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
Paul Collins
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“And now,” Hunt continued evenly, “you’ve thrown her over to St. Vincent’s sympathetic care. God knows he’ll probably rob her of her virtue before they even reach the manor.”
Marcus glanced at him sharply, his smoldering ire undercut by sudden worry. “He wouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“She’s not his preferred style.”
Hunt laughed gently. “Does St. Vincent have a preferred style? I’ve never noticed any similarities between the objects of his pursuit, other than the fact that they are all women. Dark, fair, plump, slender…he’s remarkably unprejudiced in his affairs.”
“Damn it all to hell,” Marcus said beneath his breath, experiencing, for the first time in his life, the gnawing sting of jealousy.”
― Lisa Kleypas, quote from It Happened One Autumn
“What had happened was that the formal pattern of black-and-white, mistress-and-servant, had been broken by the personal relation; and when a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.”
― Doris Lessing, quote from The Grass is Singing
“It was amazing and frightening what humans were capable of.”
― Lori Brighton, quote from The Mind Readers
“Watching them together slipped a knife between my ribs and hit my heart exactly.”
― Colum McCann, quote from Dancer
“You listen to me, Beaumont Tyler Grady. You are a wise-cracking, stubborn, annoying pain in the ass who lives to cause trouble. You’re also a brave, courageous, and valiant Marine who puts his life on the line for what he believes and for those he loves. There is no way you have ever been or ever will be a coward. It simply isn’t in you.”
― Abigail Roux, quote from Sticks & Stones
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