Book

“ I scarcely think we could any of us claim that in reading a novel we deliberately watch the book itself, rather than the scenes and figures it suggests, or that we seek to construct an image of the book, page by page, while its form is gradually exposed to us. ”

“ You appear to have studied the matter superficially, and nevertheless you imagine that you can understand a book which has been the guide of past and present generations, when you for a moment withdraw from your lusts and appetites, and glance over its contents as if you were reading a historical work or some poetical composition. ”

“ In the eager search for novel subjects scarcely anything was left untouched. History, mythology, and romance, the numberless fêtes and merrymakings of the people and the daily routine of their lives, representations of celebrated poets and heroes, scenes from the drama, portraits of popular actors and courtesans, the revels of the Yoshiwara, animals and plants, familiar scenes and famous landscapes, furnished motives for almost endless broadsheets and book illustrations. ”

“ It stretches, this little trick of mine, from book to book, and everything else, comparatively, plays over the surface of it. The order, the form, the texture of my books will perhaps some day constitute for the initiated a complete representation of it. ”

“ It seems time that some lamps should be lighted to guide the steps of the writer of Fiction. Think what the influence of novelists now is, and how some of them use it! Think of the multitudes who read nothing but novels, and then look into the novels which they read! I have seen a young man's whole library consisting of thirty or forty of those paper-bound volumes, which are the bad tobacco of the mind. In England, I looked over three railway book-stalls in one day. ”

“ Tales of adventure, manuals about various branches of nature study, historical romances, lives of heroes—in fact, almost every kind of book—is to be found in abundance, beautifully illustrated, attractively bound, well printed, all designed and written especially for the youth of our land. ”

“ For, apart from its religious intention and sacred character, the book is so written that it has supremely in its history, poetry, prophecies, promises, stories, that clear literary quality that supplies, as certainly no other single book does, the want in the human mind which is higher than the want of facts or knowledge. ”

“ The book has this merit—the first merit of a novel—that the reader is interested in the people rather than the plot, and that he watches the development of character rather than that of event."—Literary World. ”

“ V A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thence-forward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye. ”

“ I always remember that they could give us a number of little books which would tell, each book for some one country, or some one parish, the verses, or the stories, or the events that would make every lake or mountain a man can see from his own door an excitement in his imagination. ”

“ The book can, and does, present a hundred pictures that will draw any reader in closer touch with nature and the Almighty, my primal object in each line I write. The human side of the book is as close a character study as I am capable of making. ”

“ And Nature, the old nurse, took The child upon her knee, Saying: "Here is a story-book Thy Father has written for thee." "Come, wander with me," she said, "Into regions yet untrod; And read what is still unread In the manuscripts of God." ”

“ Some book there is that she desires to see. Which is it, girl, of these?- Open them, boy.- But thou art deeper read and better skill'd; Come and take choice of all my library, And so beguile thy sorrow, till the heavens Reveal the damn'd contriver of this deed. ”

“ That was a page read and turned over; I was busy now with this new page, and when the engine whistled on the grade, this page would be finished and another begun; and so the book of life goes on, page after page and pages without end--when one is young. ”

“ For my own part, I am but just set up in the business, so know little about it—but, in my opinion, to write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it. ”

“ How often has the cursory reading of a book, which irresistibly carries one with it, exercised the greatest influence on a man's whole life, and produced at once a decisive effect, which neither a second perusal nor earnest reflection can either strengthen or modify. ”

“ The wonder of the book is its superior intelligence. In the menstruum of this man's wit, the past and the present ages, and their religions, politics and modes of thinking, are dissolved into archetypes and ideas. ”

“ For, though the book moves throughout in the big world, and not in an academic groove, it still always moves intellectually. It asks a certain acquaintance with literature and history and the life of the human mind. ”

“ Write a story, or a dozen stories, and your book will be in demand like an oyster while it is freshly opened, and after tha—. The highways of literature are spread over with the shells of dead novels, each of which has been swallowed at a mouthful by the public, and is done with. ”

“ To take an extreme case, suppose a book contains simply incidents which lie quite outside the range of general or even rare experience—suppose it to be the first language to express a whole series of experiences. ”

“ Every page of every book was a peep-hole into the realm of knowledge. His hunger fed upon what he read, and increased. ”

“ The result is that those who care about books can differentiate them at a glance. They know [Pg 169] what is the approved style and line for biography and history, for poetry and fiction, for sermons, for gift-books, and so ad infinitum. The ‘Life’ of So-and-so, and the ‘Annals’ of Such-and-such, are unmistakeable; they have respectability written on every corner and angle of them. The dull brown or the dull green is sufficiently obvious to everyone. ”

“ How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! ”

“ What can we see or acquire, but what we are? You have observed a skilful man reading Virgil. Well, that author is a thousand books to a thousand persons. Take the book into your two hands, and read your eyes out; you will never find what I find. ”

“ and he glanced at the backs of the books, with an awakened curiosity that went below the binding. No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot. ”

“ But if, on the other hand, our theory should allow that a book may well be a revelation in spite of errors and passions and deliberate human composition, if only it be a true record of the inner experiences of great-souled persons wrestling with the crises of their fate, then the verdict would be much more favorable. ”

“ There are two methods for the literary study of any book—the first being the study of its thought and emotion; the second only that of its workmanship. A student of literature should study some of the Bible from both points of view. ”

“ If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and author-craft are of small amount to that. ”

“ Great Men are the inspired (speaking and acting) Texts of that divine Book of Revelations, whereof a Chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History; ”

“ That of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best—I'm sure it is the most religious—for I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second. ”

“ Let us turn back and read it again—I suspect that, after all, we are all of us small enough to sit in a chimney corner; and perhaps every book is but a picture story-book to the man or woman who is old enough and big enough to read it rightly. ”

“ In these days of overmuch involved plot and diction in the writing of novels, a book like this brings a sense of refreshment, as much by the virility and directness of its style as by the interest of the story it tells.... The human interest of the book is absorbing. ”

“ One must confess that regarded strictly as a piece of fiction the book makes rather hard reading today. But examined with some knowledge of the mystery upon which it is founded, the old novel becomes a genuine human document. ”

“ We are proceeding beyond the strict limits we assigned to ourselves in the course of these last remarks, and scarcely venture further in recommending attention—though especially worthy of it, in the case of a Book we wish to make universally attractive,—to what may be called the æsthetics of book-making. ”

“ Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors. ”

“ Literature of Fantasy includes primarily adult prose fiction published in book form in English. The first part is a list of novels and collections—as well as bibliographies—accompanied by summaries, with occasional evaluative comments, for novels and lists of contents for collections. ”

“ But the astonishment soon passed off, the scales seemed to drop from his eyes, and the book became at once and for ever to him the great human and divine book, and the men and women, whom he had looked upon as something quite different from himself, became his friends and counsellors. ”

“ But readers will recognize, he hopes, that it is a real book and not a collection of scraps, not an assemblage of little pieces, a book that may be mediocre and mistaken, but which is constructed: a work built up as well as edifying or building up ”

“ The term novel has been made to cover books of such diverse character, now-a-days, that the reader is almost entitled to demand of a novelist that he shall affix some distinct label to the book he is putting forth, and make it clear beforehand whether his work is a dialogue on religion, a satire on morals, a political tract, a study in slum life, or a mere romance. ”

“ and a book reads the better, which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots and dog's-ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins, or over a pipe, which I think is the maximum. ”

“ Books not merely—and perhaps not chiefly—as vehicles of learning or knowledge, but books as books, books as entities, books as beautiful things, books as historical antiquities, books as repositories of memorable associations. ”

“ Even leaving spirituality aside with its nobler possibilities, take [158] some great book worthy of being thought over, not a newspaper, not a sensational novel, not a child's book, but a book—an original book, on a real topic ”

“ Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. ”

“ Always as she advanced, he encouraged her to look for the life that is more than meat, and always, while they read and talked together, there was opened before them the great book wherein God has written, in the language of mountain, and tree, and sky, and flower, and brook, the things that make truly wise those who pause to read. ”

“ The student should bear in mind, therefore, that the following summary of our recent literature is based largely upon personal opinion; that it selects a few authors by way of illustration, omitting many others who may be of equal or greater importance. We are confronted by a host of books that serve the prime purpose of literature by giving pleasure; but what proportion of them are enduring books, or what few of them will be known to readers of the next century as the Sketch Book and Snow-Bound are known to us,—these are questions that only Father Time can answer. ”

“ “You’re in the middle of a book right now—close to the end of it, actually.” ”

“ I expect you could tell me a lot more interesting things, only of course you've got to keep the best of 'em to put in your book—you are writin' a book or somethin', ain't you? Such heaps of fellows are writin' books nowadays, the wonder is how any of 'em get read. ”