Look Again Book Quotes & Sayings

Well, it's not so much a trembling,' was the answer - 'though they do quiver - as a complete derangement of the nervous system. They can't sign their names to the book; sometimes can't even hold the pen; look about 'em without appearing to know why, or where they are; and sometimes get up and sit down again, twenty times in a minute. This is when they're in the office, where they are taken with the hood on, as they were brought in. When they get outside the gate, they stop, and look first one way and then the other; not knowing which to take. Sometimes they stagger as if they were drunk, and sometimes are forced to lean against the fence, they're so bad: - but they clear off in course of time. — Charles Dickens

There is a book into which some of us are happily led to look, and to look again, and never tire of looking. It is the Book of Man. You may open that book whenever and wherever you find another human voice to answer yours, and another human hand to take in your own. — Walter Besant

But then again, that's what the Book of Job was about to her, a cautionary tale about wanting there to be a God, wanting there to be someone who could enact what a God could enact, or who could sanction what the Devil would do. You want this, people? You want these kinds of powers? No, you don't, and here's why, and here's why it's sheer vanity to want them in any other entity. Look what sort of violence would rain down. Poor Job, sure, poor Job with his hives and his financial losses - though who needs three thousand camels? - and too bad about the kids, forgive me, they were delicious, so sweet and so cold, sure, too bad, but it's God who's the miserable bastard here. Look what he got himself up to! No good could come of that type of power; that's what the writer of the Book of Job was saying, and she knew the writer was right. — Michelle Latiolais

Your image as a model is your currency. That's the only thing you've got. No one cares what you look like in real life. Nobody is going to say the make up guy was terrible. They will say, you look awful and let's not book her again. — Iman Abdulmajid

Lately I can't help wanting us
to be like other people.
For example, if I were a smoker,

you'd lift a match to the cigarette
just as I put it between my lips.
It's never been like that

between us: none of that
easy chemistry, no quick, half automatic
flares. Everything between us

had to be learned.
Saturday finds me brooding
behind my book, all my fantasies

of seduction run up
against the rocks.
Tell me again

why you don't like
sex in the afternoon?
No, don't tell me--

I'll never understand you
never understand us, America's strangest
loving couple: they never

drink a bottle of wine together
and rarely look at each other.
Into each other's eyes, I mean. — Deborah Garrison

... the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea ... . It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and thus compelling words to a shape ... .
You have not finished with it because you have read it, any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up and alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered. So we look back upon essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm, knowing that, come September or May, we shall sit down with them and talk. — Virginia Woolf

Later, in my adulthood, I will read the book again, even watch the movie, and understand that I wasn't equipped, as a child, to make room for arguments that would undermine every single choice made for me, that would shatter the foundations of my very existence. I would see that I had to believe everything I was taught, if only to survive. For a long time I wouldn't be ready to accept that my worldview could be wrong, but I do not look back with shame at my ignorance. — Deborah Feldman

Beware, Underlanders, time hangs by a thread.
The hunters are hunted, white water runs red.
The Gnawers will strike to extinguish the rest.
The hope of the hopeless resides in a quest.
An Overland warrior, a son of the sun,
May bring us back light, he may bring us back none.
But gather your neighbors and follow his call
Or rats will most surely devour us all.
Two over, two under, of royal descent,
Two flyers, two crawlers, two spinners assent.
One gnawer beside and one lost up ahead.
And eight will be left when we count up the dead.
The last who will die must decide where he stands.
The fate of the eight is contained in his hands.
So bid him take care, bid him look where he leaps,
As life may be death and death life again reaps. — Suzanne Collins

The other gift - a book of poems, called, "The Cowardly Morning" - Waner put on Corinne's desk at the office, with a note saying, "This man is Coleridge and Blake and Rilke all in one, and more."
She didn't pick up the book again until she was in bed, late that night.
[...]
The first poem was the title poem. This time Corinne read it through aloud. But still she didn't hear it. She read it through a third time, and heard some of it. She read it through a fourth time, and heard all of it. It was the poem containing the lines:
'Not wasteland, but a great inverted forest
with all foliage underground.'
As though it might be best to look immediately for shelter, Corinne had to put the book down. At any moment the apartment building seemed liable to lose its balance and topple across Fifth Avenue into Central Park. She waited. Gradually the deluge of truth and beauty abated.
- The Inverted Forest (1947) — J.D. Salinger

I need a book that says 'Here's how to defeat Spring and restore power to your king, and while you're at it, here's how to prove you matter when no one else thinks you do - "

I stop. I'm staring at the bookshelves and not at Theron, and I don't think I'll ever be able to look at him again without shriveling up from embarrassment. ... I can still hear what I said hanging around me, my weak, weak admission, and I can't bring myself to breathe, let alone face him.

Theron doesn't give me a choice. He crawls up onto his knees and moves into my line of sight, his forehead wrinkled and his eyes darting over mine like he's trying to figure me out the same way he figured out that passage. After a moment of silence, he grimaces.

"You matter," is all he says. — Sara Raasch

Why is any one book different from any other book? They are different, A.J. decides, because they are. We have to look inside many. We have to believe. We agree to be disappointed sometimes so that we can be exhilarated every now and again. — Gabrielle Zevin

Either you're lying again or you're as stupid as you look. You ditch me first year for him when you were a girl. You ditch me second year for him when you were a boy. You lie and cheat and steal for him while he treats you like crap, and I help you and care for you and worship you like a queen while you treat me like crap! What does that guy have that I don't? What makes him so lovable and me so unworthy? Know how many times I've asked myself that question, Sophie? How many times I've studied him like a book or sat in the dark picturing every last shred of him, trying to understand why he's more of a person than me? Or why the moment he's gone, you take a ring from the School Master - or Raphael or Michelangelo or Donatello or whatever you want to call him to make yourself feel better - just because he looks like you want him to look and says what you want to hear? When you could have had someone who's honest and kind and real? — Soman Chainani

A book is something that young readers can experience on their own time. They decide when to turn the page. They'll put their arm right on the page so you can't turn it because they're not ready to go to the next page yet. They just want to look at it again, or they want to read the book over and over because they really enjoy setting the pace themselves. — Jan Brett

Tentatively, I presented the idea of being naked with Austin to the gallery of my neuroses. It was a loud, raucous meeting. Sex-Drive was bouncing around like a child on Pixy Stix, saying "yes yes yes" over and over again. Vanity suggested that the things in the [safe sex] book would not improve the way I looked in the slightest. Insecurity and Doubt argued over what would be more awful; when Austin saw me naked or when my sexual inexperience made itself evident and he laughed at me. Optimism sulked off to the side because I never listened to it. Prudence recommended tabling the discussion indefinitely. Curiosity wanted to look at the pictures some more. Shyness just sat in the corner, rocking back and forth and crying. — Chris O'Guinn

When I'm writing the text for a book like 'Little White Rabbit,' I read it aloud, alone, in my studio, again and again and again - because the rhythm has to be exactly right. After I get my manuscript to the point where I think it is perfect, I begin to think about what I want the art to look like. — Kevin Henkes

Henry,' at last said one, again dipping the spoon into the flaming spirit, 'hast thou read Hoffman?'
'I should think so,' said Henry.
'What think you of him?'
'Why, that he writes admirably; and, moreover, what is more admirable - in such a manner that you see at once he almost believes that which he relates. As for me, I know very well that when I read him of a dark night, I am obliged to creep to bed without shutting my book, and without daring to look behind me.'
'Indeed; then you love the terrible and fantastic?'
'I do,' said Henry. (The Dead Man's Story — James Hain Friswell

Darren Hardy has written a new bible for the self-improvement space. If you are looking for the real deal-a real program, with real tools that can change your life and make your dreams a reality-The Compound Effect is it! I plan to use this book to go back and look at what I need to again work on in my own life! Buy ten copies, one for yourself and nine more for those you love, and pass them out now-those who get it will thank you! — David Bach

They peer in and at the same moment both angle back their heads, as if they have taken a position a little too close to a panoramic screen. They are tall and big-boned and look like men playing women's parts in a play by Oscar Wilde. 'Nan, Verge's sisters are here,' my mother says loudly. But Nan already knows, and furiously pokers the fire to try and smoke them back out. Nan here is The Aged P only with more mischievousness than Mr Wemmick's in Great Expectations, the only book of which my father kept two copies (Books 180 and 400, Penguin Classic & Everyman Classics editions, London), both of which I have read twice, deciding each time that Great Expectations is the Greatest. If you don't agree, stop here, go back and read it again. I'll wait. Or be dead. — Niall Williams

The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.
(Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading, Harper's Magazine, February 2008) — Ursula K. Le Guin

The advice I would offer to any writer is that even when you think you have revised your book to the point where you cannot look at it again, it is time to sit down and revise it some more. — Michael Korda

I look upon every good man, as a good book, lent by its owner for another to read, and transcribe the excellent notions and golden passages that are in it for his own benefit, that they may return with him when the owner shall call for the book again: but in case this excellent book shall be thrown into a corner and no use made of it, it justly provokes the owner to take it away in displeasure.
Funeral of John Upton, Esq — John Flavel

Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?" Mo had said ... "As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells ... and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower ... both strange and familiar. — Cornelia Funke

Sometimes you will need to leap from one end of this paradoxical spectrum to the other in a matter of minutes, and then back again. As I write this book, for instance, I approach each sentence as if the future of humanity depends upon my getting that sentence just right. I care, because I want it to be lovely. Therefore, anything less than a full commitment to that sentence is lazy and dishonorable. But as I edit my sentence - sometimes immediately after writing it - I have to be willing to throw it to the dogs and never look back. (Unless, of course, I decide that I need that sentence again after all, in which case I must dig up its bones, bring it back to life, and once again regard it as sacred.) It matters./It doesn't matter. — Elizabeth Gilbert

The BBC came to me and they wanted to adapt the book [Three Musketeers] again, in the straightforward way, and I said no to that. I didn't want to do that. But what I did want to do was have a real look at the adventure genre because I thought it was ripe for reinvention. — Adrian Hodges

Look,' said Cyrus, raising his knife again and pointing it at her. 'Give me one reason why we shouldn't kill your boyfriend over there. Come on. The dark scowling face is reason enough in my book.'
She could have sworn she heard the sound of Lucas's eyes narrowing to slits.
'Come on, just one reason,' Cyrus repeated, 'and it better not include the words love, eternal or soul. — Sarah Alderson

Tegus, I'm leaving this book behind for you, so you will know the why of it all, and maybe you'll forgive me, or maybe you'll think me false and reprehensible. You'd be justified. I couldn't stand the thought of your reading all my words unless I knew for certain that I'd never have to face you again, so please don't look for me. If you read the book in its entirety, you'll know for truth who is Lady Saren. And I guess you'll also know that I'm a silly girl who writes down every word you said to me. — Shannon Hale

The snag in being married to a person who knows more or less everything is that one gets hopelessly lazy ... I never look things up in books because all I need to do is ask him, and when he gives me the answers I don't properly commit them to memory because I know if I forget all I have to do is to ask him again. It is rather like keeping one's brain in a suitcase. — Alice Thomas Ellis

Lucanos nodded [...] 'She's the girl who sees with her heart.'
Aranae rolled all eight of her eyes. She chittered again, in a scolding tone this time. When she finished, she crossed two of her legs and gave Belle a dirty look.
Belle shrank under her disapproving glare, 'What did she say?' she asked timidly.
'She said your heart needs glasses. — Jennifer Donnelly

It was common, back then," said Vikram, rolling his tea glass between his palms. "Living books. Alchemists were always trying to create them. There was the Quran, which shattered language and put it back together again in a way no one had been able to replicate, using words whose meanings evolved over time without the alteration of a single dot or brushstroke. As above, so below, the alchemists reasoned-they thought they could reverse-engineer the living word using chemical compounds. If they could create a book that was literally alive, perhaps it would also produce knowledge that transcended time."
"That's pretty blasphemous," said the convert.
"Oh, very. Heretics, my dear. They made the hashisheen look orthodox. — G. Willow Wilson

I can't blame anyone for being pessimistic when they look around, after all the blood spilled and energy spent to gain ground for working people in the past, and see it all happening again. I wasn't pointing a finger when I wrote the book, but sometimes the message is there even when you aren't actively trying to be the messenger. — James Vance

I go downstairs and the books blink at me from the shelves. Or stare. In a trick of the light, a row of them seems to shift very slightly, like a curtain blown by the breeze through an open window. Red is next to blue is next to cream is adjacent to beige. But when I look again, cream is next to green is next to black. A tall book shelters a small book, a huge Folio bullies a cowering line of Quartos. A child's nursery rhyme book does not have the language in which to speak to a Latin dictionary. Chaucer does not know the words in which Henry James communicates but here they are forced to live together, forever speechless. — Susan Hill

Books,' I say sleepily. 'They don't change either. If you read a book and look at it again later on, it's still the same thing. But it's exciting all over again. — Truus Matti

And as the bombshells of my daily fears explode
I try to trace them to my youth

And then you had to bring up reincarnation
Over a couple of beers the other night
And now I'm serving time for mistakes
Made by another in another lifetime

How long till my soul gets it right
Can any human being ever reach that kind of light
I call on the resting soul of galileo
King of night vision, king of insight
...
But then again it feels like some sort of inspiration
To let the next life off the hook
But she'll say "look what I had to overcome from my last life
I think I'll write a book — Indigo Girls

I know a lot of other actors that don't like to look at other references to their characters and things. But I like it. I always look at everything, I read all the books. I read Dieter's "Escape from Laos." I watched the documentary again and again and again. I recorded it just to listen to him a lot. I just don't suffer from feeling like I'm getting caught into an imitation. I just feel like I want to steal some good stuff if it's in there. — Christian Bale

ON THE RETURN OF A BOOK
LENT TO A FRIEND
I GIVE humble and hearty thanks for the safe return of this book which having endured the perils of my friend's bookcase, and the bookcases of my friend's friends, now returns to me in reasonably good condition.
I GIVE humble and hearty thanks that my friend did not see fit to give this book to his infant as a plaything, nor use it as an ash-tray for his burning cigar, nor as a teething-ring for his mastiff.
WHEN I lent this book I deemed it as lost: I was resigned to the bitterness of the long parting: I never thought to look upon its pages again.
BUT NOW that my book is come back to me, I rejoice and am exceeding glad! Bring hither the fatted morocco and let us rebind the volume and set it on the shelf of honour: for this my book was lent, and is returned again.
PRESENTLY, therefore, I may return some of the books that I myself have borrowed. — Christopher Morley

Save your explanations, I got some questions for you first and you'd better answer them!' [slurred Hellian.]
'With what?' [Banaschar] sneered. 'Explanations?'
'No. Answers. There's a difference-'
'Really? How? What difference?'
'Explanations are what people use when they need to lie. Y'can always tell those,'cause those don't explain nothing and then they look at you like they just cleared things up when really they did the opposite and they know it and you know it and they know you know and you know they know that you know and they know you and you know them and maybe you go out for a pitcher later but who picks up the tab? That's what I want to know.'
'Right, and answers?'
'Answers is what I get when I ask questions. Answers is when you got no choice. I ask, you tell. I ask again, you tell some more. Then I break your fingers, 'cause I don't like what you're telling me, because those answers don't explain nothing! — Steven Erikson

I hope for so much from every book I read. And time and again, I find myself disappointed. I look across my bookshelves and see hundreds of titles which in my memory seem merely mediocre or second-rate. Only occasionally does a novel appear for which I feel a lasting passion, a book that I think could in time become a classic. — John Boyne

Thoughtfully I resume my patrolling to and fro between the benches. Now and again I catch a searching glance above the edge of a copy book. I stand still near the stove and look at the young faces. Most of them are good-natured and ordinary, some are sly, others stupid; but in a few there is a flicker of something brighter. For these life will not be so obvious and all things will not go so smoothly. Suddenly — Erich Maria Remarque

Books are like people. Some look deceptively attractive from a distance, some deceptively unappealing; some are easy company, some demand hard work that isn't guaranteed to pay off. Some become friends and say friends for life. Some change in our absence - or perhaps it is we who change in theirs - and we meet up again only to find that we don't get along any more. — Mark Haddon

Of course, every time I end a book, I look down at myself and I'm just the same. I'm always disappointed that I'm just the same, but not enough to never do it again! — Jamaica Kincaid

My values are not based on violence. My values are based on courage, which you see time and time again in my books. A warrior isn't somebody like Bruce Willis or Arnold Schwarzenegger. A warrior can be any age. A warrior is a person people look up to. — Brian Jacques