Bibliophile Quotes

Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.

~ Voltaire

If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.

~ Anne Fadiman

She closed the book and put her cheek against it. There was still an odor of a library on it, of dust, leather, binding glue, and old paper, one book carrying the smell of hundreds.

~ Shannon Hale

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

~ Gustave Flaubert

We lusty bibliophiles know that reading, unlike just about anything else, is both good for you and loads of fun.

~ Kevin Smokler

In reading, friendship is restored immediately to its original purity. With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: “What did they think of us?”—“Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?”—“Did they like us?”—nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else. All such agitating thoughts expire as we enter the pure and calm friendship of reading.

~ Marcel Proust

I spent much of my prison time reading. I must have read over 200 large books, mostly fictional stories about the American pioneers, the Vikings, Mafia, etc. As long as I was engrossed in a book, I was not in prison. Reading was my escape.

~ Frazier Glenn Miller

Never before had I felt trapped, so seduced and caught up in a story,' Clara explained, 'the way I did with that book. Until then, reading was just a duty, a sort of fine one had to pay teachers and tutors without quite knowing why. I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel. This is a world of shadows, Daniel, and magic is a rare asset. That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn't matter to anyone, changed my life.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

It is often much harder to get rid of books than it is to acquire them. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witnesses to a moment in our lives we will never see again. While they are still there, it is a part of us. I have noticed that many people make a note of the day, month, and year that they read a book; they build up a secret calendar. Others, before lending one, write their name on the flyleaf, note whom they lent it to in an address book, and add the date. I have known some book owners who stamp them or slip a card between their pages the way they do in public libraries. Nobody wants to mislay a book. We prefer to lose a ring, a watch, our umbrella, rather than a book whose pages we will never read again, but which retains, just in the sound of its title, a remote and perhaps long-lost emotion.

~ Carlos María Domínguez

... Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

For all her faults, it was actually my mom who instilled in me a love of reading, and books, for which I will always be grateful. She’s a complete bibliophile, so I’ve pretty much grown up around libraries and books.

~ Paula Gruben

For me, every book is an individual with its own identity and has to be nurtured and taken care of, so that it may survive for a longer period.

~ Anurag Shourie

A library should fill our leisure with adventure. It is a refuge from the commonplace and the dull, a sanctuary where all the trials, the tribulations, and the boredoms of the outer world are forbidden and where such an evil thing as a tax-collector may be forgotten and, peradventure, forgiven.

~ E. Norman Torry

What's a horizon?' Lazlo asked, straight-faced. 'Is it like the end of an aisle of books?

~ Laini Taylor

And because when all the words of promises and memories fade, these words that are written are the only one that remain. People may change and things may happen when we least expect it to but all these written words are what will keep it all alive. Over and over again. It remains.

~ Diana Rose Morcilla

I grabbed my book and opened it up. I wanted to smell it. Heck, I wanted to kiss it. Yes, kiss it. That's right, I am a book kisser. Maybe that's kind of perverted or maybe it's just romantic and highly intelligent.

~ Sherman Alexie

As I look around the quiet room, I see a thousand leather covers like doorways into worlds unknown.

~ Laura Whitcomb

A sea of dreams trapped in a span of pressed pages

~ Laura Whitcomb

I do not believe in God. I have no religion. But this to me is as close to a church as I have known in this life. It is a holy place. With bookstores like this, I feel confident in saying that there will be a book business for a very long time.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

Life is paradoxical, but I believe that I could also be the same person I am today, if life would have cut me with happiness instead of pain.

~ Haidji

Mom, I feel good. This dress makes me feel like someone I didn't know I could be. I've never owned anything like it. But if when you see this - when you see me- you think it's a pity, that it's a shame I didn't lose a few, then screw you, Mom. Try harder.

~ Julie Murphy

There was nothing as romantic as the feel of a book in your hands.

~ Brittainy C. Cherry

I took my time, running my fingers along the spines of books, stopping to pull a title from the shelf and inspect it. A sense of well-being flowed through me as I circled the ground floor. It was better than meditation or a new pair of shoes- or even chocolate. My life was a disaster, but there were still books. Lots and lots of books. A refuge. A solace. Each one offering the possibility of a new beginning.

~ Beth Pattillo

There was a table laid with jellies and trifles, with a party hat beside each place, and a birthday cake with seven candles on it in the center of the table. The cake had a book drawn on it, in icing. My mother, who had organized the party, told me that the lady at the bakery said that they had never put a book on a birthday cake before, and that mostly for boys it was footballs or spaceships. I was their first book.

~ Neil Gaiman

I don't like playing playstation. It seems like a waste of time to me. Reading, instead, leaves something inside you.

~ Mattia Caldara

Fairy tales are the skeletons of story, perhaps. Reading them often provides an uneasy sensation—a gnawing familiarity—that comforting yet supernatural awareness of living inside a story.

~ Kate Bernheimer

He pinched the remaining chapters’ pages delicately between his fingers and sighed. He always hated reaching the end of a good book.

~ David S.e. Zapanta

As any avid reader knew, a good read deserved a good seat.

~ David S.e. Zapanta

To think that she had read the same elegiac prose he now beheld with such quiet awe made his heart sing.

~ David S.e. Zapanta

Everybody loves to hate a sinner, reading stories about them makes people feel better about themselves.

~ Tycobbsteeth

Shara was already an avid reader by then, but she had never realized until that moment what books meant, the possibility they presented: you could protect them forever, store them up like engineers store water, endless resources of time and knowledge snared in ink, tied down to paper, layered on shelves.... Moments made physical, untouchable, perfect, like preserving a dead hornet in crystal, one drop of venom forever hanging from its stinger.She felt overwhelmed. It was--she briefly thinks of herself and Vo, reading together in the library--a lot like being in love for the first time.

~ Robert Jackson Bennett