Paul Collins · 224 pages
Rating: (2.3K votes)
“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
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“- O Kane está preocupado com ela - disse Rowena - mas o homem está preocupado por ela.
- Há fogo entre eles - Pitte virou a cabeça e roçou os lábios no cabelo de Rowena - Ele devia levá-la para a cama e deixar esse fogo selar velhas feridas.
- Tão típico de um macho, pensar que a cama é sempre a resposta. (...) O fogo nao basta - Ela abriu os braços e dezenas de velas acenderam-se - É o calor, meu amor, meu único amor, que cura um coração ferido.”
― Nora Roberts, quote from Key of Knowledge
“[Speaker Reed's] wit was brilliant and usually cruel... Asked to attend the funeral of a political enemy, he refused, "but that does not mean to say I do not heartily approve of it.”
― Edmund Morris, quote from The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
“I would like to be able to say that she broke my heart but I know better. I broke my own heart. I can't say that she did it and get behind that statement in any real way. I know too much. The only one I can blame for my loneliness is myself. Even if I did think that she did it to me I wouldn't feel any better. Tonight I was watching a movie and this actor in the film looked like her when she had a profile shot. She did not break my heart I did. I don't know why I would do something this painful to myself. I wish I would stop it's been months now and I'm still hurting myself nightly. I can avoid it for awhile and then it comes back.”
― Henry Rollins, quote from Eye Scream
“But that’s what happened, Freeman, who had often been in love, told himself. Until you were lovers you were strangers.”
― Bernard Malamud, quote from The Magic Barrel
“DNA was the chemical material on which hereditary information was recorded, while a gene was one unit of that nearly infinite amount of hereditary information.”
― Kōji Suzuki, quote from Spiral
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