Quotes & Sayings About Reference Books

I started to get nervous when people began posting, on the public newsgroups, plot suggestions for future books and speculation about how characters would develop. The Net is still new, and it is big and it is public, and has brought with it new perceptions and problems. (One minor one is that people are out driving their language on a worldwide highway without passing a test. Take the word plagiarize. I know what it means. You know what it means. Lawyers certainly know what it means. But I have seen it repeatedly used as a synonym for research, parody, and reference, as — Anonymous

There was no Internet, not even many cookbooks except the old reference books. So we would sit down at night, a group of six chefs, and we'd exchange recipes and each talk about how we were doing things. It was the only way to learn new ideas. — Daniel Boulud

Not to alarm you or anything, but I think you just made a deal with a Mexican gang. I've read Simone Elkeles books. I know how this whole garage as a front thing works. — Tammy Blackwell

Some excellent reference works already exist on both of these topics, a few of which are mentioned in the bibliography at the end of this book. Not only are there a variety of books that cover digital painting, modeling, animation, and
rendering from a generalized perspective, but there are also specific "how-to" guides for many of the more common software packages.
The third source of imagery-scanned/digitized "live-action" footage-is still probably the most common source with which we deal in digital compositing. There are a myriad of different formats that this source imagery can come from, some of them discussed in greater detail in Chapter 10 and Appendix D. — Brinkmann, Ron

In the early 21st century, it is easy to condemn the Bond books for being racist and imperialist, sexist and misogynist, elitist and sadistic. But this is merely another way of saying that we cannot understand the Bond books without reference to the personality, the outlook and the 'Tory imagination' of the man who wrote them, and to the time in which he wrote them; and that we cannot understand the 1950s and 1960s without some reference to them, and to him. — David Cannadine

A similar attitude causes some people to spurn the use of commentaries and similar resources in their Bible study, as if their own uninformed first impression is just as good as careful study using reference tools. It is becoming more and more common all the time to hear people say, 'I don't read commentaries and books about the Bible. I limit my study to the Bible itself.' That may sound very pious, but is it? Isn't it actually presumptuous? Are the written legacies of godly men of no value to us? Can someone who ignores study aids understand the Bible just as well as someone who is familiar with the scholarship of other godly teachers and pastors? — John F. MacArthur Jr.

Most young dealers of the Silicon Chip Era regard a reference library as merely a waste of space. Old Timers on the West Coast seem to retain a fondness for reference books that goes beyond the practical. Everything there is to know about a given volume may be only a click away, but there are still a few of us who'd rather have the book than the click. A bookman's love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them. — Larry McMurtry

Where once his grandparents put up crucifixes and images of the benediction on their walls, he and Reine-Marie put up books on theirs. History books. Reference books. Biographies. Fiction, nonfiction. Stories lined the walls and both insulated them from the outside world and connected them to it. — Louise Penny

...a library is not just a reference service: it is also a place for the vulnerable. From the elderly gentleman whose only remaining human interaction is with library staff, to the isolated young mother who relishes the support and friendship that grows from a Baby Rhyme Time session, to a slow moving 30-something woman collecting her CDs, libraries are a haven in a world where community services are being ground down to nothing. I've always known libraries are vital, but now I understand that their worth cannot be measured in books alone. — Angela Clarke

I learned that there are books and there are readers; given even the worst of circumstances, they get together. In the privacy of their own homes or on park benches or on public buses, in the corner of the reference room, at the end of an aisle of fiction, in the middle of the alphabet, they club up and conspire. — Elizabeth McCracken

I am forced to reexamine. Thomas Merton's words about the Bible in general apply to the Old Testament in particular: There is, in a word, nothing comfortable about the Bible - until we manage to get so used to it that we make it comfortable for ourselves ... Have we ceased to question the book and be questioned by it? Have we ceased to fight it? Then perhaps our reading is no longer serious. For most people, the understanding of the Bible is, and should be, a struggle: not merely to find meanings that can be looked up in books of reference, but to come to terms personally with the stark scandal and contradiction in the Bible itself ... Let us not be too sure we know the Bible just because we have learned not to be astonished at it, just because we have learned not to have problems with it. — Philip Yancey

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

Oh, I collect facts and quotes when I can't write, and I can't write most of the time. I do a little chance operation sometimes where I flip through outdated reference books to see if anything will strike me as beautiful or momentous. Library roulette, I call it. — Jenny Offill

Good horror is written by people who understand that fear is one of the cardinal passageways into the core of humanity. Good horror is generally written by folks who grew up on horror; books, movies, etc. You can't simply decide to write - in any genre - if you don't first have an understanding of the topic and a strong mental backlog of reference. — Alistair Cross

Honestly, Mum, how can you say someone's a great writer if you've got a stack of reference books next to you? It's just showing off. If I behaved like that in front of other people, you'd totally tell me off when we got home. So.why is it alright for T. S. Eliot to swagger about like a complete know it all and make the rest of us feel stupid? — Val McDermid

The vital accessories to my work are my reference books, such as the complete Shakespeare and a prayer book, and a large refuse bin. — Beryl Bainbridge

I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men."
"Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything. — Jane Austen

I have a memory of my fourth-grade self wanting to be the first woman president of the United States, but I think that has a lot more to do with my love of world records and reference books than a love of serving my country. — Elizabeth McCracken

I wasn't an academic looking in books for ideas. But I educated myself about historical work that was similar to mine, to provide a frame of reference that wasn't the usual frame of reference of the New York art world and Europe. — Michael Heizer

The photo had been taken at the opening of JB's fifth, long-delayed show, 'Frog and Toad,' which had been exclusively images of the two of them, but very blurred, and more abstract than JB's previous work. (They hadn't quite known what to think of the series title, though JB had claimed it was affectionate. 'Arnold Lobel?' he had screeched at them when they asked him about it. 'Hello?!' But neither he nor Willem had read Lobel's books as children, and they'd had to go out and buy them to make sense of the reference.) — Hanya Yanagihara

And another item from the growing file of people who voluntarily wear dunce caps ... You'll be talking cordially to someone and make an offhand reference, 'I recently read where
' and they'll cut you off and say, 'Oh, I don't read' ... This is a tragedy on so many different levels. First, because they don't read, they don't know enough to keep it to themselves. Next, and this is the most amazing part, they use a demeaning tone like I'm the stupid one for wasting time with books. — Tim Dorsey

I read a lot, that's my main hobby. I've got an iPad which I store books on and I read voraciously. I'm a slow reader but I'm obsessive. I make references, underline things, cross-reference. I'm an autodidact. — Anthony Hopkins

Nerd herd, focus. You're here to help the fledglings. Dour One and Dour Two aren't important," said Aphrodite.
"Dr. Seuss reference. I like it," Stark said, giving me a check-me-out-I've-always-read-books hottie grin.
Aphrodite frowned at him.
"I said focus, not flirt. — P.C. Cast

I think, for the rest of my life, I shall refrain from looking up things. It is the most ravenous time-snatcher I know. You pull one book from the shelf, which carries a hint or a reference that sends you posthaste to another book, and that to successive others. It is incredible, the number of books you hopefully open and disappointedly close, only to take down another with the same result. — Carolyn Wells

I love reference books, especially collections of memorable quotations, world almanacs, and atlases. Facts to me are like candy or popcorn, small, tasty delights, and I like to gorge on them now and then. — Walter Kirn

Lincoln once noted how the printing press spread knowledge by making works widely available that had previously been the province of a privileged few. The same is true when primary sources are collected, transcribed, and published; when exhaustive reference works are produced; when scholars leave published books and carefully organized research files; and when interest in a subject grows to the point that entire institutions - libraries, journals, and museums - are devoted to assisting its students. The main problem with studying Lincoln is not finding sources, but choosing which sources to follow. A — Joshua Wolf Shenk

There are times when I think that the ideal library is composed solely of reference books. They are like understanding friends - always ready to meet your mood, always ready to change the subject when you have had enough of this or that. — J. Donald Adams

I like to give people novels I think they would like, on no particular occasion - just when we're in a bookstore together. I like to receive reference books on my birthday. — Daniel Handler

The most terrifying burden of the creature is to be isolated, which is what happens in individuation: one separates himself out of the herd. This move exposes the person to the sense of being completely crushed and annihilated because he sticks out so much, has to carry so much in himself. These are the risks when the person begins to fashion consciously and critically his own framework of heroic self-reference. Here is precisely the definition of the artist type, or the creative type generally. We have crossed a threshold into a new type of response to man's situation. No one has written about this type of human response more penetratingly than Rank; and of all his books, Art and Artist is the most secure monument to his genius. I — Ernest Becker

We call love what binds us to certain creatures only by reference to a collective way of seeing for which books and legends are responsible. — Albert Camus

Old reference books are like tree rings. Without them, there'd be no way to know what a tree had lived through. — Jill Lepore

After all, much of the fondness avid readers, and certainly collectors, have for their books is related to the books' physical bodies. As much as they are vessels for stories (and poetry, reference information, etc.), books are historical artifacts and repositories for memories-we like to recall who gave books to us, where we were when we read them, how old we were, and so on. — Allison Hoover Bartlett

We live in a world with "free" content, and this freedom is not an imperfection. We listen to the radio without paying for the songs we hear; we hear friends humming tunes that they have not licensed. We tell jokes that reference movie plots without the permission of the directors. We read our children books, borrowed from a library, without paying the original copyright holder for the performance rights. — Lawrence Lessig

As much as it was like anything, magic was like a language. And like a language, textbooks and teachers treated it as an orderly system for the purposes of teaching it, but in reality it was complex and chaotic and organic. It obeyed rules only to the extent that it felt like it, and there were almost as many special cases and one-time variations as there were rules. These Exceptions were indicated by rows of asterisks and daggers and other more obscure typographical fauna which invited the reader to peruse the many footnotes that cluttered up the margins of magical reference books like Talmudic commentary. — Lev Grossman

A book is judged, not by its reference to life, but by its reference to other books. — Stephen Fry

Lewis Carroll. He was an odd one. Real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Completely denied having anything to do with the Alice books. Daft as a brush. You'd have liked him! — Mike Tucker

All the knowledge that has led our species from wearing animal skins to people flying, complete with proofs, would fill a handful of reference books, but a bookcase the size of the earth would not suffice to hold all the rest, quite apart from the vast discussions that are conducted not with the pen but with the sword and chains. — Robert Musil

There is a class whose value I should designate as Favorites: such as Froissart's Chronicles; Southey's Chronicle of the Cid ; Cervantes ; Sully's Memoirs ; Rabelais ; Montaigne ; Izaak Walton; Evelyn; Sir Thomas Browne; Aubrey ; Sterne ; Horace Walpole ; Lord Clarendon ; Doctor Johnson ; Burke, shedding floods of light on his times ; Lamb; Landor ; and De Quincey ;- a list, of course, that may easily be swelled, as dependent on individual caprice. Many men are as tender and irritable as lovers in reference to these predilections. Indeed, a man's library is a sort of harem, and I observe that tender readers have a great pudency in showing their books to a stranger. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Writing in Library Journal, Ben Vershbow of the Institute for the Future of Book envisioned a digital ecology in which "parts of books will reference parts of other books. Books will be woven toghether out of components in remote databases and servers." Kevin Kelly wrote in The New York times Magagzine: "In the the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages. — Jeff Jarvis

A lot of my time is spent reading antique or out-of-print books of reference. — John Hodgman

And that brings us to tonight's word: Truthiness. Now I'm sure some of the word-police, the 'wordanistas' over at Websters, are gonna say, 'Hey, that's not a word!' Well, anybody who knows me knows that I am no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They're elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn't true, what did or didn't happen. — Stephen Colbert

Chicago is the proverbial middle child of large U.S. cities. Some might consider this analogy only in reference to Chicago's geographic location in the middle of the country. However, the analogy is multifaceted; like most middle children and like books between elaborate bookends, Chicago can sometimes be easy to overlook. It is smart and genuine, but it is always compared, for better or for worse, to its older and younger siblings, New York and Los Angeles. It's the less notorious but smarter sister to New York; it's the less ostentatious but considerably more genuine sister to Los Angeles. — Penny Reid

There is not one text reference to characteristic Protestant religious life in these books ... The dominant theme is the denial of religion as an actual part of American life. — Paul Vitz

It is worth noting that a wrong folkoric definition of an Inertial Frame in the Popular Science literature (even in text books) reads that 'it is a frame in uniform motion'. We know very well by now that the idea of motion requires a frame of reference, so that such a definition of an Inertial Frame has no meaning whatsoever, confusing the reader because it tacitly reaffirms the idea of absolute motion
when the goal of every didactic exposition of Relativity Theory should be precisely the opposite. — Felix Alba-Juez

It's like so great to be in Toronto and to see everything that's in the books and everything they reference and to be able to hang out in those places and go to those bookstores and those comic book stores and those music stores, and like have that, from the books onto the screen, is so cool and I'm glad to have been part of that. — Mary Elizabeth Winstead

The question is which one of us is the frog and which is the toad,' Willem had said after they'd first seen the show, in JB's studio, and read the kindhearted books to each other late that night, laughing helplessly as they did.
He'd smiled; they had been lying in bed. 'Obviously, I'm the toad,' he said.
'No,' Willem said, 'I think you're the frog; your eyes are the same color as his skin.'
Willem sounded so serious that he grinned. 'That's your evidence?' he asked. 'And so what do you have in common with the toad?'
'I think I actually have a jacket like the one he has,' Willem said, and they began laughing again. — Hanya Yanagihara

He says he knows someone isn't from the same race as he when that person looks at his library and asks, 'Have you read all of these?' A true book lover knows that, no, he hasn't read them all. It's about the process, it's about when the right reference comes up, you have the right book to go to; it's about never being without something to occupy your eyes and mind. — Jamie S. Rich

During the first five years that I was writing the series, I made plans and wrote small pieces of all the books. I concentrate on one book at a time, though occasionally I will get an idea for a future book and scribble it down for future reference. — J.K. Rowling