Books Quotes

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

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which are frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you...And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too.

~ Italo Calvino

I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.

~ Roger Zelazny

My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children's rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent's rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says 'PRIVATE--GROWNUPS KEEP OUT': a child sprawled on the bed, reading.

~ Anne Fadiman

[I] read books because I love them, not because I think I should read them.

~ Simon Van Booy

Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.

~ Günter Grass

When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so anti-life, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt. At one point, the old professor says, ‘It’s all in Plato’ — meaning that the physical world we see around us is the crude, shabby, imperfect, second-rate copy of something much better. I want to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritual or the afte

~ Philip Pullman

One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.

~ George W. Bush

I hadn’t been in proper school in three years. My parents were my two best friends. My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed.

~ John Green

She said it out loud, the words distributed into a room that was full of cold air and books. Books everywhere! Each wall was armed with overcrowded yet immaculate shelving. It was barely possible to see paintwork. There were all different styles and sizes of lettering on the spines of the black, the red, the gray, the every-colored books. It was one of the most beautiful things Liesel Meminger had ever seen.With wonder, she smiled.That such a room existed!

~ Markus Zusak

I picked up one of the books and flipped through it. Don't get me wrong, I like reading. But some books should come with warning labels: Caution: contains characters and plots guaranteed to induce sleepiness. Do not attempt to operate heavy machinery after ingesting more than one chapter. Has been known to cause blindness, seizures and a terminal loathing of literature. Should only be taken under the supervision of a highly trained English teacher. Preferably one who grades on the curve.

~ Laurie Halse Anderson

I love walking into a bookstore. It's like all my friends are sitting on shelves, waving their pages at me.

~ Tahereh Mafi

Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book...

~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

No two persons ever read the same book.

~ Edmund Wilson

Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

~ Marcel Proust

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

~ Umberto Eco

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.

~ Alberto Manguel

I understood books. I did not understand boys—especially alien boys.

~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime you have to draw the line somewhere.

~ Diane Setterfield

She was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells.

~ Dean Koontz

When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.

~ Haruki Murakami

In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.

~ Bill Watterson

. . . I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.

~ Neil Gaiman

Personally, I believe “Young Adult” to be an arbitrary title that means the book Can be enjoyed by anyone/Has a main character who’s not quite an adult/Isn’t really boring.

~ Shannon Hale

A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Even a book can be dangerous in the wrong hands, and when that happens, you blame the hands, but you also read the book.

~ Erika Johansen

There are few sights sadder than a ruined book.

~ Lemony Snicket

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.

~ Anatole France

Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

~ P.j. O'rourke

We're all strangers connected by what we reveal, what we share, what we take away--our stories. I guess that's what I love about books--they are thin strands of humanity that tether us to one another for a small bit of time, that make us feel less alone or even more comfortable with our aloneness, if need be.

~ Libba Bray

I was burning through books every day - stories about people and places I'd never heard of. They were perhaps the only thing that kept me from teetering into utter despair.

~ Sarah J. Maas

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.

~ E.m. Forster

The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

I was with book, as a woman is with child.

~ C.s. Lewis

No furniture is so charming as books.

~ Sydney Smith

The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn't know how to read.

~ Benjamin Franklin

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarna

~ Jorge Luis Borges

We owe it to each other to tell stories.

~ Neil Gaiman

Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.

~ Jorge Luis Borges