Books Quotes

I love bookshelves, and stacks of books, spines, typography, and the feel of pages between my fingertips. I love bookmarks, and old bindings, and stars in margins next to beautiful passages. I love exuberant underlinings that recall to me a swoon of language-love from a long-ago reading, something I hoped to remember. I love book plates, and inscriptions in gifts from loved ones, I love author signatures, and I love books sitting around reminding me of them, being present in my life, being. I love books. Not just for what they contain. I love them as objects too, as ever-present reminders of what they contain, and because they are beautiful. They are one of my favorite things in life, really at the tiptop of the list, easily my favorite inanimate things in existence, and ... I am just not cottoning on to this idea of making them ... not exist anymore. Making them cease to take up space in the world, in my life? No, please do not take away the physical reality of my books.

~ Laini Taylor

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.

~ Eugene O'neill

Reading is my passion and my escape since I was 5 years old. Overall, children don't realize the magic that can live inside their own heads. Better even then any movie.

~ Eckhart Tolle

it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.

~ Gertrude Stein

But her grandmother had never suggested she could think the same of Scarlet. You'll be fine, she always said, after a skinned knee, after a broken arm, after her first youthfull heartbreak. You'll be fine, because you're strong, like me.

~ Marissa Meyer

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

~ Elbert Hubbard

Before she came ill, David's mother would often tell him that stories were alive. They weren't alive in the way that people were alive, or even dogs or cats. (...) Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by torch light beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world. (...) They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read, David's mother would whisper. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.

~ John Connolly

Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them

~ Lemony Snicket

I wanted to know what it was like to be a drug addict, and have an eating disorder, and have a loved one die, and fall in love. I saw my friends going through these things, I saw the world going through these things, and I needed to understand them. I needed to make sense of them. Books didn’t make me wallow in darkness, darkness made me wallow in books, and it was books that showed me there is light at the end of the tunnel.

~ Jackson Pearce

Yo soy carne muerta. Translation: I am dead meat.

~ Kiersten White

Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.

~ Yann Martel

Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.

~ Laura Lippman

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

~ Benjamin Disraeli

My last refuge, my books: simple pleasures, like finding wild onions by the side of a road, or requited love.

~ Tracy Letts

The library was a little old shabby place. Francie thought it was beautiful. The feeling she had about it was as good as the feeling she had about church. She pushed open the door and went in. She liked the combined smell of worn leather bindings, library past and freshly inked stamping pads better than she liked the smell of burning incense at high mass.

~ Betty Smith

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

~ Richard Steele

Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.

~ Isaac Asimov

Computers don't kill books people do.

~ Douglas Rushkoff

One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.

~ P.g. Wodehouse

I've forgotten most of what I've read and, frankly, it never seemed very important to me or to the world.

~ Leonard Cohen

Do you arrange your books alphabetically? (I hope not.)

~ Mary Ann Shaffer

In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane from the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.

~ Milan Kundera

Life is too short to waste time on books that end badly

~ Jayne Ann Krentz

It was like walking into a treasure trove of books, hoarded by pirate librarians.

~ Pseudonymous Bosch

Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book. . . . an intertextual being: a book cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg.

~ Scarlett Thomas

Worst of all, the inner vault is guarded by a live dragon, attended by fifty naked women armed with poisoned spears, each of them sworn to die in Requin's service. All redheads.-You're just making that up, Jean.

~ Scott Lynch

What I saw next stopped me dead in my tracks. Books. Not just one or two dozen, but hundreds of them. In crates. In piles on the floor. In bookcases that stretched from floor to ceiling and lined the entire room. I turned around and around in a slow circle, feeling as if I'd just stumbled into Ali Baba's cave. I was breathless, close to tears, and positively dizzy with greed.

~ Jennifer Donnelly

It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.

~ Anne Fadiman

But you love books, then,” Aunt Queen was saying. I had to listen.“Oh, yes,” Lestat said. “Sometimes they are the only thing that keeps me alive.”“What a strange thing to say at your age,” she laughed.“No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don’t you think? The young are eternally desperate,” he said frankly. “And books, they offer one hope —- that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that new universe, one is saved.

~ Anne Rice

As we expand our knowledge of good books, we shrink the circle of men whose company we appreciate.

~ Ludwig Feuerbach

He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say.

~ Alice Hoffman

It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.

~ Penelope Lively

In other words, it's one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of This is me!

~ Nick Hornby

When was the last time you read a book? The truth now. And picture books don't count-I mean something with print in it.

~ William Goldman

Reading is the royal road to intellectual eminence...Truly good books are more than mines to those who can understand them. They are the breathings of the great souls of past times. Genius is not embalmed in them, but lives in them perpetually.

~ William Ellery Channing

This must be what an addict feels like, I think, trying to fight the pull of one last, quick read. My fingers itch toward the binding, and finally, with a sigh of regret, I just grab the book and open it, hungrily reading the story.

~ Jodi Picoult

In a few minutes I heard the books' voices: a low, steady, unsupressible hum. I'd heard it many times before. I've always had a finely tuned ear for a library's accumulations of echo and desire. Libraries are anything but hushed.

~ Martha Cooley

Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.

~ Annie Dillard

Cakes are like books: There are new ones you want to read and old favorites you want to reread.

~ Ellen Rose