Books Quotes

Shelving books incorrectly is as good as stealing them. It's almost worse.

~ Paul Acampora

We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too.

~ Nick Hornby

The function of a book is to provide a reading experience.

~ Douglas Rushkoff

I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.

~ Franz Kafka

I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.

~ Helene Hanff

Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with books, I felt myself relax and was suddenly at peace.

~ Helene Hanff

There are good books which are only for adults.There are no good books which are only for children.

~ W.h. Auden

The world belongs to those who read.

~ Rick Holland

When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.

~ Paula Fox

Libraries are not made; they grow. Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.

~ Augustine Birrell

But the penciled sheets did not seem like nor smell like the library book so she had given it up, consoling herself with the vow that when she grew up, she would work hard, save money and buy every single book that she liked.

~ Betty Smith

We were never organized readers who would see a book through to its end in any sory of logical order. We weave in and out of words like tourists on a hop-on, hop-off bus tour. Put a book down in the kitchen to go to the bathroom and you might return to find it gone, replaced by another of equal interest. We are indiscriminate.

~ Eleanor Brown

I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.

~ Helen Keller

There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one’s mind and alter one’s whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later:

~ George Orwell

Ordinarily my mom just sunk deeper into her corner of the couch and ignored it. She had succesfully ignored a quarter of a century of entropy and decay, had sat peacefully crunching popcorn and drinking soda while the house fell down around us. If I had to guess the number of books she read during that time, I would place the number at somewhere in the neighborhood of forty thousand.

~ Haven Kimmel

The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one.

~ James Goldsmith

We keep quiet about what we read. Our enjoyment of a book remains a jealously guarded secret. Perhaps because there`s no need to talk, or because it takes time to distill what we've read before we can say anything. Silence is our guarantee of intimacy. We might have finished reading but we`re still livingthe book.

~ Daniel Pennac

-You're pretty hard-boiled, Tinker Bell.-Call me that name again and you'll be wondering how your bollocks wound up lodged in your windpipe--from below. Just because we don't get to your side of things much anymore doesn't mean we don't know anything. 'If you believe in fairies, clap your hands!' If you believe in fairies, kiss my rosy pink arse is more like it. Now are you going to shut your gob or not?

~ Tad Williams

And so I'm me again, Leo. Thanks to the example of a five-year-old. I'm hoping you wouldn't want it any other way. Not that you weren't flattered, right? I mean, to have a girl two thousand miles away going to pieces over you, weeping at the mere memory of you, losing her appetite, losing herself and self-respect - well, that's trophy enough for any guy's ego, huh?

~ Jerry Spinelli

Epics are never written about libraries. They exist on whim it depends on if the conquering army likes to read.

~ Patricia A. Mckillip

If nothing else, a house is a place to keep books in.

~ Robert Pogue Harrison

The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

~ Ray Bradbury

With thought, patience, and discrimination, book passion becomes the signature of a person's character.

~ Nicholas A. Basbanes

I had spent the dayfriendless, lonely and sad,a stranger to myself.After drowning the dayon the sea shore,I walked backto my empty houseon the deserted street.The momentI opened the door,the book on my tableflipped its pagesand said:Friend,Where were youfor so long?

~ Gulzar

To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions—there we have none.

~ Virginia Woolf

The shame that tormented me was all the more corrosive for having no very clear origin: I didn't know why I felt so tainted, and worthless, and wrong-only that I did, and whenever I looked up from my books I was swamped by slimy waters rushing in from all sides.

~ Donna Tartt

Betsy returned to her chair, took off her coat and hat, opened her book and forgot the world again.

~ Maud Hart Lovelace

Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.

~ C.s. Lewis

Life happened because I turned the pages.

~ Alberto Manguel

He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design.You say this as if you envied him.There are worse prisons than words.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.

~ Pat Conroy

What are books but tangible dreams? What is reading if it is not dreaming? The best books cause us to dream the rest are not worth reading.

~ Rikki Ducornet

A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.

~ Richard Flanagan

The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest.

~ Romain Rolland

The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.

~ Oliver Goldsmith

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

~ Samuel Butler

I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.

~ Eudora Welty

Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.

~ Gary Shteyngart

I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed.

~ Umberto Eco

If you've ever read one of those articles that asks notable people to list their favorite books, you may have been impressed or daunted to see them pick Proust or Thomas Mann or James Joyce. You might even feel sheepish about the fact that you reread Pride and Prejudice or The Lord of the Rings, or The Catcher in the Rye or Gone With the Wind every couple of years with some much pleasure. Perhaps, like me, you're even a little suspicious of their claims, because we all know that the books we've loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly - or the ones we'd most like other people to think we read over and over again.

~ Laura Miller