Books Quotes

Experience is the best teacher.

~ Penelope Douglas

Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today.

~ Holbrook Jackson

We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

~ Franz Kafka

A word to the unwise.Torch every book.Char every page.Burn every word to ash.Ideas are incombustible.And therein lies your real fear.

~ Ellen Hopkins

If a book is well written, I always find it too short.

~ Jane Austen

A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.

~ Andrew Carnegie

A stereotype becomes a stereotype when a significant percentage of the population appears to conform to it.

~ Kelley Armstrong

I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

There weren't any curtains in the windows, and the books that didn't fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a bunch of intellectual refugees.

~ Haruki Murakami

I wanted to live among books.

~ Alberto Manguel

His habit of reading isolated him: it became such a need that after being in company for some time he grew tired and restless; he was vain of the wider knowledge he had acquired from the perusal of so many books, his mind was alert, and he had not the skill to hide his contempt for his companions' stupidity. They complained that he was conceited; and, since he excelled only in matters which to them were unimportant, they asked satirically what he had to be conceited about. He was developing a sense of humour, and found that he had a knack of saying bitter things, which caught people on the raw; he said them because they amused him, hardly realising how much they hurt, and was much offended when he found that his victims regarded him with active dislike. The humiliations he suffered when he first went to school had caused in him a shrinking from his fellows which he could never entirely overcome; he remained shy and silent. But though he did everything to alienate the sympathy of other boys he longed with all his heart for the popularity which to some was so easily accorded. These from his distance he admired extravagantly; and though he was inclined to be more sarcastic with them than with others, though he made little jokes at their expense, he would have given anything to change places with them.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

Reading changes your life. Reading unlocks worlds unknown or forgotten, taking travelers around the world and through time. Reading helps you escape the confines of school and pursue your own education. Through characters – the saints and the sinners, real or imagined – reading shows you how to be a better human being.

~ Donalyn Miller

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.

~ G.k. Chesterton

I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

I only read biographies, metaphysics and psychology. I can dream up my own fiction.

~ Mae West

I'm pretty sure my addiction to reading has just reached a whole new level.

~ Colleen Hoover

I have a realistic grasp of my own strengths and weaknesses. My mind is my weapon. My brother has his sword, King Robert has his warhammer, and I have my mind… and a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge. That’s why I read so much, Jon Snow.

~ George R.r. Martin

Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.

~ Alan Bennett

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It's a strange grief… to die of nostalgia for something you you will never live.

~ Alessandro Baricco

I spent the rest of the day in someone else's story. The rare moments that I put the book down, my own pain returned in burning stabs.

~ Amy Plum

I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.

~ Naomi Shihab Nye

I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.

~ Sylvia Plath

I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours.

~ Dorothy Parker

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 were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the 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. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:the Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages,the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success,the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment,the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case,the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified,Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.

~ Italo Calvino

I can promise you books and conversation and all my heart.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.

~ Samuel Butler

The point is, it didn’t really matter what the book was about. It was what it meant that was important.

~ Markus Zusak

Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.

~ Bohumil Hrabal

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.And while we're on the subject, I'd like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if it's a bad thing. As if escapist fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn't you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.

~ Neil Gaiman

He'll be down with the books. My old septon used to say books are dead men talking. Dead men should keep quiet is what I say. No one wants to hear a dead man's yabber.

~ George R.r. Martin

How does it feel, anyway?How does what feel?When you take one of those books?At that moment, she chose to keep still. If he wants an answer, he'd have to come back, and he did. Well? he asked, but again, it was the boy who replied, before Liesel could even open her mouth.It feels good, doesn't it? To steal something back.

~ Markus Zusak

Adult librarians are like lazy bakers: their patrons want a jelly doughnut, so they give them a jelly doughnut. Children’s librarians are ambitious bakers: 'You like the jelly doughnut? I’ll get you a jelly doughnut. But you should try my cruller, too. My cruller is gonna blow your mind, kid.

~ John Green

An unread book does nobody any good. Stories happen in the mind of a reader, not among symbols printed on a page.

~ Brandon Mull

Break the spine of one of my books and I break yours.

~ Mia James

One day, she ventured to the palace library and was delighted to find what good company books could be.

~ E. Lockhart

Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.

~ Kathleen Thompson Norris

I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em.

~ Ray Bradbury

You have to remember that it is impossible to commit a crime while reading a book.

~ John Waters

The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That's why we go to movies and say, Oh, the book is better.

~ Paulo Coelho