Book Dust Quotes & Sayings

I've got data incoming. Do you want me to transfer it to my portable unit?"
"No, you stay here, finish the runs. I shouldn't be more than a couple of hours. When you're done with this, I want you to go find a hammer."
Peabody had taken out her memo book, nearly plugged in the order, when she stopped, frowned up at Eve. "Sir? A hammer?"
"That's right. A really big, heavy hammer. Then you take it into my office and beat that fucking useless excuse for a data spitter on my desk to dust."
"Ah." Because she was a wise woman, Peabody cleared her throat rather than loosen the chuckle. "As an alternate to that action, Lieutenant, I could call maintenance. — J.D. Robb

I write into an old book that smells of dust and whose pages are floppy with damp. Sometimes the ink splodges onto the paper, other times it will barely leave the nib of my pen. — Fennel Hudson

I like two types of dust: pixie dust and dust from old, first edition books. — Nicholaa Spencer

As I leafed through the book in front of me and watched the dust swirl in the air, I wondered if maybe there was some evil dormant virus in the pages that would infect me, like the mummy dust that used to kill archaeologists. Death by research. That was not a glorious end. — Rachel Caine

Reality is a state of mind. To the banker, the money in his ledger book is all very real, though he doesn't actually see it or touch it. But to the Brahma, it simply doesn't exist the way the air and the earth, pain and loss do. To him, the banker's reality is folly. To the banker, the Brahma's ideas are as inconsequential as dust. — Libba Bray

Like many of the people quoted on this dust-cover, I have not read Carl King's book. I am confident, however, that my review still applies: So, You're a Creative Genius is the best book available on modern cartography. — Heather Anne Campbell

Show some respect. They were your grandparents. -Batman
Just names and dusty frames on the wall to me. -Damien
I take exception to that. There is not a speck of dust collecting on those portraits. -Alfred — Peter J. Tomasi

I was looking for a book. A very particular book in a vast and wonderful library. I found what I was looking for. It hadn't been opened for quite a long time judging by the dust that coated the upper edge and by the way the paper had yellowed on all sides creeping toward the gutter. When I opened it, some loose pages different from those in the book fell onto the floor. I picked them up and noticed that they were covered with a text in a language I did not understand. — David Treuer

Youth is a beautiful dream, on whose brightness books shed a blinding dust. Will ever the day come when the wise link the joy of knowledge to youth's dream? Will ever the day come when Nature becomes the teacher of man, humanity his book and life his school? Youth's joyous purpose cannot be fulfilled until that day comes. Too slow is our march toward spiritual elevation, because we make so little use of youth's ardor. — Khalil Gibran

Ancient Egypt 1300BC
Be a scribe! Engrave this in your heart
So that your name might live on like theirs!
The scroll is better than the carved stone.
A man has died: his corpse is dust,
And his people have passed from the land.
It is a book that makes him be remembered
In the mouth of the speaker who reads him. — Alberto Manguel

My dream scenario would be that you could go into a bookshop, examine copies of every book in print that they're able to offer, then for a fee have them produce in a minute or two a beautiful finished copy in a dust jacket that you would pay for and take home. — William Gibson

Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction
Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn ... No
Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what prayed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and the short-winded elations of men. — F Scott Fitzgerald

She was a poetry book with the wrong dust jacket, shelved in the Reference section. — Joyce Rachelle

God knows where every particle of the handful of dust has gone; he has marked in his book the wandering of every one of its atoms. He hath death so open before His view, that He can bring all these together, bone to bone, and clothe them with the very flesh that robed them in the days of yore, and make them live again. — Charles Spurgeon

There's a book called Mummy and the people actually seem to have become addicted to mummy dust. And mummy dust was somehow made from people who've died of the most loathsome diseases. It's too bad that [David] Cronenberg didn't see this book, see I only saw it after the film was made. It might have been of interest to him. — William S. Burroughs

I had a dream where I was taken to Heaven and brought into a beautiful library. There I was given two golden books that were covered with dust. The Lord told me they were golden treasure that was needed for the Body of Christ to have the knowledge to proceed and succeed in this hour. — Bob Hartley

Golbuchiks? Golbuchiks are ashes, entrails, dung, stove smoke, clay, and they'll all return to clay. They're full of dirt, candle oil, droppings, dust.
You, O Book, my pure, shining precious, my golden singing promise, my dream, a distant call
O tender specter, happy chance,
Again I heed the ancient lore,
Again with beauty rare in stance,
You beckon from the distant shore! — Tatyana Tolstaya

Stranger, pause and look; From the dust of ages Lift this little book, Turn the tattered pages, Read me, do not let me die! Search the fading letters finding Steadfast in the broken binding All that once was I! — Edna St. Vincent Millay

When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand
a center of gravity. — Adrienne Rich

Did the Abrahamic God know that, by "divinely inspiring" the book of Genesis and other tales in the Bible, that He would cause millions to impede scientific understandings of our origins and push for myth to be taught in schools? Shouldn't he have left out the bit about humans being made from dust and ribs, knowing that fact? — David G. McAfee

Eli: Cursed be the ground for our sake. Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for us. For out of the ground we were taken, for the dust we are ... and to the dust we shall return — Book Of Eli Movie

Erudition - dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull. — Ambrose Bierce

Pulvis et umbra sumus. It's a line from Horace. 'We are dust and shadows'. Appropriate, don't you think?" Will said. "It's not a long life, killing demons; one tends to die young, and then they burn your body - dust to dust, in the literal sense. And then we vanish into the shadows of history, nary a mark on the page of a mundane book to remind the world that once we existed at all. — Cassandra Clare

I believe in the absolute and unlimited liberty of reading. I believe in wandering through the stacks and picking out the first thing that strikes me. I believe in choosing books based on the dust jacket. I believe in reading books because others dislike them or find them dangerous. I believe in choosing the hardest book imaginable. I believe in reading up on what others have to say about this difficult book and then making up my own mind. - Rick Moody — Jay Allison

You may have wanted to read it when you bought it, but if you haven't read it by now, the book's purpose was to teach you that you didn't need it. There's no need to finish reading books that you only got halfway through. Their purpose was to be read halfway. So get rid of all those unread books. It will be far better for you to read the book that really grabs you right now than one that you left to gather dust for years. — Marie Kondo

Anyone who loves books the way Homer does, loves libraries, too. It doesn't matter if the library has fancy red leather chairs and gold-plated shelves that reach to a vaulted ceiling, or if the library has splintery wooden benches and shelves made of old milk crates. it's the scent that sets the book lover at ease. It's better than grandma's perfume, or freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, or even toast. It's a scent derived from paper, mildew, dust, and human endeavors. — Suzanne Selfors

I do not know if Alice in Wonderland was an original story-I was, at least, no conscious imitator in writing it-but I do know that, since it came out, something like a dozen story-books have appeared, on identically the same pattern. The path I timidly explored believing myself to be 'the first that ever burst into that silent sea'-is now a beaten high-road: all the way-side flowers have long ago been trampled into the dust: and it would be courting disaster for me to attempt that style again. — Lewis Carroll

Now the situation is different, I admit: I have a wristwatch, I compare the angle of its hands with the angle of all the hands I see; I have an engagement book where the hours of my business appointments are marked down; I have a chequebook on whose stubs I add and subtract numbers. At Penn Station I get off the train, I take the subway, I stand and grasp the strap with one hand to keep my balance while I hold the newspaper up in the other, folded so I can glance over the figures of the stock market quotations: I play the game, in other words, the game of pretending there's an order in the dust, a regularity in the system, or an interpretation of different systems, incongruous but still measurable, so that every graininess of disorder coincides with the faceting of an order which promptly crumbles. — Italo Calvino

Anything that looks like an idea is probably just something that has accumulated, like dust. It looks like I have ideas because I do books that are all on the same subject. That is just because the pictures have piled up on that subject. Finally I realize that I am really interested in it. The pictures make me realize that I am interested in something. — Lee Friedlander

There are no stories without meaning. And I am one of those men who can find it even when others fail to see it. Afterwards the story becomes the book of the living, like a blaring trumpet that raises from the tomb those who have been dust for centuries ... — Umberto Eco

'THIS ROOM HAS MYSTERY LIKE A TRANCE' This room has mystery like a trance Of wine ; forget-me-nots of you Are chair and couch, the books your Fingers touched. And now that you Are absent here the silence scrapes A secret rust from everything; While sudden wreaths of sorrow's Dust uncover emptiness like halls To stumble through, and terror falls — Kenneth Patchen

There yet remains but one concluding tale, And then this chronicle of mine is ended Fulfilled, the duty God ordained to me, A sinner. Not without purpose did the Lord Put me to witness much for many years And educate me in the love of books. One day some indefatigable monk Will find my conscientious, unsigned work; Like me, he will light up his ikon-lamp And, shaking from the scroll the age-old dust, He will transcribe these tales in all their truth. — Alexander Pushkin

I had a book of Bible stories when I was a kid. There was a picture I'd look at twenty times every day: Jacob wrestles with the angel. I don't really remember the story, or why the wrestling
just the picture. Jacob is young and very strong. The angel is ... a beautiful man, with golden hair and wings, of course. I still dream about it. Many nights. I'm ... It's me. In that struggle. Fierce, and unfair. The angel is not human, and it holds nothing back, so how could anyone human win, what kind of a fight is that? It's not just. Losing means your soul thrown down in the dust, your heart torn out from God's. But you can't not lose. — Tony Kushner

The dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. — Moses

No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book. — Ellen Glasgow

Julian Street in his book, Abroad At Home: American Ramblings, Observations, and Adventures, painted a grim picture of Western Kansas as he traveled across the area in 1914. Street saw only a drab, treeless wasteland of brown and gray---"nothing, nothing, nothing"--images of incessant wind, violent cyclones, dust storms, and tragic desolation. As the train he was riding approached the small town of Monotony, which he felt was appropriately named, he listened sympathetically to the remarks of a fellow passenger: "God! How can they stand living out here? I'd rather be dead! — Daniel Fitzgerald

That's not what I mean by 'a book.' I mean a 'book' in the sense of the dust jacket, the cover, the pages . . ." "A book is the text. And you can read the text on an iPad! — Fredrik Backman

Who has a book of all that monarchs do, He's more secure to keep it shut than shown; For vice repeated is like the wand'ring wind, Blows dust in others' eye, to spread itself; And yet the end of all is bought thus dear, The breath is gone, and the sore eyes see clear To stop the air would hurt them. — William Shakespeare

Books! The chosen depositories of the thoughts, the opinions, and the aspirations of mighty intellects; like wondrous mirrors that have caught and fixed bright images of souls that have passed away; like magic lyres, whose masters have bequeathed them to the world, and which yet, of themselves, ring with unforgotten music, while the hands that touched their chords have crumbled into dust. Books! they are the embodiments and manifestations of departed minds
the living organs through which those who are dead yet speak to us. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

I love book books, real books, books with spines and heart, dust jackets, books that smell of books. Take the frame from a painting and you have a painting, not art. Take the pages from a book and print them on a screen and you have the ghost of a book. Not a book. — Chloe Thurlow

Destiny sees things as they are, not as we would wish them to be. He knows there are no stories, only the illusion of stories: threads and patterns that seem to appear in the pages of existence given meaning and significance by the observer. Destiny observes worlds and molecules like motes of dust hanging in a sunbeam: every movement, every moment inevitable. Destiny walks the paths of his garden, a place of forks and paths which combine and part, seeing only what is. He is surprised by nothing. There is nothing that can surprise him, nothing that was not already written in his book. — Neil Gaiman

Dictionaries, manuals, grammars, study guides and topic notes, classical authors and the entire book trade in de Viris, Quintus-Curtius, Sallust, and Livy peacefully crumbled to dust on the shelves of the old Hachette publishing house; but introductions to mathematics, textbooks on civil engineering, mechanics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, courses in commerce, finance, industrial arts- whatever concerned the market tendencies of the day - sold by the millions of copies. — Jules Verne

I know a person who will poke the fire, set chairs straight, pick dust specks from the floor, arrange his table, snatch up a newspaper, take down any book which catches his eye, trim his nails, waste the morning anyhow, in short, and all without premeditation - simply because the only thing he ought to attend to is the preparation of a noonday lesson in formal logic which he detests. - William James — Mason Currey

There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words to join them in the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark. There are people who think death a fate worse than boredom. — Helen DeWitt

Timelessness again, the house like a secret temple as dust built up on things that were never meant to have dust on them - Clee's toothbrush and hairdryer and left-out-of-the-box CDs and deodorant on the bathroom window ledge. Ordinary things carefully kept in place because the last person to touch them would never put a cup down on the edge of the table again, or ever leave a book half-read. — Steven Hall

Isn't it what all librarians strive toward, at least in the movies and cliches? Silence, invisibility, nothing but a rambling cloud of old book dust. — Rebecca Makkai

The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain
There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.
He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.
It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction
How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds
For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:
The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged
Where he could lie and gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home. — Wallace Stevens

They remain dead, the people I try to resuscitate by straining to hear what they say. But the illusion is not pointless, or not quite, even if the reader knows all this better than I do. One thing a book tries to do, beneath the disguise of words and causes and clothes and grief, is show the skeleton and the skeleton dust to come. The author too, like those of whom he speaks, is dead. — Jean Genet

Sulphurous wind gusted in his wake; the dust of the street swirled and the folds of his black coat flapped against his thin body. — A.F. Stewart

Quotologists encounter happy surprises, bright books by faded authors, treasures hidden under dust. — Willis Regier

Dust rises at every step, fine as flour. It is dried river silt, that dust. Add water, and the soil is so fertile that you could plant a pencil and harvest a book. — Mary Doria Russell

He had a book to finish. Ten-thousand words. The other ninety thousand had been difficult. This last tenth seemed impossible. His plot had become derailed. He was unable to see his way through the smoke and coke dust of a mythical railway track that should stretch ahead. Yes, the characters were there, good and solid. Indeed, the story's engine was strong and had shunted yet forward and forward, with only one or two sharp halts. But six weeks ago he met the bumpers. R. was now stuck in a deserted station, his progress blocked. ("Out Back") — Garry Douglas Kilworth

The books of the great scientists are gathering dust on the shelves of learned libraries ... While the artist's communication is linked forever with its original form, that of the scientist is modified, amplified, fused with the ideas and results of others and melts into the stream of knowledge and ideas which forms our culture. The scientist has in common with the artist only this: that he can find no better retreat from the world than his work and also no stronger link with the world than his work. — Max Delbruck

A swirl of dust and dirt picked up from the shadows that fell over everything in this grungy corner of the world. The dancing movement was hypnotizing. The sand and grit had rested long enough to have drifted into obscurity. But fate had different plans, and this gust of wind had lifted them and turned their obscure and unknown existence into a chaotic tempest of action that could not be ignored. — Lexie Syrah

The Dog was a different matter. She was new, or so old that any book that told of her was long since dust. The creature in the fog thought the latter. — Garth Nix

Heading back into your life to dust off and decipher old memories allows you to fully grasp how much power you have always held in your life. It helps you start to see that the way you have stored your memories and the role you played in them can be altered by you at any moment. Truly. At any moment in time. Hell, with one phone call. — Lauren Handel Zander

There was scrutiny is Lincoln's eyes as he looked at me. He was studying me. Eyeing me up and down. Taking in my hair, my mouth, my eyes. His gaze fell on the ring pierced through my nose. He stopped at the small leftover drawings illustrated on my wrists from yesterday's English class doodlings--reading me like I was a book that had been on a shelf so long dust embossed the title on the spine. He read me as though he was the first to crack open that cover in over a decade. I felt him blowing off the pages. — Megan Squires

Not all writers are artists. But all of us like the idea of somebody in the year 2283 blowing the dust off one of our books, thumbing through it and exclaiming, Hey, listen to what this old guy had to say back in the twentieth century! — William Attwood

My go-to author for knowing it all is Evelyn Waugh. 'A Handful of Dust' is as perfect as a book can get. — Laurie Graham

He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings. It was its pages covered with dust - dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight. — Gustave Flaubert

Old or new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that malignant booksellers attach to the backs. These evil white scabs rip off with difficulty, leaving leprous wounds and traces of slime to which adhere the dust and fluff of ages, making me wish for a special gummy hell to which the inventor of these stickers would be condemned. — Alberto Manguel

What makes it worth it though, is I love drawing. I LOVE IT. I love making comics. I love starting a new page and buying new paper, ink and brushes. I love telling stories! I love the people I work with, I love the people I meet. I love thinking about the syntax and language of comics. I love esoteric discussions about the comic book industry. I love the opportunities I've had in life because of comics. The second I stop loving it I will find something else to do.
Comics are hard work. Comics are relentless. Comics will break your heart. Comics are monetarily unsatisfying. Comics don't offer much in terms of fortune and glory, but comics will give you complete freedom to tell the stories you want to tell, in ways unlike any other medium. Comics will pick you up after it knocks you down. Comics will dust you off and tell you it loves you. And you will look into it's eyes and know it's true, that you love comics back. — Becky Cloonan

I'm handed faith like a sealed package on a strange-looking platter and am expected to accept it without opening it. I'm handed science, like a knife on a plate, to cut the folios of a book whose pages are blank. I'm handed doubt, like dust inside a box
but why give me a box if all it contains is dust? — Fernando Pessoa

She has a bookshelf for a heart, and ink runs through her veins, she'll write you into her story with the typewriter in her brain. Her bookshelf's getting crowded. With all the stories that's she's penned, of all the people who flicked through her pages but closed the book before it ended. And there's one pushed to the very back, that sits collecting dust, with its title in her finest writing, 'The One's Who Lost My Trust'. There's books shes scared to open, and books she doesn't close. Stories of every person she's met stretched out in endless rows. Some people have only one sentence while others once held a main part, thousands of inky footprints that they've left across her heart. You might wonder why she does this, why write of people she once knew? But she hopes one day she'll mean enough for someone to write about her too. — E.H.

It was immediately clear that the book had been undisturbed for a very long time, perhaps even since it had been laid to rest. The librarian fetched a checked duster, and wiped away the dust, a black, thick, tenacious Victorian dust, a dust composed of smoke and fog particles accumulated before the Clean Air acts. — A.S. Byatt

Buy Fable! the book that rejuvenates your soul! makes your belly belly-laugh! turns your cares to dust! ... likewise your moods, woes an wounds! ... turns everything rosy, deflates spleen and bile! pocondria! not just any old work! not just any old words! Fable!
You gotta be categorical. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The book hard and soft at once, the cover when she run her fingers over it feel like linen or osnaburg, but the book also hard like wood and thick. The book red like wine or blood. She never smell anything like that ever. A scent like oil, or mayhaps white man armpit, or dust and something else, all of them smelling something awful apart but together make the most wonderfullest thing. Lilith close her eye and breathe in the smell like tobacco. — Marlon James

Historically, dust jackets are a new concern for authors; you don't see them much before the 1920s. And dust jacket is a strange name for this contrivance, as if books had anything to fear from dust. If you store a book properly, standing up, then the jacket doesn't cover the one part of the book that is actually exposed to dust, which is the top of the pages. So a dust jacket is no such thing at all; it is really a sort of advertising wrapper, like the brown paper sheath on a Hershey's bar. On this wrapper goes the manufacturer's name, the ingredients
some blithering about unforgettable characters or gemlike prose or gripping narrative
and a brief summation of who does what to whom in our gripping, unforgettable, gemlike object. — Paul Collins

He could judge with reasonable accuracy the amount of use a book had had. The first item to show any sign of wear was the dust jacket at the top and bottom of the spine. Little tears or cracks in the paper appeared here if a book had been taken off a shelf as much as three or four times. — Leonard Holton

She closed the book and put her cheek against it. There was still an odor of a library on it, of dust, leather, binding glue, and old paper, one book carrying the smell of hundreds. — Shannon Hale

There is more empty space in the book you're holding, than book. The electrons in the atoms of the book are moving so fast, they give the illusion of solid ink on solid paper. It's not. It's just an illusion. If all the electrons would stop moving for even an instant, the book would not just crumble into dust, it would disappear. Poof — Peter McWilliams

Man's books are but a climbing stair, Lain step by step, like stairs of stone; The stairway here, the temple there Man's lampad honor, and his trust, The God who called him from the dust. — Joaquin Miller

Knowledge of the Absolute depends upon no book, nor upon anything; it is absolute in itself. No amount of study will give this knowledge; is not theory, it is realization. Cleanse the dust from the mirror, purify your own mind, and in a flash you know that you are Brahman. — Swami Vivekananda

In a second-hand bookshop head to the back, find the old books with dust undisturbed and worn off covers for these clothe true treasures. — Rachel Hall

Blindness to the aesthetic element in mathematics is widespread and can account for a feeling that mathematics is dry as dust, as exciting as a telephone book ... Contrariwise, appreciation of this element makes the subject live in a wonderful manner and burn as no other creation of the human mind seems to do. — Philip J. Davis

I always say that you cannot tell what a picture really is or what an object really is until you dust it every day and you cannot tell what a book is until you type it or proof-read it. It then does something to you that only reading it never can do. — Gertrude Stein

And every nation which shall war against thee, O house of Israel, shall be turned one against another, and they shall fall into the pit which they digged to ensnare the people of the Lord. And all that fight against Zion shall be destroyed, and that great whore, who hath perverted the right ways of the Lord, yea, that great and abomniable church, shall tumble to the dust and great shall be the fall of it. — Anonymous

One day or another, it is true, dust, supposing it persists, will probably begin to gain the upper hand over domestics, invading the immense ruins of abandoned buildings, deserted dockyards; and, at that distant epoch, nothing will remain to ward off night-terrors, for lack of which we have become such great book-keepers... — Georges Bataille

It's important to read a book, but also to hold the book, to smell the book ... it's perfume, it's incense, it's the dust of Egypt ... — Ray Bradbury

A man has perished; his corpse is dust,
and his people have passed from the land;
it is a book which makes him remembered
in the mouth of a speaker.
More excellent is a [papyrus] roll than a built house,
than a chapel in the west.
It is better than an established villa,
than a stela in a temple... — Anonymous