book

"Oh for a book and a shady nook."

"I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us.  If the book does not shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place?"

"Do you think that civilization advances because of things written in books? Not a bit of what is written in books ever got there until after the thought of it happened in someone's mind. Someone first had to collect it from space, or recollect it from its electrical pattern to which he (or she) had been attuned. The book is but a record of what has already happened."

When you sell a man a book, you don't sell him 12 ounces of  
paper and glue, you sell him a whole new life.  

A book is a human fact; a great book like Seraphita gathers together numerous psychological elements. These elements become coherent through a sort of psychological beauty. It does the reader a service.

A book is always an emergence above everyday life. A book is expressed life and thus is an addition to life.

Written language must be considered as a particular psychic reality. The book is permanent; it is an object in your field of vision. It speaks to you with a monotonous authority which even its author would not have. You are fairly obliged to read what is written.

The best proof of the specificity of the book is that it is at once a reality of the virtual and a virtuality of the real.

Whoever lives for poetry must read everything. How often has the light of a new idea sprung for me from a simple brochure! When one allows himself to be animated by new images, he discovers iridescence in the images of old books. Poetic ages unite in a living memory. The new age awakens the old. The old age comes to live again in the new. Poetry is never as unified as when it diversifies.

No book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.