Books Quotes

Literature simply becomes richer after you've been fired, rejected, stranded, or had to change a few midnight diapers.

~ Christian Bauman

No one stepping for the first time into a room made of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror--at the cluster or the vastness, the stillness, the mocking reminder of everything one doesn't know, the surveillance--and some of that overwhelming feeling may cling on, even after the rituals and conventions are learned, the geography mapped, and the natives found friendly.

~ Alberto Manguel

There's a book for everyone, even if they don't think there is. A book that reaches in and grabs your soul.

~ Veronica Henry

The summer passed quietly. I busied myself as best I could, reading a good deal.

~ Michael Cox

Its better to hold a book between your Fingers than to Hold a Cigarette.

~ Bista Nirooj

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

~ Henry David Thoreau

There's nothing so heavy as books, sir--unless it's bricks.

~ Graham Greene

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.

~ Henry David Thoreau

It must be that people who read go on more macrocosmic and microcosmic trips – biblical god trips, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake trips. Non-readers, what do they get? (They get the munchies.)

~ Maxine Hong Kingston

Books have long been instruments of the divinatory arts.

~ Alberto Manguel

The waltz held the feeling you get when you finish a well-loved book. It left me longing for something I couldn't name.

~ Louise Miller

The spirits of the brain are directly connected to the testicles. This is why men who weary their imagination in books are less suitable for procreative functions...

~ Louis De La Forge

The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Most books are so well written they barely have any effect on the reader’s senses

~ Steve Aylett

Do you love tragedies and everything that breaks the heart?

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Filmmaker John Waters has said, “Nothing is more important than an unread library.

~ Austin Kleon

Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

~ Jeanette Winterson

[A]s Agatha Swanburne once said, 'To be kept waiting is unfortunate, but to be kept waiting with nothing interesting to read is a tragedy of Greek proportions.

~ Maryrose Wood

But Neve, you can’t start a book and leave it halfway through,’ he’d said implacably. ‘It’s almost as bad as turning down the corner of the page, instead of using a bookmark.

~ Sarra Manning

Until recently, I was an ebook sceptic, see; one of those people who harrumphs about the “physical pleasure of turning actual pages” and how ebook will “never replace the real thing”. Then I was given a Kindle as a present. That shut me up. Stock complaints about the inherent pleasure of ye olde format are bandied about whenever some new upstart invention comes along. Each moan is nothing more than a little foetus of nostalgia jerking in your gut. First they said CDs were no match for vinyl. Then they said MP3s were no match for CDs. Now they say streaming music services are no match for MP3s. They’re only happy looking in the rear-view mirror.

~ Charlie Brooker

Books were my passion and my escape from madness.

~ Dorothea Benton Frank

Ereaders were a great convenience, but nothing could beat the smell of a library and old books.

~ Kate Evangelista

There is much you can learn from books and scrolls. These books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life.

~ Christopher Paolini

I realise people exist who don't read. But it's like I knew there were people who didn't breathe or eat: I can't imagine a life like that.

~ Sarah Rees Brennan

If a book did nothing else for you, other than to save you from the company of other people; if all it did was to deliver you from their gossip, and their dull affairs, and their appalling manners, and their rotten Arabic, and their stupid ideas, and their woefully misguided opinions, and above all, from the need to be polite to them; if a book did nothing more than that, it would still be the best friend you ever had.

~ Andrew Killeen

She thought it must be a lonely life for a boy who hated books.

~ Hilda Van Stockum

I spend many hours in conversation with wonderful characters from fantastic books.

~ Patti Roberts

A book is the cheapest ticket you will ever hold.

~ Stefanos Livos

Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate.

~ Edward Abbey

Yes, we'll have to put a stop to this bookworming. No future in that.

~ Molly Keane

I kiss her. I kiss her and kiss her. I try not to bite her lip. She tastes like vodkahoney.

~ Lidia Yuknavitch

I've always loved joining clubs--although, in truth, they're usually book clubs. ~Robecca Steam

~ Gitty Daneshvari

I put the books I was returning on the appropriate desk, and I began looking at the shelves of new arrivals. Most of them were some permutation on self-help. Going by how popular these books were and how often they were checked out, everyone in Bon Temps should have become perfect by now.

~ Charlaine Harris

I doubt if ever one ceases to love, but one can cease to be in love as easily as one can outgrow an author one admired as a boy.

~ Graham Greene

On a day like today,there's no friend like a book.

~ Laura Purdie Salas

There is something nice about a library, isn't there? Mr. Curtis said. He nodded and took in the familiar scenery. The scent of ink and worn, dusty pages.

~ Ilana Waters

If the college you visit has a bookstore filled with t-shirts rather than books, find another college.

~ R. Albert Mohler Jr.

If she were running through the rye, if she were headed towards the abyss, I would grab hold with every ounce of my strength, with every scared beat of my heart, with every thought that could only be for her. And if I were to be running the same way, I’d like to think she’d do the same. But maybe her hands would be busy holding the book. Maybe she wouldn’t see me, too intent on looking for Phoebe from the carousel. Or waiting for Holden to hold her, to wrap her in the pages of his arms, to say she was the only one who truly knew him, as I plunged past her, sad to be leaving, and a little happy to be away.

~ David Levithan

God, he thought, her eyes are so bright, flashing, deep, full of promise, all those things eyes are in books but never are in life, and she was his.

~ John Crowley

Bookish people, who are often maladroit people, persist in thinking they can master any subtlety so long as it's been shaped into acceptable expository prose.

~ Carol Shields