Books Quotes

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

~ Harold Bloom

Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.

~ Margery Williams Bianco

Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.

~ John Green

The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

~ Malcolm X

His hands were weak and shaking from carrying far too many books from the bookshop. It was the best feeling.

~ Joseph Gordon-Levitt

There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Don't mark up the Library's copy, you fool! Librarians are Unprankable. They'll track you down! They have skills!

~ Charles Ogden

After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this:A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.

~ Robin Sloan

If you surround yourself with the good and righteous, they can only raise you up. If you surround yourself with the others, they will drag you down into the doldrums of mediocrity, and they will keep you there, but only as long as you permit it.

~ Mark Glamack

Books may look like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head.

~ Jasper Fforde

Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow.

~ Orhan Pamuk

Life is too short to read books that I'm not enjoying.

~ Melissa Marr

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

~ Benjamin Franklin

I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.

~ Muriel Barbery

Sometimes I reread my favorite books from back to front. I start with the last chapter and read backward until I get to the beginning. When you read this way, characters go from hope to despair, from self-knowledge to doubt. In love stories, couples start out as lovers and end as strangers. Coming-of-age books become stories of losing your way. Your favorite characters come back to life.

~ Nicola Yoon

I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

It's a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids.

~ Tracy Chevalier

Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time.

~ Jasper Fforde

That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything.

~ Noam Chomsky

Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.

~ Robertson Davies

When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be prod

~ Salman Rushdie

I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.

~ Wisława Szymborska

What better place to kill time than a library?

~ Diane Setterfield

Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.

~ Alberto Manguel

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.

~ Marcel Proust

People don't read any more. It's a sad state of affairs. Reading's the only thing that allows you to use your imagination. When you watch films it's someone else's vision, isn'

~ Lemmy Kilmister

As long as you have any floor space at all, you have room for books! Just make two stacks of books the same height, place them three or four feet apart, lay a board across them, and repeat. Viola! Bookshelves!

~ Jan Karon

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency -- the belief that the here and now is all there is.

~ Allan Bloom

We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And someday we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddamn steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in it and cover it up.

~ Ray Bradbury

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

~ Jeanette Winterson

It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.

~ Agatha Christie

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

~ Ray Bradbury

You want to remember that while you're judging the book, the book is also judging you.

~ Stephen King

The problem with books is that they end.

~ Caroline Kepnes

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Come with me,' Mom says.To the library. Books and summertimego together.

~ Lisa Schroeder

Give yourself unto reading. The man who never reads will never be read; he who never quotes will never be quoted. He who will not use the thoughts of other men’s brains, proves that he has no brains of his own. You need to read.. . . We are quite persuaded that the very best way for you to be spending your leisure time, is to be either reading or praying. You may get much instruction from books which afterwards you may use as a true weapon in your Lord and Master’s service. Paul cries, “Bring the books” — join in the cry.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory... In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man's freedom.

~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries. These libraries should be open to all—except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our li

~ John F. Kennedy