world. (CJ)
...books that were all about the world tended to be written by people who knew all about books rather than all about the
world. (CJ)
0 Comments
Through a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke Nanny reflected that Agnes read books. All the witches who’d lived in her cottage were bookish types. They thought you could see life through books but you couldn’t, the reason being that the words got in the way. (CJ)
It is a simple universal law. People always expect to use a holiday in the sun as an opportunity to read those books they’ve always meant to read, but an alchemical combination of sun, quartz crystals and coconut oil will somehow metamorphose any improving book into a rather thicker one with a name containing at least one Greek word or letter (The Gamma Imperative, The Delta Season, The Alpha Project and, in the more extreme cases, even The Mu Kau Pi Caper). (LC)
'I thought you didn’t like books,’ said Agnes.
‘I don’t,’ said Granny, turning a page. ‘They can look you right in the face and still lie.' (Ma) The Library didn’t only contain magical books, the ones which are chained to their shelves and are very dangerous. It
also contained perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren’t also dangerous, just because reading them didn’t make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangerous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader’s brain. (SM) Susan hated Literature. She’d much prefer to read a good book. (SM)
Some people like to settle down with a good book. No-one in possession of a complete set of marbles would like to settle down with a book of magic, because even the individual words have a private and vindictive life of their own and reading them, in short, is a kind of mental Indian wrestling. Many a young wizard has tried to read a grimoire that is too strong for him, and people who’ve heard the screams have found only his pointy shoes with the classic wisp of smoke coming out of them and book which is, perhaps, just a little fatter. (M)
For the first time in her life Granny wondered whether there might be something important in all these books people
were setting such store by these days, although she was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy. (ER) 'Bonfire of books?'
‘Yes. Horrible, isn’t it?’ ‘Right,’ said Cohen. He thought it was appalling. Someone who spent his life living rough under the sky knew the value of a good thick book, which ought to outlast at least a season of cooking fires if you were careful how you tore the pages out. Many a life had been saved on a snowy night by a handful of sodden kindling and a really dry book. If you felt like a smoke and couldn’t find a pipe, a book was your man every time. Cohen realised people wrote things in books. It has always seemed to him to be a frivolous waste of paper. (LF) It looked the sort of book described in library catalogues as ‘slightly foxed’, although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well. (LF)
|
Author
The world has lost Sir Terry, and it's so much the poorer for that. Vale Sir Terry. Categories
All
Archives
March 2023
|