that survive in the very long run. I think if a writer is lucky enough to still have a few books around after he's gone, a few that are still being read, then he's accomplished quite a lot.

My dad read The Hobbit to me originally when I was young. So, it was the first imaginary landscape I ever had in my head from the written word. It gave me a passion for reading, thanks to my dad's performance of the book.

Books are islands in the ocean of time. They are also oases in the deserts of time.

The books we enjoy as children stay with us forever -- they have a special impact. Paragraph after paragraph and page after page, the author must deliver his or her best work.

You asked if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure, there's been some scandal, but people are scandalized all the time; it's a way of life for them. It doesn't mean a thing. If you ask if I want my fiction to change anything in the culture, the answer is still no. What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book — if I can, to possess them in ways that other writers don't. Then let them return, just as they were, to a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them.

There are books that I read years ago that enlivened things in me that haven't died yet.

Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings.

That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn't matter to anyone changed my life.

My life has been more influenced by books than by any other one thing.

Since I was trying so hard to make books lead my life, I didn’t want to read them and then just put them back on the shelf and say, “good book,” as if I was patting a good dog. I wanted books to change me, and I wanted to write books that would change others.

Reading ... changes you. You aren't the same person after you've read a particular book as you were before, and you will read the next book, unless both are Harlequin Romances, in a slightly different way.

I think the best writers are voracious readers who pick up the cadences and the feel of narration through a number of different books. And you begin by maybe copying the style of writers that really knocked you out.

Let us not forget the genial miraculous force we have known to proceed from a book.

The ideas of the classics, so far as living, are our commonplaces. It is the modern books that give us the latest and most profound conceptions. It seems to me rather a lazy makeshift to mumble over the familiar.

Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so.

I think for Lev [Grossman], C. S. Lewis was a huge inspiration from his childhood. I know that Brideshead Revisited is a book that he's incredibly found of and he took certain structural influences from that book that he brought into The Magicians.

While I'm working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style.

The power of reading a great book is that you start thinking like the author. For those magical moments while you are immersed in the forests of Arden, you are William Shakespeare; while you are shipwrecked on Treasure Island, you are Robert Louis Stevenson; while you are communing with nature at Walden, you are Henry David Thoreau. You start to think like they think, feel like they feel, and use imagination as they would. Their references become your own, and you carry these with you long after you've turned the last page.

The great authors were great readers, and one way to understand them is to read the books they read.

When I read Jerome D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" that was the first time I felt my mind blow open. I thought that book was speaking to me. I was 12 or 13 when I read that. I read everything on my mother's bookshelves.