Powerful Books Quotes & Sayings

If you're a history buff, you know about J. Edgar Hoover. He was likely the most powerful man in the US. If you start reading about him, the books contradict each other constantly. I was often left with very little sense of the man personally. I had a sense of what he did and didn't do and what people disagreed about whether he did this or didn't do this or that, but I was like, "Why? Why was he doing all of this?" That was my big question. — Dustin Lance Black

Our Voice is our most powerful tool against these evil people who prey on the innocent, we should never be silent and let them continue to harm people. By being silent we are telling them it is "Okay to continue". I firmly believe if you choose to stand with those who wish to keep the victim silent you are yourself guilty of a crime against humanity
- Misty Griffin — Misty Griffin

I want that quiet rapture again. I want to feel the same powerful, nameless urge that I used to feel when I turned to my books. The breath of desire that then arose from the coloured backs of the books, shall fill me again, melt the heavy, dead lump of lead that lies somewhere in me and waken again the impatience of the future, the quick joy in the world of thought, it shall bring back again the lost eagerness of my youth. I sit and wait. — Erich Maria Remarque

Let us pick up our books and our pens, they are the most powerful weapons. Malala Yousafzai, the schoolgirl who was shot in the head by the Taliban for wanting an education and survived, in her keynote speech to the United Nations, 12th July 2013. — Malala Yousafzai

Trends working at least marginally towards the implantation of a very narrow range of attitudes, memories and opinions include control of major television networks and newspapers by a small number of similarly motivated powerful corporations and individuals, the disappearance of competitive daily newspapers in many cities, the replacement of substantive debate by sleaze in political campaigns, and episodic erosion of the principle of the separation of powers. It is estimated (by the American media expert Ben Bagditrian) that fewer than two dozen corporations control more than half of the global business in daily newspapers, magazines, television, books and movies! — Carl Sagan

Change is the one unavoidable, irresistible, ongoing reality of the universe. To us, that makes it the most powerful reality, and just another word for God. Earthseed: The Books of the Living Lauren Oya Olamina — Octavia Butler

If people knew how powerful books were, they'd all have one in their hand or a tablet loaded full of e-books, just like me! — Terry Schott

It is no more necessary that a man should remember the different dinners and suppers which have made him healthy, than the different books which have made him wise. Let us see the results of good food in a strong body, and the results of great reading in a full and powerful mind. — Sydney Smith

There was another reason [she] took her books whenever they went away. They were her home when she was somewhere strange. They were familiar voices, friends that never quarreled with her, clever, powerful friends
daring and knowledgeable, tried and tested adventurers who had traveled far and wide. Her books cheered her up when she was sad and kept her from being bored. — Cornelia Funke

I read romance because it's fun to fall in love. And with romance books, I get to do it over and over. I get to be different types of lovers, I get to feel the heartbreak of love and the successes. Love is the most powerful and real emotion we feel, and I think it's sort of magical that we can experience some of the greatest loves of all time through books. — Kandi Steiner

I'm reminded of how passionate Kuan Yin is about the importance of being human on this earth," continues Lena.

"It's the most important thing in your existence," states Kuan Yin. "Your existence is eternal. This phase (of your soul) is so important because you learn so much in human form. This is where the individual's 'spark' of existence can expand into bigger, more powerful energies. — Hope Bradford

I am a reader. I am a writer. People assume I do these things to escape. You couldn't be more right. I'm escaping a world I don't like. A world I have no control in. In this world, I am nothing. I am a color, a height, a weight, a number. But in the world of books and writing, I am amazing. I am powerful. I am different. People are better. Worlds are endless. Change is possible. Life is manageable. — Philip K. Dick

Ecclesiastes calls you the All-powerful; the Maccabees call you the Creator; the Epistle to the Ephesians calls you liberty; Baruch calls you Immensity; the Psalms call you Wisdom and Truth; John calls you Light; the Books of Kings call you Lord; Exodus calls you Providence; Leviticus, Sanctity; Esdras, Justice; the creation calls you God; man calls you Father; but Solomon calls you Compassion, and that is the most beautiful of all your names. — Victor Hugo

...story is a powerful stimulant with tremendous influence over how we think and act. Like meth, only safer. — Kathleen Smith

It is you who must someday break through the protective polish of who you are, to become naked and powerful to who you can truly be. — Carew Papritz

They were her home when she was somewhere strange. They were familiar voices, friends that never quarreled with her, clever, powerful friends - daring and knowledgable, tried and tested adventurers who had traveled far and wide. Her books cheered her up when she was sad and kept her from being bored while Mo cut leather and fabric to the right size and re-stitched old pages that over countless years had grown fragile from the many fingers leafing through them. — Cornelia Funke

The Elephantine papyri - written as some of the books of the Bible are being written - is true social and legal documentation, and to historians overwhelmingly powerful and moving, even when ostensibly about trivial things. — Simon Schama

When you stand inside somebody's library, you get a powerful sense of who they are, and not just who they are now but who they've been. . . . It's a wonderful thing to have in a house. It's something I worry is endangered by the rise of the e-book. When you turn off an e-book, there's no map. All that's left behind is a chunk of gray plastic. ~ Lev Grossman — Leah Price

She was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells. — Dean Koontz

In some ways, certain books are more powerful by far than any battle. — Henry A. Wallace

We mothers have a wonderfully precious and truly powerful role to play in the future self-images of our daughters. The truth is, the most effective way to inculcate in our daughters a fighting chance at life-long self-love and empowerment is not in the books we read to them, or the workshops we send them to, or the media we do or do not expose them to, or even the things we tell them, rather it is in the reflection of self-love and empowerment they see in us, their mothers. The model of our own empowerment gives our daughters permission to be powerful. Of course, culture and societal norms mold our view of ourselves as women, but the beliefs and behaviors of our mothers are far more influential. — Melia Keeton-Digby

Whether we're talking about books, music or film, it's all about storytelling. You get a powerful new way of connecting with people once you hear their stories. — Craig Hatkoff

I feel excited; but I do not want to be, for that is not right. I want that quiet rapture again. I want to feel the same powerful, nameless urge that I used to feel when I turned to my books. The breath of desire that then arose from the coloured backs of the books, shall fill me again, melt the heavy, dead lump of lead that lies somewhere in me and waken again the impatience of the future, the quick joy in the world of thought, it shall bring back again — Erich Maria Remarque

It made me realise just how desperate the world is for a superhero. I don't just mean those of the comic books. For there is an inexhaustible supply of would-be superheroes throughout history and across the globe. From the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood, to the Gods of a thousand religions. From Santa Claus to Peter Pan to a myriad other folklore characters. Monsters from the Lochs. Spirits from the other side. Aliens from distant planets. The world longs for something ... something else. Something powerful and exciting. A little bit of magic. — Paul J. Newell

I could leave the world of the book enthralled and inspired, but the real world awaited me, to caress or to kick me; reality was a powerful force that could not be ignored. — Sara Niles

People who think my books are autobiographical, which they're not, credit me with having a much better memory than I do. I do, however, have a powerful imagination. — Curtis Sittenfeld

Assembly, while extremely powerful, is simply too difficult to program large applications and hard to read or interpret in a logical way. C is a compiled language, which creates fast and efficient executable files. It is also a small "what you see is all you get" language: — Wiki Books

Looking over world literature, it is almost impossible to find a single sympathetic representation of a moneylender- or anyway, a professional moneylender, which means by definition one who charges interest. I'm not sure there is another profession (executioners?) with such a consistently bad image. It's especially remarkable when one considers that unlike executioners, usurers often rank among the richest and most powerful people in their communities. Yet the very name, "usurer," evokes images of loan sharks, blood money, pounds of flesh, the selling of souls, and behind them all, the Devil, often represented as himself a kind of usurer, an evil accountant with his books and ledgers. — David Graeber

I'm a feminist. The women in my books in recent years have been powerful characters and I love to see a woman with a cute bottom walking past. — Wilbur Smith

Books on prayer are good, but not good enough. As books on cooking are good but hopeless unless there is food to work on, so with prayer. One can read a library of prayer books and not be one whit more powerful in prayer. We must learn to pray, and we must pray to learn to pray. — Leonard Ravenhill

Books are an amazing thing. Anyone who thinks of them as an escape from reality or as something you should get your nose out of and go outside and play, or as merely a distraction or an amusement or a waste of time is - dead wrong.
Books are the most important
the most powerful
the most beautiful thing
humans have ever created. — Connie Willis

I think of all media, television is the most powerful when it comes to selling books, because when you have a feature film, yeah, there's a rush. But then after that month is over and the movie goes out of release, that's it. — Tess Gerritsen

M's plan would put Blake right up there in the history books with Alexander, with Charlemagne, with Napoleon. One of the most powerful men ever to have lived. Viceroy of the Americas. — Lisa Marie Rice

The best books act like a powerful drug--they take you out of your own head into experiences, emotions and settings a million miles away. — Anonymous-9

All good things are powerful stimulants to life, even a good book written against life. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Why are fanatics so terrified of girls' education? Because there's no force more powerful to transform a society. The greatest threat to extremism isn't drones firing missiles, but girls reading books. — Nicholas Kristof

Our job, then, is two-fold: to focus on our own failings as writers. But also to speak more forcefully as advocates for literature. Books are a powerful antidote for loneliness, for the moral purposelessness of the leisure class. It's our job to convince the 95 percent of people who don't read books, who instead medicate themselves in front of screens, that literary art isn't some esoteric tradition, but a direct path to meaning, to an understanding of the terror that lives beneath our consumptive ennui. — Steve Almond

Now Dave Eggers, if you lived in San Francisco, is not an easy person to be done with. Everyone - and by everyone, I mean every white person with a college education and an interest in books - wants a piece of him. It's not just his amazingly powerful prose; it's also his charitable works. — James Bernard Frost

A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is. — Jeanette Winterson

Giles: Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower, or a a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell musty and-and-and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is a - it, uh, it has no no texture, no-no context. It's-it's there and then it's gone. If it's to last, then-then the getting of knowledge should be, uh, tangible, it should be, um, smelly. — Joss Whedon

The energy of book titles and the words inside them are very powerful. In Japan, we say that "words make our reality." The words we see and with which we come into contact tend to bring about events of the same nature. In that sense, you will become the person who matches the books you have kept. — Marie Kondo

In the end it comes down to two rival versions of the English middle afternoon. Post-Barrett, Pink Floyd kept on in a middle-afternoonish vein, but they fell in love with the idea of portentous storm clouds in the offing somewhere over Grantchester ... Barrett's afternoonishness was far more supple and engaging. It superimposed the hippie cult of eternal solstice on the pre-teatime daydreams of one's childhood, occasioned by a slick of sunlight on a chest of drawers ... His afternoonishness is lit by an importunate adult intelligence that can't quite get back to the place it longs to be ... Barrett created the same precocious longing in adolescents.
I remember 'See Emily Play' drifting across a school corridor in 1967 ... and I remember the powerful wish to stay suspended indefinitely in that music ... I also remember the quasi-adult intimation that this wasn't possible.
[from the London Review of Books for January 2, 2003] — Jeremy Harding

Books can be immensely powerful. The ideas in them can change the way people think. Yet it was the Nazis and Stalin's officers who committed terrible crimes, and not Mein Kampf or the Communist Manifesto - and of course, the Manifesto contained many key ideas that are still relevant and important today, long after Stalin has gone. There is a crucial distinction between the book and its effect - it's crucial because if you talk about a book being harmful rather than its effect you begin to legitimise censorship. Abhorrent ideas need to be challenged by better ones, not banned. — John Farndon

These stories were very old, as old as people, and they had survived because they were very powerful indeed. They were the tales that echoed in the head long after the books that contained them were cast aside. They were both an escape from reality and an alternative reality themselves. They were so old, and so strange, that they had found a kind of existence independent of the pages they occupied. The world of the old tales existed parallel to ours, but sometimes the walls separating the two became so thing and brittle that the two worlds started to blend into each other. That was when the trouble started. That was when the bad things came. That was when the Crooked Man began to appear to David. — John Connolly

He's so powerful. Who knows maybe he's advanced past eating — Priya Ardis

Let us pick up our books and our pens," I said. "They are our most powerful weapons. One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world. — Malala Yousafzai

Mom taught me not to look away from the worst but to believe that we can all do better. She never wavered in her conviction that books are the most powerful tool in the human arsenal, that reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose - electronic (even though that wasn't for her) or printed, or audio - is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in human conversation. Mom taught me that you can make a difference in the world and that books really do matter: they're how we know what we need to do in life, and how we tell others. Mom also showed me, over the course of two years and dozens of books and hundreds of hours in hospitals, that books can be how we get closer to each other, and stay close, even in the case of a mother and son who were very close to begin with, and even after one of them has died. — Will Schwalbe

Then there were her childhood book: Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, What Katy did next, Pollyanna - stories about girls who were good. All Pollyanna had ever done wrong was ruin her parasol. Beth in Little Women was so perfect she was only fit for heaven. Why were girls in novels exemplary, almost saintly? Grace preferred adventure stories, histories and romances about what to do if you were damned and female, tales about women who were kind, likeable and believable, who escaped unpunished. No thin Quakers with lace caps. No beatific consumptives coughing delicately. No unloved, eternally jolly orphans. Grace craved books about girls like herself: good women, normal women in a world bigger and more powerful than themselves. — Wendy Jones

Eugenic rhetoric thus remained dependent on the body exterior as a powerful "material metaphor" for mysterious genetic processes. The desirable stock of the "fit" was imagined in terms of whiteness, beauty, and physical fitness; embodied in the winners of the AES's "Better Babies" and "Fitter Families" competitions; invoked in books like Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race (1916), which described the progenitors of good American stock as "splendid conquistadores" of Nordic heritage with "absolutely fair skin" and "great stature"; and visualized in eugenic displays.37 — Angela M. Smith

Experience alone, that supreme educator of peoples, will be at pains to show us our mistake. It alone will be powerful enough to prove the necessity of replacing our odious text-books and our pitiable examinations by industrial instruction capable of inducing our young men to return to the fields, to the workshop, and to the colonial enterprise which they avoid to-day at all costs. — Gustave Le Bon

I'd read a lot of books where the girls are in awe of the supernatural male, so I thought it was time to write about an awesome and super-powerful female who is also quite vulnerable and naive about life on earth. — Alexandra Adornetto

learned that knowledge is power. If you want to control people's lives, limit their knowledge. That is why, throughout history, despots have burned books and exiled (and even killed) those with knowledge who threatened their power. Before the Civil War in America, it was against the law in many states to teach slaves to read and write. Knowledge is the most powerful force on earth. That is why the control of knowledge is essential to the control of power. The formula is: Information x Education = Knowledge Knowledge is power - and lack of knowledge is weakness. — Robert T. Kiyosaki

What I have learned from about twenty years of serious reading is this: It is sentences that change my life, not books. What changes my life is some new glimpse of truth, some powerful challenge, some resolution to a long-standing dilemma, and these usually come concentrated in a sentence or two. I do not remember 99% of what I read, but if the 1% of each book or article I do remember is a life-changing insight, then I don't begrudge the 99%.
From Quantitative Hopelessness and the Immeasurable Moment — John Piper

Be an unstoppable force. Write with an imaginary machete strapped to your thigh. This is not wishy-washy, polite, drinking-tea-with-your-pinkie-sticking-out stuff. It's who you want to be, your most powerful self. Write your books. Finish them, then make them better. Find the way. No one will make this dream come true for you but you. — Laini Taylor

Everything is going well "Day One" book up to page 137, planning som new movies to watch in the near future, close to awesome and powerful quotes. Some new and awesome events... - And that's life, that's how it must be! — Deyth Banger

Never underestimate the power of giving a book! — Carmela Dutra

Brian Walker and David Salt have written a thoughtful and powerful book to help resource users and managers put resilience thinking into practice and aim toward increasing the sustainability of our world. I urge public officials, scholars, and students in public policy programs to place this volume on their list of must-read books. It is a powerful antidote to the overly simplified proposals too often offered as solutions to contemporary problems at multiple scales. — Elinor Ostrom

Here and there and not just in books we catch glimpses of a world of once upon a time and they lived happily ever after, of a world where there is a wizard to give courage and a heart, an angel with a white stone that has written on it our true and secret name, and it is so easy to dismiss it all that it is hardly worth bothering to do ... But if the world of the fairy tale and our glimpses of it here and there are only a dream, they are one of the most haunting and powerful dreams that the world has ever dreamed ... — Frederick Buechner

Mikolay took his wand out, touched the cage's lock and said: "Eis Izras" three times.
The door opened at once, unfortunately making lots of noise and waking the humans up.
Mikolay knew a few powerful hexes and he was able to create small flying dragons.
He hoped that he could stop the people, animals, and block the shadows to buy some time. — Magda M. Olchawska

Love, how often that word came up in books over and over again. If you had wealth and health, and beauty and talent ... you had nothing if you didn't have love. Love changed all that was ordinary into something giddy, powerful, drunken, enchanted. — V.C. Andrews

My parents to this day are unable to comprehend anything about my profession," Sophia sighed, "in fact, they stopped helping me with my homework the minute I hit the fifth grade. But they had wisdom that I could not find in books, and as powerful as I am... I can't hug myself when I am at my lowest. — Kipjo Kenyatta Ewers

The Most Powerful story is the one you tell yourself — Forgotten Books

Books are the most powerful tool in the human arsenal, that reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose - electronic (even though that wasn't for her) or printed, or audio - is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in human conversation. — Will Schwalbe

The ABC's success by Bob Proctor is one powerful book, such books are rare. Even sometimes it's hard to find a book which is based on somebody's experience... fantasy??
For god sake, one drop truth which is about from 10% up to 20% and the other from 80% up to 90% it's a lie. — Deyth Banger

Let us pick up our books and pencils. They are our most powerful weapons. — Malala Yousafzai

I thought that words and books and pens were more powerful than guns. — Malala Yousafzai

She chose books because they never left her lonely the way that Kirk had left her lonely. BEcause company was often nothing of the kind, whereas a good book always was.
She chose books for the smell of fresh-pressed pages, for the yellow-brown musk of library mould, but always for the breathy kiss of paper rustling. She chose books because some of the held prose that made her weep, or poetry that winded her, and words that mae her heart skip beats.
She chose books because some came readey-made with characters that seemed like perfect versions of hrself, all of them little proofs that somehow, somewhere, it might just be possible for her to be better: to be popular, powerful, sexy and smart.
She chose books because they lied to her with more conviction than people ever had. — Dan Micklethwaite

The terms of copyright last far too long: either the life of the author plus 70 years after death for a personal work or 95 years for a corporate work. That length doesn't encourage more authorship - it merely limits the speakers who could share powerful speeches, books, and films. — Marvin Ammori

Outside there a lot of powerful stuff, starting from mind movies up to movies like drama, real life, horror, mysteries and many other. Music which makes your day interesting, quotes which change your thought, books which provoke and many other stuff... (So now you know what's everything about, Good Luck with the other Stuff!) — Deyth Banger

I love my lecture tours. I get up onstage. I have my stack of books and a glass of water and a microphone. No podium, no distance between me and the audience, and I just talk to people and get all excited and tell a lot of jokes, and sing some songs, and read from my work and remind people how powerful they are and how beautiful they are. — Suzan-Lori Parks

The lack of magic is what leads humans to fantasize in the first place. And Alyssa, what a wonderfully powerful force an imagination can be. — A.G. Howard

I definitely have a spiritual outlook. I don't usually read self-help books, but I read a great book by a guy called Wayne Dyer, The Power of Intention, which I loved. I'm not a religious guy, in fact I'm probably agnostic but I thought what this writer had to say was really powerful. — Chris Pine

I am drawn mostly, insistently to the human voice. How powerful and necessary the solo voice, the experience of being someone, something else for a little while. This is and will remain literature's killer app, the thing most impervious to threat by everything that's not the word. — Ander Monson

Books can capture injustices in a way that stays with you and makes you want to do something about them. That's why they are so powerful. — Malala Yousafzai

I like to carry around extremely pretentious books, and I don't know if I can read them, but if I hold them near me, it imbues me with a sense of powerful intelligence. — Sam Amidon

Some books don't answer the inside, I read one comic called Ms.Marvel!
Under Marvel can be understand that this person is powerful and can handle a lot of stuff, but reality this wasn't a powerful one or one strong. This guy was a guy who just called the Avengers like Iron Man for help! — Deyth Banger

I think the reason I'm a writer is because first, I was a reader. I loved to read. I read a lot of adventure stories and mystery books, and I have wonderful memories of my mom reading picture books aloud to me. I learned that words are powerful. — Andrew Clements

A war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising range, and mount the most powerful guns. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

A narcissist with power will attempt to prove in the world only what is already in his head. He can't 'see' otherwise. For him, the 'outside world' is not beyond him and does not question or challenge him and his ideas. He is the world. Others will assent to his distorted worldview, because he is powerful, not because he is believable. If he possesses any reflection, that will be exactly what will gnaw at the narcissist with power most of all: his 'truths' are inauthentic, and he is a human being without integrity. The very narcissism and power he possesses prevent him from an ongoing relationship with the truth, which begins with self-humility and the curiosity this can create in a person. — Sergio Troncoso

Max said little. His essential quality was always to say little, but by powerful empathy for writers and for books to draw out of them what they had it in them to say and to write. — A. Scott Berg

The death of literature had been exaggerated. Whereas on dating websites, those who like books are usually bracketed into a single category, the broad selections on offer at WH Smith spoke to the diversity of individuals' motives for reading. If there was a conclusion to be drawn from the number of bloodstained covers, however, it was that there was a powerful desire, in a wide cross-section of airline passengers, to be terrified. — Alain De Botton

Books and knowledge are the two most powerful drugs. — Meghan Blistinsky

There's nothing more powerful than the written word. It can transfer you to a place that exists right now that you'll never get to visit or it can take you to a world that doesn't. It can show you things you'll never experience otherwise in life, and books ... most importantly, they can take you out of your own world, and sometimes you need that. — J. Lynn

The reason books get banned, but movies can do almost anything is because the novel is more powerful than a movie. The reader is part of the creation of the story because they must imagine and envision it. There is creation in the act of reading. — Carolyn Mackler

Libraries' most powerful asset is the conversation they provide - between books and readers, between children and parents, between individuals and the collective world. Take them away and those voices turn inwards or vanish. Turns out that libraries have nothing at all to do with silence. — Bella Bathurst

He was defiantly narrow-minded, barely educated, and at least close to functionally illiterate. His beliefs were powerful but consistently dubious, and made him seem, in the words of The New Yorker, "mildly unbalanced." He did not like bankers, doctors, liquor, tobacco, idleness of any sort, pasteurized milk, Wall Street, overweight people, war, books or reading, J. P. Morgan and Co., capital punishment, tall buildings, college graduates, Roman Catholics, or Jews. Especially he didn't like Jews. Once he hired a Hebraic scholar to translate the Talmud in a manner designed to make Jewish people appear shifty and avaricious. — Bill Bryson

I had done something wrong. I shouldn't have shown him. But he had known, hadn't he? What had I done? I retreated quickly down the aisle, pushing my way through the double doors into the porch, where I swiped one of my eyes dry. For a long moment I stood in the dim room, looking blankly at the flyers for bake sales and Bible studies on the noticeboard.
Then I heard him shout, "Damn you! Why?"
I looked through the clear glass of the porch doors to see if he spoke to some barely seen faerie. But to my eyes, there was no one there but Luke and God. — Maggie Stiefvater

They (books) were familiar voices, friends that never quarreled with her, clever, powerful friends - daring and knowledgeable, tried and tested adventurers who had traveled far and wide. — Cornelia Funke

I really believe that the movie will never be as good as the book, both because the book goes on longer - a movie is basically an abridgment of a book - and because books are internal. But they are incredibly powerful. The visual format is, you know, amazing. — Scott Turow

The real world dissolved and I was free to drift in fantasy, living a thousand lives, each one more powerful, more accessible, and more real than my own — Frank Conroy

That is faith. You cannot measure it with weights and doses like your herbs. You cannot classify it in your books, or test it with chemics. But it is there, more powerful than any bit of old world science. Only the Creator can see the path ahead. He makes of us what he wants - what the world needs - us to be. But we can have a glimpse, looking back. — Peter V. Brett

Songs are more powerful than books. — Elvis Costello

Sometimes when I'm in a bookstore or library, I am overwhelmed by all the things that I do not know. Then I am seized by a powerful desire to read all the books, one by one. — Arthur C. Clarke

The fascination exerted by one human being over another is not what he emits of his personality at the present instant of encounter but a summation of his entire being which gives off this powerful drug capturing the fancy and attachment. — Anais Nin

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time. — Bertrand Russell

I understand that through books one is able to journey. One is able to smell and taste and go into different worlds without actually leaving where you are, with your imagination.

Imagination is more powerful than anything. For me, anywhere the imagination is fed, is sustained, is strengthened, then you are preparing that human being to deal with anything they face in life. — Ishmael Beah

Even if the sum total of human knowledge is available online, a book is still a powerful thing. — M.H. Van Keuren

When you keep a strong image of what you want in your mind, and possess the conviction that it is yours by right, you send out powerful vibrations to the farthest reaches of the universe. — Stephen Richards

Yet the experience of reading a novel has certain qualities that remind us of the traditional apprehension of mythology. It can be seen as a form of meditation. Readers have to live with a novel for days or even weeks. It projects them into another world, parallel to but apart from their ordinary lives. They know perfectly well that this fictional realm is not 'real' and yet while they are reading it becomes compelling. A powerful novel becomes part of the backdrop of our lives, long after we have laid the book aside. — Karen Armstrong

[Censors] rake through the entrails of many an old good author, with a violation worse than any could be offered to his tomb. — John Milton