Quotes from The Quotable Book Lover

Recently, a friend of mine answered a question from SocialInterview.com (on Facebook) that says, "What is Dinesh Chandren obsessed with?" I don't know who created that quiz, and my friend answered ''Umm... books i think, as he'd rather spend his time & money on books instead of anything else, & that's something goddamn admirable...''

I replied that his reply made me sound like a f***ing geek. But I love books, and I guess I am a little obsessed with them. Here I have a selection of quotes from this rather nice little book, The Quotable Book Lover, edited by Ben Jacobs and Helene Hjalmarsson (The Lyons Press, 1999). It was one of those serendipitous finds.

"Books are the carriers of civilisation...They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print." - Barbara W. Tuchman

"A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return." - Salman Rushdie (Imaginary Homelands)

"Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk to me without embarassment or awkwardness." - Helen Keller (The Story of My Life)

"The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that here and now is all there is." - Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind)

"Books are my disease." - James Logan, in Edwin Wolf II, The Library of James Logan

"A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason, no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn (The First Circle)

"A room without books is like a body without a soul." -Cicero

Then there are some really humorous ones...

"I am still buying books. It is like getting pregnant after the menopause; it's not supposed to happen." - Chef Louis Szathmary, in an interview with Nicholas A. Basbanes

"I find television very educational. Every time someone turns it on, I go in the other room and read a book." - Groucho Marx

"I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It's about Russia." - Woody Allen