Books Quotes

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.

~ Julian Barnes

There is something fascinatingly awkward about an author photo. I'm drawn to those glossy shots in the back of books, mostly because the subjects never look happy to be there.

~ Pamela Ribon

Geeks are not the world’s rowdiest people. We’re quiet and introspective, and usually more comfortable communing with our keyboards or a good book than each other. Our idea of how to paint theEmerald City red involves light liquor, heavy munchies, and marathon sessions of video games of the ‘giant robots shooting each other and everything else in sight’ variety. We debate competing lines of software or gaming consoles with passion, and dissect every movie, television show, and novel in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.With as many of us as there are in this town, people inevitably find ways to cater to us when we get in the mood to spend our hard-earned dollars. Downtown Seattle boasts grandiose geek magnets, like the Experience Music Project and the Experience Science Fiction museum, but it has much humbler and far more obscure attractions too, like the place we all went to for our ship party that evening: a hole-in-the-wall bar called the Electric Penguin on Capitol Hill.

~ Angela Korra'ti

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

Temeraire said, 'It is very nice how many books there are, indeed. And on so many subjects!

~ Naomi Novik

An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.

~ Roger Ebert

Last night I thought about all the kerosene I've used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before...It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I come along in two minutes and boom! it's all over.

~ Ray Bradbury

The young need discipline and a full bookcase.

~ Vivienne Westwood

Instead, we'd do what we always did, the only thing we'd ever been dependably stellar at: we'd read.

~ Eleanor Brown

The only life worth living is the adventurous life. Of such a life the dominant characteristic is that it is unafraid. It is unafraid of what other people think...It does not adapt either its pace or its objectives to the pace and objectives of its neighbors. It thinks its own thoughts, it reads its own books. It develops its own hobbies, and it is governed by its own conscience. The herd may graze where it pleases or stampede where it pleases, but he who lives the adventurous life will remain unafraid when he finds himself alone.

~ Raymond B. Fosdick

Books and movies, they are not mere entertainment. They sustain me and help me cope with my real life.

~ Arlaina Tibensky

History proves there is no better advertisement for a book than to condemn it for obscenity.

~ Holbrook Jackson

As I walked, I ran my fingers along the spines of hundreds of books. I let myself be imbued with the smell, with the light that filtered through the cracks or from the glass lanterns embedded in the wooden structure, floating among mirrors and shadows.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time.

~ Nick Hornby

I was on a walking tour of Oxford colleges once with a group of bored and unimpressable tourists. They yawned at Balliol's quad, T.E. Lawrence's and Churchill's portraits, and the blackboard Einstein wrote his E=mc2 on. Then the tour guide said, 'And this is the Bridge of Sighs, where Lord Peter proposed (in Latin) to Harriet,' and everyone suddenly came to life and began snapping pictures. Such is the power of books.

~ Connie Willis

Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.

~ Harold Bloom

I would rather read a mediocre book than waste time sitting around with people making small talk.

~ James D. Sass

I enjoy sharing my books as I do my friends, asking only that you treat them well and see them safely home.

~ Ernest Morgan

A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. You prime a pump with your own water, you work the handle with your own strength. You do this because you expect to get back more than you give.

~ Stephen King

From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.

~ Alberto Manguel

No encounter occured that day, and I was glad of it; I took out of my pocket a little Homer I had not opened since leaving Marseilles, reread three lines of the Odyssey, learned them by heart; then, finding sufficient sustenance in their rhythm and reveling in them at leisure, I closed the book and remained, trembling, more alive than I had thought possible, my mind numb with happiness.

~ André Gide

But, how do you know if an ending is truly good for the characters unless you've traveled with them through every page?

~ Shannon Hale

This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.

~ Michael Ondaatje

The book's always better than the movie.

~ Richelle Mead

Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

I recognized it instantly. It was a made-up story, a fantasy, the tale of four kids who went through a magic wardrobe and found themselves in a strange new world. I'd read it more times than I could remember, and although I sneered at the thought of a magical land with friendly, talking animals, there were times when I wished, in my most secret moments, that I could find a hidden door that would take us allout of this place.

~ Julie Kagawa

The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know — the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be…. The thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever.

~ Thomas Wolfe

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks? Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet. (A Teller of Tales)

~ W.b. Yeats

Have you never picked up a book you've read before, and found it speaks to you in a new way?

~ Django Wexler

My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closest. Their selves were on their shelves.

~ Anne Fadiman

Olly: jesus. is there a girl on this planet who doesn't love mr.darcyMadeline: All girls love Mr. Darcy?Olly: are you kidding? even my sister loves darcy and she doesn't love anybodyMadeline: She must love somebody. I'm sure she loves youOlly: what's so great about darcy?Madeline: That's not a serious questionOlly: he's a snobMadeline: But he overcomes it and eventually realizes that character matters more than class! He's a man open to learning life's lessons! Also, he's completely gorgeous and noble and brooding and poetic. Did I mention gorgeous? Also, he loves Elizabeth beyond all reason.

~ Nicola Yoon

What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever.

~ Virginia Woolf

More and more I lived in books, they were my comfort, refuge, addiction, compensation for the humiliations that attended contact with the world outside.

~ Lorna Sage

Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.

~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

Take what interests and knowledge you can from books, but do not let them replace words and thoughts of your own.

~ Pai Kit Fai

I shake my head. Not my kind of scene. I'd rather be home with my book boyfriend. I'll never get what you book sluts get out of a fictional man… He shakes his head. Boys in books are better.

~ Danielle Torella

We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

In fiction, beauty was run-of-the-mill.

~ Eileen Favorite

Authors: The only people you thank for leaving you emotionally devastated.

~ Love The Stacks Bookstore