(Source: booksandothergeekery)
"‘…a successful novel should erase the boundary between writer and reader so they can unite…should interrupt the reader’s life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog. In the best novels the writer’s imagination becomes the reader’s reality. It glows incandescent and furious…’"
— Introduction to William Goldings “Lord of the Flies” by Stephen King.
(via thebookishdark)
i love handwritten letters. there should be more of them in the world.
(Source: amandaonwriting)
"You can possess a book without really owning it, though. Beyond ownership in a commercial or legal sense, there’s ownership of an emotional or metaphysical kind - when a book speaks so powerfully to us that we feel it’s ours exclusively: that it exists just tor us. People we meet sometimes have this effect too; they look into our eyes, and speak in a hushed, intimate voice, and make us feel we’re uniquely important to them - before going on to do the same to someone else. In life, we call these people flirts. The best books are flirtatious, too, since they seem to be ours alone when in reality they’re anyone’s."
— Blake Morrison, Twelve Thoughts About Reading (via distantheartbeats)
"Do you understand economics? I mean big-time, prewar, global capitalism. Do you get how it worked? I don’t, and anyone who says they do is full of shit. There are no rules, no scientific absolutes. You win, you lose, it’s a total crapshoot. The only rule that ever made sense to me I learned from a history, not an economics, professor at Wharton. “Fear,” he used to say, “fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe.” That blew me away. “Turn on the TV,” he’d say. “What are you seeing? People selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to live without their products.” Fuckin’ A, was he right. Fear of aging, fear of loneliness, fear of poverty, fear of failure. Fear is the most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal. Fear sells."
— World War Z - Max Brooks (via colourofpanic)
But what was it like being married to the most famous man in England, the life and soul of the party, the icon of Victorian family values? In Mrs Dickens’s Family Christmas, presenter Sue Perkins discovers much of the public image was humbug.
"After lunch, there’s a lecture on walruses. There are rumors of rogue walruses that prey on seals, puncturing them with their tusks, then sucking out the fat with their powerful mouths. The women on either side of Verna are knitting. One of them says, “Liposuction.” The other laughs."
— Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood
(Source: newyorker.com)
“I silently judge others by their bookshelves.”
So, so true. From the AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers exhibit.
(via booklover)
