This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
Do you ever read any of the books you burn? That's against the law! Oh. Of course.
Books |
Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
You're a hopeless romantic, said Faber. It would be funny if it were not serious. It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the 'parlor families' today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios, and televisors, but are not. No, no it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type or receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. Of course you couldn't know this, of course you still can't understand what i mean when i say all this. You are intuitively right, that's what counts.
Awareness | Books | Magic | Nature | Nothing | Universe | Awareness | Afraid | Old | Understand |
Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
Rebecca West, pen name of Mrs. Cicily Maxwell Andrews, born Fairfield, aka Dame Rebecca West
I write books to find out about things.
Books |
Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.
Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
Better not read books in which you make acquaintance of the devil.
Acquaintance | Books |
Bad books engender bad habits, but bad habits engender good books.
I knew that the languages which one learns there are necessary to understand the works of the ancients; and that the delicacy of fiction enlivens the mind; that famous deeds of history ennoble it and, if read with understanding, aid in maturing one's judgment; that the reading of all the great books is like conversing with the best people of earlier times; it is even studied conversation in which the authors show us only the best of their thoughts; that eloquence has incomparable powers and beauties; that poetry has enchanting delicacy and sweetness; that mathematics has very subtle processes which can serve as much to satisfy the inquiring mind as to aid all the arts and diminish man's labor; that treatises on morals contain very useful teachings and exhortations to virtue; that theology teaches us how to go to heaven; that philosophy teaches us to talk with appearance of truth about things, and to make ourselves admired by the less learned; that law, medicine, and the other sciences bring honors and wealth to those who pursue them; and finally, that it is desirable to have examined all of them, even to the most superstitious and false in order to recognize their real worth and avoid being deceived thereby
Aid | Appearance | Books | Conversation | Deeds | Famous | History | Mathematics | Mind | Order | People | Philosophy | Poetry | Reading | Theology | Truth | Wealth | Worth | Deeds | Understand |
I feel that we read to learn new things, sure, absolutely, but more often than not, what we really get out of the good books we read is self- recognition. We read and discover stuff about life that we already knew, except that we didn't know we knew it until we read it in a particular book. And this self-recognition, this discovering ourselves in the writings of others can be very exciting, can make us feel a little less isolated inside our own thing and a little more connected to the larger world.
Given the books of a man, it is not difficult, I think, to detect therein the personality of the man, and the station in life to which he was born.
Books | Life | Life | Personality |
It is not the reading of many books which is necessary to make a man wise or good, but the well-reading of a few, could he be sure to have the best. And it is not possible to read over many on the same subject without a great deal of loss of precious time.
Make careful choice of the books which you read: let the holy Scriptures ever have the preeminence. Let Scripture be first and most in your hearts and hands and other books be used as subservient to it. While reading ask yourself: 1. Could I spend this time no better? 2. Are there better books that would edify me more? 3. Are the lovers of such a book as this the greatest lovers of the Book of God and of a holy life? 4. Does this book increase my love to the Word of God, kill my sin, and prepare me for the life to come?
Better | Books | Choice | God | Kill | Life | Life | Love | Reading | Scripture | Time | God |
Explaining is a difficult art. You can explain something so that your reader understands the words; and you can explain something so that the reader feels it in the marrow of his bones. To do the latter, it sometimes isn't enough to lay the evidence before the reader in a dispassionate way. You have to become an advocate and use the tricks of the advocate's trade. This book is not a dispassionate scientific treatise. Other books on Darwinism are, and many of them are excellent and informative and should be read in conjunction with this one. Far from being dispassionate, it has to be confessed that in parts this book is written with a passion which, in a professional scientific journal, might excite comment. Certainly it seeks to inform, but it also seeks to persuade and even - one can specify aims without presumption - to inspire. I want to inspire the reader with a vision of our own existence as, on the face of it, a spine-chilling mystery; and simultaneously to convey the full excitement of the fact that it is a mystery with an elegant solution which is within our grasp. More, I want to persuade the reader, not just that the Darwinian world-view happens to be true, but that it is the only known theory that could, in principle, solve the mystery of our existence. This makes it a doubly satisfying theory. A good case can be made that Darwinism is true, not just on this planet but all over the universe, wherever life may be found.
Aims | Books | Enough | Evidence | Excitement | Existence | Good | Life | Life | Mystery | Passion | Presumption | Vision |
Richard Wright, fully Richard Nathaniel Wright
It's always difficult to pare down so many books. There's only room for five on the raft. So there was give and take. There has to be compromise, but it was very amicable. We had a fair degree of consensus. And we're happy with the choices. We think these five books represent the best of Canadian fiction this year.
Richard Wright, fully Richard Nathaniel Wright
It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself... It had been only through books - at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions - that I had managed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way. Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books; consequently, my belief in books had risen more out of a sense of desperation than from any abiding conviction of their ultimate value.
Belief | Books | Desperation | Life | Life | Nothing | Sense |
Not in books only, nor yet in oral discourse, but often also in words there are boundless stores of moral and historic truth, and no less of passion and imagination laid up, from which lessons of infinite worth may be derived.
Books | Imagination | Passion | Words | Worth |