quotes from books

“Children's books are not a hiding place, they are a seeking place.”
- Katherine Rundell, Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise

“To fall in love with the world isn’t to ignore or overlook suffering, both human or otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry and watch the sycamore trees leaf out in June. When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat tightens and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling. I want to deflect with irony or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.”
- John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed

quotes about books/bookselling

"Bookselling is a cultural and political expression, an expression of progressive change, of challenge to oppressive authority, of a search for a community of values which can act as an underpinning of a better world. The true profit in bookselling is the social profit; the bottom line, the measure of the impact of the books on the community."
- David Schwartz

"There is such wonder in independent bookstores. Every day booksellers bravely recommend books that challenge and stir-up readers. They read and sell books that expand our imaginations, touch our aggrieved souls, and ignite our intellect. They invite readers to experience the diversity of our rich world. Read this, they say, and tell me what you think. For years and years and years they have shown me that I matter as a reader. I have known independent booksellers to sell difficult and challenging books even when they are threatened. Booksellers are courageous in their desire to share knowledge and ideas. Booksellers matter."
- Debra Magpie Earling

"We do not talk about “Le Guin-esque” works the way we might call something Dickensian, but all the same, she has had a remarkable influence on literature and pop culture. Because Le Guin wrote so many different kinds of books, her influence has been diverse."
- Christian Holub

“Ms. Rowling’s magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in it, are, as Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out of his dream, ‘only personal.’ Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family.”
- AS Byatt

“What I do object to is a pedestrian, ungrammatical prose style which has left me with a headache and a sense of a wasted opportunity. If Rowling is blessed with this magic gift of tapping into young minds, I can only wish she had made better use of it. Her characters, unlike life’s, are all black-and-white . Her story-lines are predictable, the suspense minimal, the sentimentality cloying every page. (Did Harry, like so many child-heroes before him, HAVE to be yet another poignant orphan?)'”
- Anthony Holden