If only I could manage, without annoyance to my family, to get imprisoned for 10 years, "without hard labour," and with the use of books and writing materials, it would be simply delightful!
These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.
Provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she had never any objection to books at all.
I'm aware of 'Twilight,' but I've never seen the movies or read any of the books. Frankly, the story leaves me cold - why do a vampire story about abstinence?
It is true that the discerning intellect of the world is always much in advance of the creative, so that there are competent judges of the best book, and few writers of the best books.
That partially due to the world of media and commerce, the idea of a comic book has been lost in the ghetto, whereas the graphic novel is now being held up as something to aspire to and as something that's respectable for adults to read.
Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.
We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.
The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.
There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.
That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.