Paul Collins · 224 pages
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“If a book cover has raised lettering, metallic lettering, or raised metallic lettering, then it is telling the reader: Hello. I am an easy-to-read work on espionage, romance, a celebrity, and/or murder. To readers who do not care for such things, this lettering tells them: Hello. I am crap.”
― Paul Collins, quote from Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books
“Many people are partial to the notion that . . . all writers are somehow mere vessels for Truth and Beauty when they compose. That we are not really in control. This is a variation on that twee little fable that writers like to pass off on gullible readers, that a character can develop a will of his own and 'take over a book.' This makes writing sound supernatural and mysterious, like possession by faeries. The reality tends to involve a spare room, a pirated copy of MS Word, and a table bought on sale at Target. A character can no more take over your novel than an eggplant and a jar of cumin can take over your kitchen.”
― Paul Collins, quote from Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books
“If you grew up in a rural area, you have seen how farmhouses come and go, but the dent left by cellars is permanent. There is something unbreakable in that hand-dug foundational gouge into the earth. Books are the cellars of civilization: when cultures crumble away, their books remain out of sheer stupid solidity.”
― Paul Collins, quote from Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books
“Historically, dust jackets are a new concern for authors; you don't see them much before the 1920s. And dust jacket is a strange name for this contrivance, as if books had anything to fear from dust. If you store a book properly, standing up, then the jacket doesn't cover the one part of the book that is actually exposed to dust, which is the top of the pages. So a dust jacket is no such thing at all; it is really a sort of advertising wrapper, like the brown paper sheath on a Hershey's bar. On this wrapper goes the manufacturer's name, the ingredients--some blithering about unforgettable characters or gemlike prose or gripping narrative--and a brief summation of who does what to whom in our gripping, unforgettable, gemlike object.”
― Paul Collins, quote from Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books
“Leatherbound books are an expensive form of wallpaper, and yet every English nobleman’s home seems to have had them. Their endless sets of the works of Cooper and Scott and Goethe, in finely tanned bindings with marbled endpapers, all end up with this sort of dealer sooner or later. I look through a set of Cooper and, without surprise, find uncut pages: these books were never actually read.”
― Paul Collins, quote from Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books
“…I had a good title already. My book was originally called Loser: A Brief History of Notable Failures. But American publishers don’t like this. Losing is a bad thing in our country. It’s not allowed.”
― Paul Collins, quote from Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books
“You see, literary culture is perpetually dead and dying; and when some respected writer discovers and loudly proclaims the finality of this fact, it is a forensic marker of their own decomposition. It means that they have artistically expired within the last ten years, and that they will corporeally expire within the next twenty.”
― Paul Collins, quote from Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books
“What you mean to find matters less than what you do find.”
― Paul Collins, quote from Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books
“I noticed you made a bee-line for their bookcases." It is the oldest and most incorrigible trait of the book-lover.”
― Paul Collins, quote from Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books
“It really is an APPALLING thing to think of the people who have no books...It is only by books that most men and women can lift themselves above the sordidness of life. No books! Yet for the greater part of humanity that is the common lot. We may, in fact, divide our fellow-creatures into two branches - those who read books and those who do not.”
― Paul Collins, quote from Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books
Paul Collins
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“Indeed, confident assurances and promises of fortune, when whispered into the right ears, often serve as substitutes for thinking at all.”
― Trenton Lee Stewart, quote from The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma
“இனியபுனல் அருவிதவழ் இன்பமலைச் சாரலிலே
கனிகுலவும் மரநிழலில்
கரம்பிடித்து உகந்ததெல்லாம் கனவுதானோடி - சகியே நினைவு தானோடி..!
புன்னைமரச் சோலையிலே பொன்னொளிரும் மாலையிலே என்னைவரச்சொல்லி அவர்
கன்னல்மொழி பகர்ந்ததெல்லாம் சொப்பனந்தானோடி - அந்த அற்புதம் பொய்யோடி..!
கட்டுகாவல் தான்கடந்து கள்ளரைப்போல் மட்டில்லாத
காதலுடன் கட்டி முத்தம்
ஈந்ததெல்லாம் நிகழ்ந்ததுண்டோடி நாங்கள் மகிழ்ந்ததுண்டோடி..!”
― Kalki, quote from பொன்னியின் செல்வன் [Ponniyin Selvan]
“And then I thought: Bring it on. There’s no place like anywhere but here.”
― Danielle Paige, quote from Dorothy Must Die
“A century from now,” he murmured as he lifted a page and examined it against the light, closing one eye, “almost all the contents of today’s libraries will have disappeared. But these books, printed two hundred or even five hundred years ago, will remain intact. We have the books, and the world, that we deserve. . . . Isn’t that so, Pablo?” “Lousy books printed on lousy paper.”
― Arturo Pérez-Reverte, quote from The Club Dumas
“The simultaneous scream sounded from teh twins. Borth clasped their hands over their mouths, their eyes wide with horror. Azalea followed their gaze.
There, in patches of light, scratched-up Fairweller held a weeping clover in his arms, cradling her head against his shoulder. He murmured into her ear.
Delphinium screamed.
"Oh, Clover, how could you?" said Eve.
"Is he a good kisser?" said Hollyhock.
The King had no words as he strode to them. In an instant he had torn Fairweller away from Clover, wound up, and boxed Fairweller straight in the face.
Fairweller stumbled backward and fell to the floor, glass crunching beneath him.
"You may fill out your resignation paperwork tomorrow," said the King. "ExPrime Minister Fairweller!”
― Heather Dixon, quote from Entwined
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