The Child That Books Built Quotes

“I can always tell when you're reading somewhere in the house,' my mother used to say. 'There's a special silence, a reading silence.”
― Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading

“When I'm tired and therefore indecisive, it can take half an hour to choose the book I am going to have with me while I brush my teeth.”
― Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading

“What follows is more about books than it is about me, but nonetheless it is my inward autobiography, for the words we take into ourselves help to shape us.”
― Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading

“Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be.”
― Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading

“If your memory was OK you could descend upon on a bookshop – a big enough one so that the staff wouldn’t hassle a browser – and steal the contents of books by reading them. I drank down 1984 while loitering in the 'O' section of the giant Heffers store in Cambridge. When I was full I carried the slopping vessel of my attention carefully out of the shop.”
― Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading

“You never came out the way you came in.”
― Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading

“I need fiction, I am an addict. This is not a figure of speech. I don’t quite read a novel a day, but I certainly read some of a novel every day, and usually some of several. There is always a heap of opened paperbacks face down near the bed, always something current on the kitchen table to reach for over coffee when I wake up. Colonies of prose have formed in the bathroom and in the dimness of the upstairs landing, so that I don’t go without text even in the leftover spaces of the house where I spend least time….I can be happy with an essay or a history if it interlaces like a narrative, if its author uses fact or impression to make a story-like sense, but fiction is kind, fiction is the true stuff….I don’t give it up. It is entwined too deeply within my history, it has been forming the way I see for too long.”
― Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading

“Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind tham lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be.”
― Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading

“The part of thinking that’s easy to handle is the part that works by analogy with speech. Thinking in words, speaking our thoughts internally, projects an auditorium inside our skulls. Dark or bright, a shadow theater or a stage scorched by klieg lights, here we try out voices, including the voice we have settled on as the familiar sound of our identity, although it may not be what other people hear when we speak aloud. But that is the topmost of the linguistic processes going on in the mind. Beneath the auditorium runs a continuous river of thought that not only is soundless but is not ordered so it can be spoken. For obvious reasons, describing it is difficult. If I dip experimentally into the wordless flow, and then try to recall the sensations of it, I have the impression of a state in which grammar is present – for when I think like this I am certainly construing lucid relationships between different kinds of meaning, and making sense of the world by distinguishing between (for a start) objects and actions – but thought there are so to speak nounlike and verblike concentrations in the flow, I do not solidify them, I do not break them off into word-sized units. Are there pictures? Yes, but I am not watching a slide show, the images do not come in units either. Sometimes there’s a visual turbulence – rapid, tumbling, propelled – that doesn’t resolve into anything like the outlines of separate images. Sometimes one image, like a key, will hold steady while a whole train of wordless thoughts flows from its start to its finish. A mountain. A closed box. A rusty hinge.”
― Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading

“it is good to know that real woods, even in England, hold very small areas that may not have changed since the wildwood. In leg-breaking gullies, on precipitous slopes, there are reservoirs of ancient vegetation perhaps a few feet square that have never been cleared. From here, lime seedlings or snake's-head fritillaries replenish the wood around. These too are doors.”
― Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading

“Beyond the breakwater you can no longer touch bottom, but you are not afraid, for in this sea the harder you swim the stronger you grow, and the farther out you go the better it gets. More and more completely you feel the liquid embrace of the water, and yet appetite is not quenched here by being satisfied; from happiness to happiness, from joy to joy, it grows and goes on growing. You never knew it was possible to feel like this. You never felt more like yourself, so richly aware of your senses and yet so unclouded by the confusions of them, so unclogged, so awake. You are washed clean. No secrets are hidden any more, all desires are known.”
― Francis Spufford, The Child that Books Built: A Life in Reading