Books Quotes

Whenever Monsieur Perdu looked at a book, he did not see it purely in terms of a story, retail price and an essential balm for the soul; he saw freedom on wings of paper.

~ Nina George

I often carry things to read so that I will not have to look at the people.

~ Charles Bukowski

Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if he do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers.

~ P.g. Wodehouse

If your friend wishes to read your 'Plutarch's Lives,' 'Shakespeare,' or 'The Federalist Papers,' tell him gently but firmly, to buy a copy. You will lend him your car or your coat - but your books are as much a part of you as your head or your heart.

~ Mortimer J. Adler

Can you tell me what happened?Her lips thinned as she shook her head. 'Tis not a happy tale.You have me reading a book about a girl who tries to kill an entire town. Anything else at this point would be a pick me up.

~ Jenny B. Jones

When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?

~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

As with men, it has always seemed to me that books have their own peculiar destinies. They go towards the people who are waiting for them and reach them at the right moment. They are made of living material and continue to cast light through the darkness long after the death of their authors.

~ Miguel Serrano

When you learn to read you will be born again...and you will never be quite so alone again.

~ Rumer Godden

One bright day in the last week of February, I was walking in the park, enjoying the threefold luxury of solitude, a book, and pleasant weather.

~ Anne Brontë

Who wants a library full of books you've already read?

~ Harlan Ellison

Often the adult book is not for you, not yet, or will only be for you when you're ready. But sometimes you will read it anyway, and you will take from it whatever you can. Then, perhaps, you will come back to it when you're older, and you will find the book has changed because you have changed as well, and the book is wiser, or more foolish, because you are wiser or more foolish than you were as a child.

~ Neil Gaiman

I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.

~ Anita Brookner

She liked getting hold of some book... and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her thoughts with any one, or having to decide whether the book was a good one or a bad one.

~ Virginia Woolf

We rely upon the poets, the philosophers, and the playwrights to articulate what most of us can only feel, in joy or sorrow. They illuminate the thoughts for which we only grope; they give us the strength and balm we cannot find in ourselves. Whenever I feel my courage wavering, I rush to them. They give me the wisdom of acceptance, the will and resiliance to push on.

~ Helen Hayes

Reality doesn’t always give us the life that we desire, but we can always find what we desire between the pages of books.

~ Adelise M. Cullens

I have lots of favourites. That's the trouble with books. You can never choose your favorite. It changes depending on your mood.

~ Veronica Henry

Don't be afraid of books, even the most dissident, seemingly 'immoral' ones. Culture is a sure bet in life, whether high, low, eclectic, pop, ancient or modern. And I am convinced that reading is one of the most important tools of liberation that any human being, and a contemporary Arab woman in particular, can exploit. I am not saying it is the ONLY tool, especially with all the new alternative - more visual, interactive and hasty - ways of knowledge, learning and growth. But how could I not be convinced of literature's power, when it has been my original emancipator?

~ Joumana Haddad

For centuries, no one was concerned that books weren’t girl-friendly, because no one really cared if girls read; but even so, we persisted for long enough that literature has slowly come to accommodate us. Modern boys, by contrast, are not trying to read in a culture of opposition. Nobody is telling them reading doesn’t matter, that boys don’t need to read and that actually, no prospective wife looks for literacy in a husband. Quite the opposite! Male literary culture thrives, both teachers and parents are throwing books at their sons, and the fact that the books aren’t sticking isn’t, as the nature of the complaint makes clear, because boys don’t like reading – no. The accusation is that boys don’t like reading about girls, which is a totally different matter.Because constantly, consistently, our supposedly equal society penalises boys who express an interest in anything feminine. The only time boys are discouraged from books all together is in contexts where, for whatever reason, they’ve been given the message that reading itself is girly – which is a wider extrapolation of the same problem.

~ Foz Meadows

You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don't say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that indiscreetly outshouts the message that the book itself must communicate directly, that you must extract from the book, however much or little it may be. Of course, this circling of the book, too, this reading around it before reading inside it, is a part of the pleasure in a new book, but like all preliminary pleasures, it has its optimal duration if you want it to serve as a thrust toward the more substantial pleasure of the consummation of the act, namely the reading of the book.

~ Italo Calvino

It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.

~ Annie Dillard

To tell you the truth, I used to consider it a disgrace to be found ignorant by other people. But now, I find that I am not ashamed of knowing less than others, and I'm less inclined to force myself to read books. In short, I have grown old and decrepit.

~ Sōseki Natsume

There are treasures in books that all the money in the world cannot buy, but the poorest laborer can have for nothing.

~ Robert G. Ingersoll

For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner,Let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying out for mercy, Let there be no surcease to his agony till he sink in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the worm that dieth not.When at last he goeth to his final punishment, Let the flames of Hell consume him forever.[attributed to the Monastery of San Pedro in Barcelona, Spain]

~ Nicholas A. Basbanes

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

~ Edward Gibbon

In a second-hand bookshop head to the back, find the old books with dust undisturbed and worn off covers for these clothe true treasures.

~ Rachel Hall

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book, and a tired man who wants a book to read.

~ G.k. Chesterton

The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den.

~ Phillip Adams

One sheds ones sickness in books- repeats and presents again ones emotions, to be master of them.

~ D.h. Lawrence

Every new book we read in our brief and busy lives means that a classic is left unread.

~ B.r. Myers

Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp.

~ Margaret Atwood

A general cry of What book? What book? Let us see this famous book!

~ Diana Gabaldon

. . . she read with undifferentiated glee . . .

~ Sebastian Faulks

Over there! Where? Enna asked in mock panic Do you see something?

~ Shannon Hale

But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

He says he knows someone isn't from the same race as he when that person looks at his library and asks, 'Have you read all of these?' A true book lover knows that, no, he hasn't read them all. It's about the process, it's about when the right reference comes up, you have the right book to go to; it's about never being without something to occupy your eyes and mind.

~ Jamie S. Rich

And Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book.

~ Jane Austen

Perhaps that is the best way to say it: printed books are magical, and real bookshops keep that magic alive.

~ Jen Campbell

I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books.

~ Rabih Alameddine

We read in slow, long motions, as if drifting in space, weightless. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling gaps, mending faults. And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder... as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us--the recognition of something we never knew was there...

~ Alberto Manguel