Books Quotes

I had said that Le Guin's worlds were real because her people were so real, and he said yes, but the people were so real because they were the people the worlds would have produced. If you put Ged to grow up on Anarres or Shevek in Earthsea, they would be the same people, the backgrounds made the people, which of course you see all the time in mainstream fiction, but it's rare in SF.

~ Jo Walton

He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or a writer, it must also be demanded of a reader. Because we mustn’t deceive ourselves: on the journey of reading we often travel through difficult terrains that demand a capacity for intelligent emotion, a desire to understand the other, and to approach a language distinct from the one of our daily tyrannies… Writers fail readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it.

~ Enrique Vila-Matas

The library made me feel safe, as if every question had an answer and there was nothing to be afraid of, as long as I could sort through another volume.

~ Dee Williams

And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder, as if someone or something had 'walked over our grave,' as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us - the recognition of something we never knew was there, or of something we vaguely felt as a flicker or a shadow, whose ghostly form rises and passes back into us before we can see what it is, leaving us older and wiser.

~ Alberto Manguel

What's the point of a houseful of books you've already read?

~ Cory Doctorow

Rows and rows of books lined the shelves and I let my eyes linger on the sturdy spines, thinking how human books were, so full of ideas and images, worlds imagined, worlds perceived; full of fingerprints and sudden laughter and the sighs of readers, too. It was humbling to consider all these authors, struggling with this word or that phrase, recording their thoughts for people they'd never meet. In that same way, the detritus of the boxes was humbling - receipts, jotted notes, photos with no inscriptions, all of it once held together by the fabric of lives now finished, gone.

~ Kim Edwards

When you're in my arms, I know you're mine. But your feet are so swift, so swift, they carry you as lightly as wings, I never know where, too fast, too fast away from me.

~ Anaïs Nin

Currently, the Library of Congress houses eighteen million books. American publishers add another two hundred thousand titles to this stack each year. This means that at the current publishing rate, ten million new books will be added in the next fifty years. Add together the dusty LOC volumes with the shiny new and forthcoming books, and you get a bookshelf-warping total of twenty-eight million books available for an English reader in the next fifty years! But you can read only 2,600 - because you are a wildly ambitious book devourer. ... For every one book that you choose to read, you must ignore ten thousand other books simply because you don't have the time (or money!).

~ Tony Reinke

All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.

~ Susan Sontag

All good things are powerful stimulants to life, even a good book written against life.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Books are more precious than jewels. She truly believed this. What did a diamond bring you? A momentary flash of brilliance. A diamond scintillated for second a book could scintillate forever.

~ Veronica Henry

Love the great narcotic was the revealer in the alchemist's bottle rendering visible the most untraceable substances. Love the great narcotic was the agent provocateur exposing all the secret selves to daylight.

~ Anaïs Nin

I'd much rather fall to my death than admit my weakness to you.The captain of the Royal Guard wants to impress a lowly handmaiden?A clumsy young man wants to impress a beautiful young woman.

~ Renee Ahdieh

People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to l

~ Michael Chabon

Do I dare ask him for what I want,As if I knew it,Could find it on some pageIn some chapterIn some book?

~ Stasia Ward Kehoe

Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.)

~ Susan Sontag

If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.

~ Lewis Buzbee

I always say, 'Books beat boredom,' said Amanda wisely.

~ Mo Willems

The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older.

~ Haruki Murakami

I wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A–Z.But this was diff

~ Jeanette Winterson

Some of the most relaxing weekends I have ever enjoyed were those I spent quietly with a sense of all work to date completed, and an absorbing mystery.

~ Aung San Suu Kyi

A doctor is advertised by the bodies he cures. My business is advertised by the minds I stimulate. And let me tell you that the book business is different from other trades. People don't know they want books. I can see just by looking at you that your mind is ill for lack of books but you are blissfully unaware of it!

~ Christopher Morley

School did give me one of the greatest gifts of my life, though. I learned how to read, and for that I remain thankful. I would have died otherwise. As soon as I was able, I read, alone. Under the covers with a flashlight or in my corner of the attic—I sought solace in books. It was from books that I started to get an inkling of the kinds of assholes I was dealing with. I found allies too, in books, characters my age who were going through or had triumphed against the same bullshit.

~ Craig Ferguson

There is no greater feeling of accomplishment than to create a world that solely exists in your imagination and be able to pull someone into this hidden place inside of my thoughts. To make someone care for a person that has manifested from my dreams, to make them hate me for putting them in danger, and for them to ask to be taken on another journey with me when it is all said and done is why I write.

~ Teresa Mummert

Just give me a thousand words and you may make your own pictures.

~ Erica Goros

People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

A great book increases my heartbeat as if I’m prey, melts my insides in anticipation of a first kiss, immerses me in its depths.

~ Carmen Desousa

I inhaled the musty, leathery, old-papery scent and a shiver passed over me. If I had any idea of heaven, it was this: shelves and shelves of books, ten times as many as were upstairs, each with stories or pictures more exciting and beautiful than the next, and two overstuffed chairs big enough for me to sleep in.

~ Clay Carmichael

Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

~ Jeanette Winterson

This is a book. It is a book I found in a box. I found the box in the attic. The box was in the attic, under the eaves. The attic was hot and still. The air was stale with dust. The dust was from old pictures and books. The dust in the air was made up of the book I found. I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it.

~ P. Harding

A bran' new book is a beautiful thing, all promise and fresh pages, the neatly squared spine, the brisk sense of a journey beginning. But a well-worn book also has its pleasures, the soft caress and give of the paper's edges, the comfort, like an old shawl, of an oft-read story.

~ Lewis Buzbee

Lacey-girl, books take you anywhere. Any place you want to go. You remember that always.

~ Carol Lynch Williams

I was thinking, So, I’m Emperor, am I? What nonsense! But at least I'll be able to make people read my books now.

~ Robert Graves

Leaving behind books is even more beautiful — there are far too many children.

~ Marguerite Yourcenar

You're not allowed to say anything about books because they're books, and books are, you know, God.

~ Nick Hornby

I spent much of my prison time reading. I must have read over 200 large books, mostly fictional stories about the American pioneers, the Vikings, Mafia, etc. As long as I was engrossed in a book, I was not in prison. Reading was my escape.

~ Frazier Glenn Miller

They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.

~ Virginia Woolf

Jack shook his head. 'Books. What is it with women and books? My sisters were the same. They were always buying books for boys they fancied.'Ellie bent down and picked up the stone and put it on the table. 'It's like sending a love letter without having to write it yourself,' she said softly.

~ Hazel Osmond

There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction. As Police Commissioner it was my duty to deal with all kinds of squalid misery and hideous and unspeakable infamy, and I should have been worse than a coward if I had shrunk from doing what was necessary; but there would have been no use whatever in my reading novels detailing all this misery and squalor and crime, or at least in reading them as a steady thing. Now and then there is a powerful but sad story which really is interesting and which really does good; but normally the books which do good and the books which healthy people find interesting are those which are not in the least of the sugar-candy variety, but which, while portraying foulness and suffering when they must be portrayed, yet have a joyous as well as a noble side.

~ Theodore Roosevelt

She found herself longing for home-not just for the hotel but for New York and all the real novels that she could lose herself in there.

~ Anna Godbersen