Books Quotes

What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!

~ Thomas Babington Macaulay

If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can’t be in books. The book needs you.

~ Gary Paulsen

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.

~ Abraham Lincoln

If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you.

~ Terry Pratchett

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.

~ Roberto Bolaño

Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.

~ Stephen Fry

He was the crazy one who had painted himself black and defeated the world.She was the book thief without the words.Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like rain.

~ Markus Zusak

Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.

~ Nicholson Baker

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

~ Joseph Joubert

Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.

~ Stéphane Mallarmé

Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you'll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.

~ Stephen King

My alma mater was books, a good library.... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.

~ Malcolm X

We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.

~ Jules Verne

There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.

~ Ray Bradbury

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.

~ Hilary Mantel

I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.

~ Gary Paulsen

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

~ C.s. Lewis

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

~ Anne Lamott

It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book.

~ Maureen Corrigan

Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.

~ Russell Banks

The books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill!

~ Wilkie Collins

Books to the ceiling,Books to the sky,My pile of books is a mile high.How I love them! How I need them!I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.

~ Arnold Lobel

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

~ Carl Sagan

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

~ Angela Carter

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.

~ Diane Setterfield

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

~ John Berger

There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.

~ Diane Setterfield

Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose.

~ Neil Gaiman

Books were safer than other people anyway.

~ Neil Gaiman

If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.

~ Daphne Du Maurier

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.

~ John Milton

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

~ David Mitchell

If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.

~ J.k. Rowling

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

~ John Green

Why can't people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?

~ David Baldacci

So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!

~ Jonathan Safran Foer