books – secretive dreams

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

Kurt Vonnegut, A man without a country

Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind (via booksqouted)

The Once and Future King still makes me sad.

I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction—until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”. The Latin root simply means “letters”. Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.

Brent Weeks

It was a pleasure to burn.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

They all read too much, and watched too much TV, and argued about movies like they were things that had actually happened.

Rainbow Rowell, Attachments (via gloryandus)

via hus & hem

It seems a distinctly feminine trait to want to share books with people [you] care deeply about.

Anton Szandor Lavey

There are things that are not spoken about in polite society. Very quickly in most conversations you’ll reach a moment where someone goes, ‘Oh, that’s a bit heavy,’ or ‘Eew, disgusting.’ And literature is a place where that stuff goes; where people whisper to each other across books, the writer to the reader. I think that stops you feeling lonely – in the deeper sense, lonely.

Alain de Botton