Books Quotes

Have books ‘happened’ to you? Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk to you

~ Haruki Murakami

I love staring at my books for hours just trying to decide which book to read next. Doing that is almost as fun as actually reading them.

~ Love The Stacks Bookstore

Books can truly change our lives: the lives of those who read them, the lives of those who write them. Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew about the world and about themselves.

~ Lloyd Alexander

Books fall open, you fall in

~ David T.w. Mccord

...Something we once loved, and love now, in the shape of a book. Maybe eBooks are going to take over, one day, but not until those whizzkids in Silicon Valley invent a way to bend the corners, fold the spine, yellow the pages, add a coffee ring or two and allow the plastic tablet to fall open at a favorite page.

~ Russell T. Davies

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

~ Susan Sontag

Learning became her. She loved the smell of the book from the shelves, the type on the pages, the sense that the world was an infinite but knowable place. Every fact she learned seemed to open another question, and for every question there was another book.

~ Robert Goolrick

Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.

~ Laurie Anderson

If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them – peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.

~ Winston S. Churchill

There's no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature.

~ Stephen R. Covey

Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.

~ Rebecca Mead

anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.

~ Virginia Woolf

A book is a wonderful present. Though it may grow worn, it will never grow old.

~ Jane Yolen

Anything can become a children's book if you give it to a child...Children are actually the best (and worst) audience for literature because they have no patience with pretence.

~ Orson Scott Card

I smiled at the stacks, inhaling again. Hundreds of thousands of pages that had never been turned, waiting for me. The shelves were a warm, blond wood, piled with spines of every color. Staff picks were arranged on tables, glossy covers reflecting the light back at me. Behind the little cubby where the cashier sat, ignoring us, stairs covered with rich burgundy carpet led up to the worlds unknown. 'I could just live here,' I said.

~ Maggie Stiefvater

The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.

~ Walt Whitman

If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.

~ Alberto Manguel

The act of true reading is in its very essence democratic. Consider the nature of what happens when we read a book - and I mean, of course, a work of literature, not an instruction manual or a textbook - in private, unsupervised, un-spied-on, alone. It isn't like a lecture: it's like a conversation. There's a back-and-forthness about it. The book proposes, the reader questions, the book responds, the reader considers. We bring our own preconceptions and expectations, our own intellectual qualities, and our limitations, too, our own previous experiences of reading, our own temperament, our own hopes and fears, our own personality to the encounter.

~ Philip Pullman

All his life, Klaus had believed that if you read enough books, you could solve any problem, but now he wasn't so sure.

~ Lemony Snicket

But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.

~ Alberto Manguel

Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book.

~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

Revenge. Justice. Love. They are the three stories that all other stories are made up of. It's the trifecta.

~ April Genevieve Tucholke

He had no money and no home; he lived entirely on the road of the racing circuit, sleeping in empty stalls, carrying with him only a saddle, his rosary, and his books....The books were the closest thing he had to furniture, and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.

~ Laura Hillenbrand

…books are always good company if you have the right sort. Let me pick out some for you.' And Mrs. Jo made a bee-line to the well-laden shelves, which were the joy of her heart and the comfort of her life.

~ Louisa May Alcott

Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of emotion and observation, multilayered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers. Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language. It will not get us anything that enters not just the conscious mind but the unconscious. It will not allow the book to burrow down into our memory and become part of ourselves, the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom and vicarious experience which helps to form us as complete human beings. It will not develop our awareness or add to the sum of our knowledge and intelligence. Read parts of a newspaper quickly or an encyclopaedia entry, or a fast-food thriller, but do not insult yourself or a book which has been created with its author's painstakingly acquired skill and effort, by seeing how fast you can dispose of it.

~ Susan Hill

...I will not allow books to prove any thing.But how shall we prove any thing?We never shall.

~ Jane Austen

We become the books we read.

~ Matthew Kelly

She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain

~ Louisa May Alcott

CUSTOMER: If I were to, say... meet the love of my life in this bookshop, what section do you think they would be standing in?

~ Jen Campbell

You're either reading a book or you're not.

~ Jonathan Franzen

All books are either dreams or swords,You can cut, or you can drug, with words.

~ Amy Lowell

great books are the ones we need

~ Charles Bukowski

Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading -- once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive -- is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.

~ Alberto Manguel

There were two sets of double doors leading out of the antechamber, one marked STACKS and the other TOMES. Not knowing the difference between the two, I headed to the ones labeled STACKS. That was what I wanted. Stacks of books. Great heaps of books. Shelf after endless shelf of books.

~ Patrick Rothfuss

A Book “Now” - said a good book unto me -“Open my pages and you shall seeJewels of wisdom and treasures fine,Gold and silver in every line,And you may claim them if you but willOpen my pages and take your fill.“Open my pages and run them o’er,Take what you choose of my golden store.Be you greedy, I shall not care -All that you seize I shall gladly spare;There is never a lock on my treasure doors,Come - here are my jewels, make them yours!“I am just a book on your mantel shelf,But I can be part of your living self;If only you’ll travel my pages through,Then I will travel the world with you.As two wines blended make better wine,Blend your mind with these truths of mine.“I’ll make you fitter to talk with men,I’ll touch with silver the lines you pen,I’ll lead you nearer the truth you seek,I’ll strengthen you when your faith grows weak -This place on your shelf is a prison cell,Let me come into your mind to dwell!

~ Edgar A. Guest

And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun.

~ Nick Hornby

A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

With no reason to hide these words I feel, and no reason to talk about the books I read, but still, I do.

~ Morrissey

The Bookshop has a thousand books,All colors, hues, and tinges,And every cover is a doorThat turns on magic hinges.

~ Nancy Byrd Turner

Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers.

~ Alberto Manguel