Books Quotes

That's the thing about a great book. Every time you read it, it's different, because you're different. You've changed since the last time you picked it up, things have happened to you.

~ Jessica Zafra

But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.’ Most of us can’t rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book.

~ Ray Bradbury

For the last several days I've had the sudden and general urge to buy a new book. I've stopped off at a few bookstores around the city, and while I've looked at hundreds and hundreds of books in that time, I have not found the one book that will satisfy my urge. It's not as if I don't have anything to read; there's a tower of perfectly good unread books next to my bed, not to mention the shelves of books in the living room I've been meaning to reread. I find myself, maddeningly, hungry for the next one, as yet unknown. I no longer try to analyze this hunger; I capitulated long ago to the book lust that's afflicted me most of my life. I know enough about the course of the disease to know I'll discover something soon.

~ Lewis Buzbee

I took to the Bodleian library as to a lover and ... would sit long hours in Bodley's arms to emerge, blinking and dazed with the smell and feel of all those books.

~ Laurie R. King

Maybe Heaven will be a library and then I might get to finish my ‘to-read’ list.

~ Kellie Elmore

Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.

~ Jane Austen

Sometimes I think books are the only friends worth having.

~ Susie Derkins

Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the Universe together into one garment for us.

~ Ray Bradbury

I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Woe be to him that reads but one book.

~ George Herbert

Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself.

~ Harlan Ellison

Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.

~ Geraldine Brooks

Remember, when you don’t know what to do, it never hurts to play Scrabble. It’s like reading the I Ching or tea leaves.

~ Kelly Link

In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.

~ Alberto Manguel

The books we love, they love us back. And just as we mark our places in the pages, those pages leave their marks on us.

~ Jay Kristoff

A good book is always on tap; it may be decanted and drunk a hundred times, and it is still there for further imbibement.

~ Holbrook Jackson

For all the books in his possession, he still failed to read the stories written plain as day in the faces of the people around him.

~ Emma Donoghue

Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine.

~ Alberto Manguel

Books remember all the things you cannot contain.

~ Elizabeth Mccracken

However much you study, you cannot know without action. A donkey laden with books is neither an intellectual nor a wise man. Empty of essence, what learning has he whether upon him is firewood or book?

~ Saadi

People have often told me that one of their strongest childhood memories is the scent of their grandmother's house. I never knew my grandmothers, but I could always count of the Bookmobile.

~ Adriana Trigiani

Literature is the real life of imaginary people.

~ Stefanos Livos

No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.

~ Stanisław Lem

Far be it from me to keep a woman from her book. That could become dangerous.

~ Elizabeth Hunter

Associate with noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty. But learn to be happy alone. Rely upon your own energies, and so not wait for, or depend on other people.

~ Thomas Davidson

I regained my soul through literature after those times I'd lost it to wild-eyed gypsy girls on the European streets.

~ Roman Payne

The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library.

~ Michel Foucault

I could read the great books but the great books don't interest me.

~ Charles Bukowski

Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal.

~ Laura Miller

After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.

~ Jean Rhys

A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity.

~ Penelope Fitzgerald

The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes connot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog. Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality... in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad of eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

~ C.s. Lewis

I think I’m always so much more happy with books and movies and stuff. I think I get more excited about well-done representations of life than life itself.- Celine

~ Richard Linklater

Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book.

~ David Mitchell

Remind me not to piss you off Red. You might aim for the heart and shoot me in the balls.

~ Nora Roberts

In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.

~ Anne Fadiman

I wanted to pull down a book, open it proper, and gobble up page after page

~ Laurie Halse Anderson