Cormac McCarthy Quotes

You couldn't unburn the books. You could only buy new ones.

Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved.

In five minutes the earth would be a desert, and you cling to books.

Books are yours, Within whose silent chambers treasure lies Preserved from age to age; more precious far Than that accumulated store of gold And orient gems, which, for a day of need, The Sultan hides deep in ancestral tombs. These hoards of truth you can unlock at will.

Men of the world who value the Way all turn to books. But books are nothing more than words. Words have value; what is of value in words is meaning. Meaning has something it is pursuing, but the thing that it is pursuing cannot be put into words and handed down. The world values words and hands down books but, though the world values them, I do not think them worth valuing. What the world takes to be values is not real value.

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

We all love to hear a good story. We save our stories in books. We save our books in libraries. Libraries are the storyhouses full of all those stories and secrets.

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treausre of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

Books cannot be killed by fire.

One of the first things my father taught me was that the library was made for and available to me. It's a place where you not only learn from books but you learn responsibility - how to borrow, take care of, and give back.

Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is what it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.

There is a universe behind and before him. And the day is approaching when closing the last book on the last shelf on the far left; he will say to himself, "now what?

Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.

A library is many things, but particularly it is a place where books live, and where you can get in touch with other people, and other thoughts, through books... Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had.

Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.

A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people - people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.

There is no past, as long as books shall live. Books make the past our heritage and our home.

As I stood outside in Cow Lane, it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No ... eight days a week.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst...They are for nothing but to inspire.

He lies like a book. And he reads a lot of books.

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

A library is infinity under a roof.

There are treasures in books that all the money in the world cannot buy, but the poorest laborer can have for nothing.

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.

They go in [to the library] not because they need any certain volume but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them.