Buried Books Quotes & Sayings

Such places exist among the endless abodes of every major city, places that seem to be sanctuaries from the present, immune to the hustle and bustle, the sound and fury that in the end change nothing. Like long unopened books sitting upon dusty shelves, there exist people filled with knowledge that has somehow been saved from extinction. But buried as they are by time, there abides in them yet a seed awaiting the proper condition for germination. There is some process that occurs in dormancy, some subtle shifting of the fabric of reality that science has yet to discover. From such forgotten places as these occasionally springs, in some unseen future, a gigantic oak whose day has come. — James Rozoff

It gives him an eerie feeling to sit in London reading about streets - Waalstraat, Buitengracht, Buitencingel - along which he alone, of all the people around him with their heads buried in their books, has walked. But even more than by accounts of old Cape Town is he captivated by stories of ventures into the interior, reconnaissances by ox-wagon into the desert of the Great Karoo, where a traveller could trek for days on end without clapping eyes on a living soul. Zwartberg, Leeuwrivier, Dwyka: it is his country, the country of his heart, that he is reading about. — J.M. Coetzee

All the rare-book dealers regaled me with stories of the trade. They told me that after the war there were too many books and not enough bookshop space, so all the dealers in London BURIED hundreds of old books in the open bomb craters of London streets. Today the buried books would be worth a fortune if they could be recovered, if the new buildings could be torn down and the rebuilt streets torn up. I had a sudden vision of an atomic war destroying everything in the world, except here and there an old book lying where it fell when it was blasted up out of the depths of London. — Helene Hanff

Every new search is a voyage to the Indies, a quest for buried treasure, a journey to the end of the rainbow; and whether or not at the end there shall be turned up a pot of gold or merely a delightful volume, there are always wonders along the way. — Vincent Starrett

In my early teens, I heard about Naked Lunch and its mutating typewriters and talking cockroaches. While I would hardly classify its dystopic vision as erotica now, at the time, Naked Lunch was my first foray into consuming smut. It was because of Burroughs that I knew about the particular musk that blooms when a rectum is penetrated, and that death-by-hanging produces spontaneous trouser tents. The first Burroughs I read was Naked Lunch, but I buried myself in a few of his stories, and thus the arc of my recollection is just as non-linear as his narrative. — Peter Dube

It wasn't the best view of the landscape around their buried bunker, but it wasn't the worst, either. In the distance, low rolling hills stood, a pretty shade of brown, like coffee mash with just the right amount of pig's milk in it. The sky above the hills was the same dull gray of his childhood and his father's childhood and his grandfather's childhood. The only moving feature on the landscape was the clouds. They hung full and dark over the hills. They roamed free like the herded beasts from the picture books. — Hugh Howey

My childhood wasn't easy. I buried myself in books. I guess I'm a recovering book addict. — Katherine Reay

Every story is a ride to some place and time other than here and now. Buried in an armchair, reclined on a couch, prostrate on your bed, or glued to your desk, you can go places and travel through time. — A.A. Patawaran

In books I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I foresee things to come; in books warlike affairs are set forth; from books come forth the laws of peace.
All things are corrupted and decay in time; Saturn ceases not to devour the children that he generates; all the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books. — Richard De Bury

All books have to be researched, but readable books have their research buried. — Joshua Cohen

That's your business, isn't it, cousin? To make nothing your business. Even your own sons going to war. How I pleaded with you. But you buried your nose in those cursed books and let our sons go like they were a pair of haramis. — Khaled Hosseini

Some people buried their fears in food, she knew, and some in booze, and some in planning elaborate engagements and weddings and other life events that took up every spare moment of their time, in case unpleasant thoughts intruded. But for Nina, whenever reality, or the grimmer side of reality, threatened to invade, she always turned to a book. Books had been her solace when she was sad; her friends when she was lonely. They had mended her heart when it was broken, and encouraged her to hope when she was down. Yet — Jenny Colgan

I'll live to be one year younger, because I can't stand the idea of a world without you in it, and die buried beneath an avalanche of my own books. — Lance Olsen

There's no reason that anything should ever become obsolete, whether it be VHS tapes, celluloid film, print books or even the previous versions of a computer operating system, as long as even just one person still wants them around. After all, one thing leads to another, old inventions are the basis for new ones, inventors and designers and scientists and hobbyists worked hard to create all these things, so don't they deserve some respect, enough not to have their ideas buried in the dust by the latest trends and fads? — Rebecca McNutt

I know. I know. But he's always buried in those books or shuffling around the house like he's lost in some dream." "And?" "I wasn't like that." Baba sounded frustrated, almost angry. Rahim Khan laughed. "Children aren't colouring books. You don't get to fill them with your favourite colours. — Khaled Hosseini

Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature. — Arthur Conan Doyle

There was one sure way to avoid being assigned an impromptu chore in our house - be it taking out the trash or cleaning your room - and that was to have your face buried in a book. Like churches during the Middle Ages, books conferred instant sanctuary. Once you entered one, you couldn't be disturbed. They didn't give you immunity from prosecution if you'd done something wrong - just a temporary reprieve. But we quickly learned you had to both look and be completely engrossed - just flipping pages didn't count. — Will Schwalbe

Yet in this my stars were not Mercury as morning star in the angle of the seventh house, in quartile with Mars, but they were Copernicus, they were Tycho Brahe, without whose books of observations everything which has now been brought by me into the brightest daylight would lie buried in darkness. — Johannes Kepler

It had been a boy's trick, Jerott remembered. Standing bareback on your father's horses; somersaulting, chariot-riding. Francis, buried in books, had never publicly attempted it. What private practice, Jerott wondered fleetingly, had gone into that? — Dorothy Dunnett

Boys forget what their country means by just reading 'The Land of the Free' in history books. Then they get to be men. They forget even more. Liberty's too precious a thing to be buried in books. — Jefferson Smith

I try to find the books that I lost or forgot more than 30 years ago on another continent, with the hope and dedication and bitterness of those who search for their first lost books, books that if found I wouldn't read anyway, because I've already read them over and over, but that I would look at and touch just as the miser strokes the coins under which he's buried ... Books are like ghosts — Roberto Bolano

I guess that's why I buried myself in books. There was comfort there. Security. — Tom Isbell

If you want, you can have a coffin made out of cardboard or wicker or papier mache. There's one like a seed pod, or you could buy one that doubles as both a bookcase and a coffin. During your life, you stand it in your living room, and then after you die, the books are taken out and your body put in their place and the whole thing buried. — Laura Wade

The internet was supposed to liberate knowledge, but in fact it buried it, first under a vast sewer of ignorance, laziness, bigotry, superstition and filth and then beneath the cloak of political surveillance. Now ... cyberspace exists exclusively to promote commerce, gossip and pornography. And of course to hunt down sedition. Only paper is safe. Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar, you have to hold it, you have to read it. — Ben Elton

I'm sure you understand my meanin'. After all, you're one of us. Your daddy was born here and your mamma was buried here. You belong here. Not everyone does. I stared back at her. She was in her van before I could say another word. This time, Mrs. Lincoln was after more than burning a few books. — Kami Garcia

Now maybe I wouldn't do it, but I was a child then," said Oryx more softly. "Why are you so angry?"
"I don't buy it," said Jimmy. Where was her rage, how far down was it buried, what did he have to do to dig it up?
"You don't buy what?"
"Your whole fucking story. All this sweetness and acceptance and crap."
"If you don't want to buy that, Jimmy," said Oryx, looking at him tenderly, "what is it that you would like to buy instead?" (167) — Margaret Atwood

My only wish is to be buried with my books. — Nikita Dudani

There were many deficits in our swamp education, but Grandpa Sawtooth, to his credit, taught us the names of whole townships that had been forgotten underwater. Black pioneers, Creek Indians, moonshiners, women, 'disappeared' boy soldiers who deserted their army camps. From Grandpa we learned how to peer beneath the sea-glare of the 'official, historical' Florida records we found in books. "Prejudice," as defined by Sawtooth Bigtree, was a kind of prehistoric arithmetic
a "damn, fool math"
in which some people counted and others did not. It meant white names on white headstones in the big cemetery in Cypress Point, and black and brown bodies buried in swamp water.
At ten, I couldn't articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well. — Karen Russell

When I was with him, I felt like a book worth reading all the way through again and again and again. Sure, he liked my cover. I wanted him to, but I wanted him to like everything else too. I imagined him buying the book, studying it, quoting it, memorizing his favorite parts. He'd keep it with him always, like a Bible, hold it sacred even when the cover fell off and the book became bent with age and use. Maybe, he'd be buried with it. That's all I wanted. — Candice Raquel Lee

In books and movies, all the loose ends are tired, things are resolved, mysteries are solved, they catch the killer, the boy gets the girl, a sick baby is miraculously healed. In reality it doesn't always work that way. The killer gets away, the girl is in love with another boy, things just get buried under new dramas and don't get resolved. Life is far more complicated than the life depicted in a book or a movie. — Cindy Vine

Days in the past cover up little by little those that preceded them and are themselves buried beneath those that follow them. But each past day has remained deposited in us, as in a vast library where, even of the oldest books, there is a copy which doubtless nobody will ever ask to see. And yet should this day from the past, traversing the translucency of the intervening epochs, rise to the surface and spread itself inside us until it covers us entirely, then for a moment names resume their former meaning, people their former aspect, we ourselves our state of mind at the time, and we feel, with a vague suffering which however is endurable and will not last for long, the problems which have long ago become insoluble and which caused us such anguish at the time ... Incessant upheavals raise to the surface ancient deposits. — Marcel Proust

That once were urgent and necessary for an orderly world and now were buried away, gathering dust and of no use to anyone. — Patricia A. McKillip

They came generally from people writing theses on fantasy or on the Dark Is Rising books. They were full of questions I'd never thought about and false assumptions that I didn't want to think about. They would ask me in great detail for, say, the specific local and mythical derivations of my Greenwitch, a leaf-figure thrown over a Cornish cliff as a fertility sacrifice, and I would have to write back and say, "I'm terribly sorry; I made it all up." They told me I echoed Hassidic myth, which I hadn't read, and the Mormon suprastructure, which I'd never even heard of. They saw symbols and buried meanings and allegories everywhere. I'd thought I was making a clear soup, but for them it was a thick mysterious stew.

from "In Defense of the the Artist" in Signposts to Criticism of Children's Literature (1983) — Susan Cooper

When we think of the masterpieces that nobody praised and nobody read, back there in the past, we feel an impatient superiority to the readers of the past. If we had been there, we can't help feeling, we'd have known that Moby-Dick was a good book - -why, how could anyone help knowing?
But suppose someone says to us, "Well, you're here now: what's our own Moby-Dick? What's the book that, a hundred years from now, everybody will look down on us for not having liked?" What do we say then? — Randall Jarrell

When the sun shall be folded up; and when the stars shall fall; and when the mountains shall be made to pass away; and when the camels ten months gone with young shall be neglected; and when the seas shall boil; and when the souls shall be joined again to their bodies; and when the girl who hath been buried alive shall be asked for what crime she was put to death; and when the books shall be laid open; and when the heavens shall be removed; and when hell shall burn fiercely; and when paradise shall be brought near: every soul shall know what it hath wrought. — Anonymous

Your life, your breath, do they diligently seek,
Beyond the ridge to Willows Peak.
Go tortured soul! Go the weak!
Fall into their arms which eagerly reach,
Your spirit will they shackle and keep,
buried in the darkness of Willows Peak."
"Not the happiest poem in the world," Breccan remarked. — Madison Thorne Grey

He places the skull in the palm of my hand. There are four canines; the top two are so long and curved I can feel them pricking my skin. There's a green tinge round the eye socket and in a fine line across the cranium. I'm not sure what animal it's from.
'Stoat,' Harris says, as if I've spoken out loud. 'They hunt grouse and partridge. I found it behind my house. I buried the body in the furze until it was just bone.'
His hand is still beneath mine, supporting it. I think of him seeing the small dead creature and digging a tiny grave for it. Planning ahead for all those months just so he'd see the skeleton. Or maybe he severed the animal's head and that was the only part he buried.
'It's been waiting for you all this time. Like I have. — Sanjida Kay

You'll accidentally find in barrows of books wrought-iron lines of long-buried poems, handle them with the care that respects ancient but terrible weapons.. — Bill Vaughan

Possession of books denounced as heretical was made a criminal offense. Copies of such books were burned and destroyed. But in Upper Egypt, someone, possibly a monk from a nearby monastery of St Pachomius, took the banned books and hid them from destruction - in the jar where they remained buried for almost 1,600 years. — Elaine Pagels

Liberty is too precious to be buried in books. Men should hold it up in front of them every single day of their lives and say, 'I'm free'. — Sidney Buchman

That bookshops will one day disappear altogether and be replaced by mail order, that eventually books themselves would be finally and fully buried by that awful foe, so much cheaper and easier to carry: newspapers. — Matthew Pearl

Vincent made his way closer to the group and shuffled his feet while he watched them embrace. Breccan's head remained buried in the huddle while his large hand reached out, grabbed Vincent's good wing, and pulled the archangel into the fold. — Madison Thorne Grey

They buried him, but all through the night of mourning, in the lighted windows, his books arranged three by three kept watch like angels with outspread wings and seemed for him who was no more; the symbol of his resurrection — Marcel Proust

My love of books and ability to get buried in them while real life piles up outside the door always keeps me passive and deluded. — Kay Dew Shostak

purple threaded evening. a torn goddess laying on the roof. milk sky. lavender hued moan against hot asphalt. the thickness of evening presses into your throat. polaroids taped to the ceiling. ivy pouring out of the cracks in the wall. i found my courage buried beneath molding books and forgot to lock the door behind me. the old house never forgets. opened my mouth and a dandelion fell out. reached behind my wisdom teeth and found sopping wet seeds. pulled all of my teeth out just to say i could. he drowned himself in a pill bottle and the orange really brought out his demise. lay me down on a bed of ground spices. there's a song there, i know it. amethyst geode eyes. cracked open. no one saw it coming.
october never loved you.
the moon still doesn't understand that. — Taylor Rhodes

Many useful and valuable books lie buried in shops and libraries, unknown and unexamined, unless some lucky compiler opens them by chance, and finds an easy spoil of wit and learning. — Samuel Johnson

Partially satisfied by grazing on the first few pages of several books, and as a consequence, there are half-chewed novels lying all over the place. At least, I'm presuming they're lying all over the place; I seem to have temporarily lost most of them. When the World Cup is over, and we clear away the piles of betting slips and wall charts, some of them will, presumably, reappear. I wrote in this column recently about Muriel Spark's novels, their genius and their attractive brevity, but there is an obvious disadvantage to her concision: her books tend to get buried under things. I can put my hands on Dennis Lehane's historical novel The Given Day whenever I want, simply because it is seven hundred pages long. — Nick Hornby

My crime books are actually novels and are written as such. One might even say that each one is really two novels, one of which is the story I tell the reader, and the other the buried story I know and let slip now and then into a clue to whet the reader's interest. — Mary Roberts Rinehart

The most buried treasures lie in the cemetery. There lies buried the dreams that never came true, the goals that were never reached, the inventions that were never created and the books that were never written.
Don't be a buried treasure. — John E. DeJesus

She is walking several feet ahead, pretending I don't exist, but that's okay, I'm used to it, and what she doesn't know is that is doesn't faze me. People either see me or they don't. I wonder what it's like to walk down the street, safe and easy in your skin, and just blend right in. No one turning away, no one starring, no one waiting and expecting, wondering what stupid, crazy thing you'll do next
Then I can't hold back anymore, and I take off running, and it feels good to break free from the slow, regular pace of everyone else. I break free from my mind, which is, for some reason, picturing myself as dead as the authors of the books she has collected, asleep for good this time, buried deep in the ground under layers and layers of dirt and cornfields. I can almost feel the earth closing in, the air going stale and damp, the dark pressing down on top of me, and I have to open my mouth to breath. — Jennifer Niven

This makes it tough to find a lot of solid material on him because so much of his work got discounted as irrelevant. Most of it just ends up buried in pseudo-science books. Pretty much the only place you can find him is lumped in with guys like Edgar Cayce or Immanuel Velikovsky. He believed in telepathy, shared dreaming, race memories, all that kind of stuff. The idea that people's minds can all connect on some extra-sensory level. — Peter Clines

Literature is dead, my boy' the uncle replied. 'Look at these empty rooms, and these books buried in their dust; no one reads anymore; I am the guardian of a cemetery here, and exhumation is forbidden.' ... 'My boy, never speak of literature, never speak of art! Accept the situation as it is! You are Monsieur Boutardins ward before being your Uncle Huguenin's nephew! — Jules Verne