Quotes & Sayings About Books And Wine

Lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays ... — Stephen Fry

Life, as the signs in the liquor stores say, is too short to drink bad wine. And summer is too short to read bad books. — David Frum

If the day was bright, I would buy a liter of wine and a piece of bread and some sausage and sit in the sun and read one of the books I had bought and watch the fishing. — Ernest Hemingway,

An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only ... We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness. — C.S. Lewis

Wine can be a better teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books — Stephen Fry

Before long, I had lost my youth and my patience for indulging others. Books were everything in life; books were better than wine. — Matthew Pearl

And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing. — Toni Morrison

He loved physical books with the same avidity other people loved horses or wine or prog rock. He'd never really warmed to ebooks because they seemed to reduce a book to a computer file, and computer files were disposable things, things you never really owned. He had no emails from ten years ago but still owned every book he bought that year. Besides, what was more perfect an object than a book? The different rags of paper, smooth or rough under your fingers. The edge of the page pressed into your thumbprint as you turned a new chapter. The way your bookmark - fancy, modest, scrap paper, candy wrapper - moved through the width of it, marking your progress, a little further each time you folded it shut. — Patrick Ness

The town, although it had "suffered greatly," was not in as bad shape as he had expected, he wrote to John Hancock, "and I have a particular pleasure in being able to inform you, sir, that your house has received no damage worth mentioning." Other fine houses had been much abused by the British, windows broken, furnishings smashed or stolen, books destroyed. But at Hancock's Beacon Hill mansion all was in order, as General Sullivan also attested, and there was a certain irony in this, since the house had been occupied and maintained by the belligerent General James Grant, who had wanted to lay waste to every town on the New England coast. "Though I believe," wrote Sullivan, "the brave general had made free with some of the articles in the [wine] cellar. — David McCullough

Dedicated ereaders are as sharp as steak knives in doing what they're supposed to do, which is let you read books. The iPad is more like a Swiss Army knife
it can cut the steak and uncork a wine bottle, and there's even a toothpick to use when you're done eating! It's got it all. — Jason Merkoski

She called me Nerdy because I wore glasses and read books and ate yogurt on my lunch break. I'm not really a nerd: I only aspire to be one. Because of the high-school-dropout thing, I'm a self-didact. (Not a dirty word, look it up.) I read constantly. I think. But I lack formal education. So I'm left with the feeling that I'm smarter than everyone around me but that if I ever got around really smart people - people who went to universities and drank wine and spoke Latin - that they'd be bored as hell by me. It's a lonely way to go through life. So I wear the name as a badge of honor. That someday I may not totally bore some really smart people. The question is: How do you find smart people? — Gillian Flynn

Books and bottles breed generosity, and the bibliophile and the oenophile og through life scattering largesse from their libraries and cellars — Holless Wilbur Allen

Don't get me started on the term literary fiction. I think the idea is that there are some books who know how to order from a wine list and some who don't. I like wine, but I prefer the company of beer drinkers any day. — Keir Graff

To me, there is only one God. An unnamed presence we'll never understand. Everything else is human politics. It was human beings who wrote the holy books, and human beings who made all the rules and rituals. In other words, it is human beings who turn life into hell. So yes'
he picked up his wine glass
'I try to live by the spirit of God, but not by the rules, because rules are made by man, and man is nothing but a fatally conceited flea on the mammoth of Creation. — Anne Fortier

After a time, it seemed that the world inside the books became my world. So when I thought of my childhood, it was dandelion wine and ice cream on a summer porch, like Ray Bradbury, and catching catfish with Huck Finn. My own memories receded and the book memories became the real memories, far more than the outside, far more even than in here. — Rene Denfeld

'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

Give me books, fruit, French wine, fine weather and a little music.. — John Keats

Books are worse than wine, I say. You read one and you need another - there's no end to it. What ails you that you cannot content yourself with just living on under the sun? — Donna Gillespie

Dad is looking at the bookshelves, deep in thought, deciding which book should go where. Once, Mom came home from work and discovered that he had turned all the books around so that the bindings were against the wall and the pages faced out. He said it was calming not to have all those words floating around and "creating static." Mom made him turn them back. She said it was too hard to find a book when she couldn't read the titles. Then she poured herself a big glass of wine. — Rebecca Stead

Laughter and books and wine are holy things; and living is good; and death is a breathlessness with the whole adventure of finding everywhere the traces of one great beauty... — Henry Rago

At the same time I grew increasingly dissatisfied and irritable with what we are prone to call normal life. Except for wine, music, and books, I disliked shopping. Television grated on my nerves, the commercials in particular, so I got rid of the television. I found it harder and harder to rouse any interest in sports, celebrities, electronic gadgets, the chatter of the culture, the latest this or that. Nor did I have any desire to own a house, or get rich, or start a family. I wanted to keep traveling and see the world, live an eventful, unpredictable life with as much personal freedom as possible, and have a few adventures along the way. — Richard Grant

But she loved studying and books, the way other people love wine for its power to make you forget. What else did she have? She lived in a deserted, silent house. The sound of her own footsteps in the empty rooms, the silence of the cold streets beyond the closed windows, the rain and the snow, the early darkness, the green lamp beside her that burned throughout the long evenings and which she watched for hours on end until its light began to waver before her weary eyes: this was the setting for her life. — Irene Nemirovsky

Give me books, fruit, French wine and fine weather and a little music out of doors, played by someone I do not know. — John Keats

But there is another realm where we can always find something true, the fireside of a friend, where we shed our little conceits and find warmth and understanding, where small selfishnesses are impossible and where wine and books and talk give a different meaning to existence.
There we have made something that no falseness can touch. We are at home. — Kressman Taylor

She took out an Ian McEwan book, flicked through it and said, 'I love this. I can't bear people who don't read. I think they must have something wrong with them, don't you?' 'I guess so.' 'Books, music, art, films.' She held up her glass. 'Good wine. It's what life's all about.' I held up my own glass. 'To books, music, art, films and wine. — Mark Edwards

EDGAR
A serving-man, proud in heart and mind; that curled
my hair; wore gloves in my cap; served the lust of
my mistress' heart, and did the act of darkness with
her; swore as many oaths as I spake words, and
broke them in the sweet face of heaven: one that
slept in the contriving of lust, and waked to do it:
wine loved I deeply, dice dearly: and in woman
out-paramoured the Turk: false of heart, light of
ear, bloody of hand; hog in sloth, fox in stealth,
wolf in greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey.
Let not the creaking of shoes nor the rustling of
silks betray thy poor heart to woman: keep thy foot
out of brothels, thy hand out of plackets, thy pen
from lenders' books, and defy the foul fiend.
Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind:
Says suum, mun, ha, no, nonny.
Dolphin my boy, my boy, sessa! let him trot by.
Storm still. — William Shakespeare

Despite the promise of four days of sun and overly sweet wine, Richard was sporting a sour puss. But then that was to be expected - he sold books for a living, after all. — Charlie Hill

It is not just bookstores and libraries that are disappearing but museums, theaters, performing arts centers, art and music schools - all those places where I felt at home have joined the list of endangered species. The San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe and my own hometown paper, The Washington Post, have all closed their weekend book review sections, leaving books orphaned and stranded, poor cousins to television and the movies. In a sign of the times, the Bloomberg News website recently transferred its book coverage to the Luxury section, alongside yachts, sports clubs and wine, as if to signal that books are an idle indulgence of the super-rich. But if there is one thing that should not be denied to anyone rich or poor it is the opportunity to dream. — Azar Nafisi

She was here and the world, for so long ugly and deformed, was all at once itself again. She was taking a glass of sweet wine from one of the waiters. She was smiling. She was breathing. She was here. She was an island of such colossal importance within a sea of inconsequence that it seemed impossible the Ball was able to continue its empty existence. — F.D. Lee

I wish I were rich enough to endow a prize for the sensible traveler: £10,000 for the first man to over Marco Polo's outward route, reading three fresh books a week, and another £10,000 if he a drinks a bottle of wine a day as well. That man might tell one something about the journey. He might or might not be naturally observant. But at least he would use what eyes he had, and would not think it necessary to dress up the result in thrills that never happened and science no deeper than its own jargon. — Robert Byron

A paradox: The things you don't need to live - books, art, cinema, wine, and so on - are the things you need to live. — Matt Haig

'Dandelion Wine' became one of the few books that I returned to time and again, and while not anywhere near the story crafter as Mr. Bradbury, I hope I managed to absorb by osmosis some of his techniques. — Kim Harrison

I shall conclude with a saying of Alponsus, surnamed the Wise, King of Aragon - that among so many things as are by men possessed or pursued in the course of their lives, all the rest are baubles, besides old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to converse with, and old books to read! — William Temple

Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know. — John Keats

I think of myself as a fairly logical, scientific and somewhat reserved person. Maura Isles, the Boston medical examiner who appears in five of my books, is me. Almost everything I use in describing her, from her taste in wine to her biographical data, is taken from my own family. Except I don't have a serial killer as a mother! — Tess Gerritsen

We got quiet. The garden was combing her hair and putting on earrings. The house was full of dancing creatures, not male and female but both, two lovers in one body. The books downstairs were reciting their poetry to each other, rubbing together, whispering through the leather covers. Wine was flowing through the water pipes. You had caught my leaping heart in your hand like a fish. — Francesca Lia Block

I prefer old books and find them more relevant. I dislike new books. It's like drinking wine that's not ready. — Jonathan Lethem

If anybody would make me the greatest king that ever lived, with palaces, and gardens and fine dinners, and wine, and coaches, and beautiful clothes, and hundreds of servants, on condition that I would not read books, I would not be a king. — Thomas B. Macaulay

We don't lock up books in this house," Philippe said, "only food, ale, and wine. Reading Herodotus or Aquinas seldom leads to bad behavior. — Deborah Harkness

Nobody went to bed at seven in Paris, even French children. Les enfants stayed up late at night, he had heard, eating with the adults, sipping red wine, and discussing the latest books and films. — Alexander McCall Smith

I like Rhine wine, blue grapes, good cheese, endive and lots of books, etc., etc., etc., as much as I like supreme fiction. — Wallace Stevens

In 1916, when Johnny Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my studio at the south end of the town at five o'clock one May morning, we had no idea of the immense possibilities, or of the thorny but successful career, that awaited the new invention. On a piece of cardboard we pasted a mishmash of advertisements for hernia belts, student song books and dog food, labels from schnaps and wine bottles, and photographs from picture papers, cut up at will in such a way as to say, in pictures, what would have been banned by the censors if we had said it in words. — George Grosz