Books Quotes

There were valuable first editions of books in the enormous library, most of them had been scribbled in by some idiot named Will H.

~ Cassandra Clare

I’d volunteer to go to prison, as long as there are books. Because with books I am free.

~ Mohammad Hatta

Allowing yourself to stop reading a book - at page 25, 50, or even, less frequently, a few chapters from the end - is a rite of passage in a reader's life, the literary equivalent of a bar mitzvah or a communion, the moment at which you look at yourself and announce: Today I am an adult. I can make my own decisions.

~ Sara Nelson

I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them.

~ Anne Fadiman

Any book which inspires us to lead a better life is a good book.

~ Fulton J. Sheen

The library is like a candy store where everything is free.

~ Jamie Ford

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

~ Kevin Smokler

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is pleasure beyond compare.

~ Yoshida Kenkō

Authors do not choose a story to write, the story chooses us.

~ Richard P. Denney

What is reading but silent conversation.

~ Walter Savage Landor

Before he had lost his sight, the maester had loved books as much as Samwell Tarly did. He understood the way that you could sometimes fall right into them, as if each page was a hole into another world.

~ George R.r. Martin

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.

~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Reading is probably another way of being in a place.

~ José Saramago

For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.

~ Virginia Woolf

There’s nothing as cozy as a piece of candy and a book.

~ Betty Macdonald

Few pleasures, for the true reader, rival the pleasure of browsing unhurriedly among books: old books, new books, library books, other people's books, one's own books - it does not matter whose or where. Simply to be among books, glancing at one here, reading a page from one over there, enjoying them all as objects to be touched, looked at, even smelt, is a deep satisfaction. And often, very often, while browsing haphazardly, looking for nothing in particular, you pick up a volume that suddenly excites you, and you know that this one of all the others you must read. Those are great moments - and the books we come across like that are often the most memorable.

~ Aidan Chambers

I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books.

~ Marilynne Robinson

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was locatedwill betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them,and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what wereally desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols,breaking the hearts of their worshippers.For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

~ C.s. Lewis

All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been; it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

~ Thomas Carlyle

The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.

~ Ray Bradbury

These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes them want to live in other ways they can never really be.

~ Ray Bradbury

I think it’s the books that you read when you’re young that live with you forever.

~ J.k. Rowling

Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.

~ Anne Fadiman

I am not afraid of giving bad reviews. If I don't like a book, I don't like it. Period. I don't do promotion

~ Bookvergent

I have all the books I could need, and what more could I need than books?

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Teenagers read millions of books every year. They read for entertainment and for education. They read because of school assignments and pop culture fads.

~ Sherman Alexie

I don't remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books.

~ Alberto Manguel

The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book -- it makes a very poor doorstop.

~ Alfred Hitchcock

But maybe they understood more about life than I did. From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn't waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing, I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

It would be inappropiate, undignified, at 38, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour or intensity of a 22 year old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry? Crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photobooths? Taking a whole day to make a compilation tape? Asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or TS Eliot or, god forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them? Ridiculous, at 38, to expect a song or book or film to change your life.

~ David Nicholls

Of all the inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books are the nearest to us for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to the truth, and our persistent leanings to error. But most of all they resemble us in their precious hold on life.

~ Joseph Conrad

A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.

~ Geraldine Brooks

Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.

~ Anthony Doerr

I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

No one knows as well as I how much nonsense is printed in books.

~ Julia Quinn

She did not care very much for other little girls, but if she had plenty of books she could console herself.

~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

It looked like the sort of book described in library catalogues as 'slightly foxed', although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.

~ Terry Pratchett

Overall, the library held a hushed exultation, as though the cherished volumes were all singing soundlessly within their covers.

~ Diana Gabaldon

To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.

~ Claude Adrien Helvétius

Reading is important.Books are important.Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.)

~ Neil Gaiman