Books Quotes

His entire body was pleading for reassurance, and if her whole love was not enough what else could she give him to cure his doubt?

~ Anaïs Nin

Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.

~ Susan Sontag

No two readers can or will ever read the same book, because the reader builds the book in collaboration with the author.

~ Neil Gaiman

Any book is my kind of book that I can read with delight.

~ A. Edward Newton

No man and woman know what will be born in the darkness of their intermingling; so much besides children, so many invisible births, exchanges of soul and character, blossoming of unknown selves, liberation of hidden treasures, buried fantasies...

~ Anaïs Nin

Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

~ Susan Sontag

No we should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

~ Susan Sontag

The potion drunk by lovers is prepared by no one but themselves. The potion is the sum of one's whole existence.

~ Anaïs Nin

Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.

~ Aaron Swartz

Without a doubt,I must read,all the booksI've read about.See the artworkshung on hooks,that I have only,seen in books.

~ Lang Leav

I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I cannot live without reading.

~ Aidan Chambers

In the end, what makes a book valuable is not the paper it’s printed on, but the thousands of hours of work by dozens of people who are dedicated to creating the best possible reading experience for you.

~ John Green

The point is, Jenna, no one is normal or perfect like that house you see across the street. Everyone suffers from their own struggles, whether they’re big or small.

~ E.l. Montes

Ten minutes of careful searching later, Maelyn faced the dismal truth - she was bookless.

~ Anita Valle

There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don't really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping.

~ Matt Haig

Have you ever looked at, say, a picture or a great building or read a paragraph in a book and felt the world suddenly expand and, in the same instant, contract and harden into a kernel of perfect purity? Do you know what I mean? Everything suddenly fits, everything's in its place.

~ Carol Shields

He who studies old books will always find in them something new, and he who reads new books will always find in them something old.

~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Books require titles reading them doesn't

~ Alan Moore

Usually, I set one foot in a library and I feel my own internal volume lower. A library is a physical equivalent of a sigh. It’s the silence, sure, but it’s also the certainty of all those books, the way they stand side by side with their still, calm conviction. It’s the reassurance of knowledge in the face of confusion.

~ Deb Caletti

They were waiting for me in the books and in stories, after all, hiding inside the twenty six characters and a handful of punctuation marks. These letters and words, when placed in the right order, would conjure all manner of exotic beasts and people from the shadows, would reveal the motives and minds of insects and of cats. They were spells, spelled with words to make worlds, waiting for me, in the pages of books.

~ Neil Gaiman

Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.

~ Alan Bennett

Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old.

~ C.s. Lewis

Reading makes me feel like I've lived a thousand lives in addition to my own.

~ Arlaina Tibensky

I dusted my books off, placing each one—sorted alphabetically and by genre—on the shelves Dad installed. What some people might call “anal,” I’d call efficient. What good was it to have a book if you couldn’t find it when you wanted it?

~ Aileen Erin

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book.

~ Marcel Proust

You got shook and shook till there was nothing left. You lost your name and your body and your self and you just didn't care.

~ Anthony Burgess

The love I knew was from books..

~ Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Hate will cause you to catch a case. Release yourself from your own personal jail before you are put in the real one for life! It ain't worth it!!

~ Anita R. Sneed-Carter

They were steaming out of the station before Maia asked, 'Was it books in the trunk?''It was books, admitted Miss Minton.And Maia said, 'Good.

~ Eva Ibbotson

I just love the smell of an old book store and the feel of the crisp pages along my fingertips.

~ Leah Spiegel

She read all sorts of things: travels, and sermons, and old magazines. Nothing was so dull that she couldn't get through with it. Anything really interesting absorbed her so that she never knew what was going on about her. The little girls to whose houses she went visiting had found this out, and always hid away their story-books when she was expected to tea. If they didn't do this, she was sure to pick one up and plunge in, and then it was no use to call her, or tug at her dress, for she neither saw nor heard anything more, till it was time to go home.

~ Susan Coolidge

As soon as I got into the library I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I got a whiff of the leather on all the old books, a smell that got real strong if you picked one of them up and stuck your nose real close to it when you turned the pages. Then there was the the smell of the cloth that covered the brand-new books, books that made a splitting sound when you opened them. Then I could sniff the the paper, that soft, powdery, drowsy smell that comes off the page in little puffs when you're reading something or looking at some pictures, kind of hypnotizing smell.I think it's the smell that makes so many folks fall asleep in the library. You'll see someone turn a page and you can imagine a puff of page powder coming up real slow and easy until it starts piling on a person's eyelashes, weighing their eyes down so much they stay down a little longer after each blink and finally making them so heavy that they just don't come back up at all. Then their mouths open and their heads start bouncing up and down like they're bobbing in a big tub of of water for apples and before you know it... they're out cold and their face thunks smack-dab on the book.That's the part that makes librarians the maddest. They get real upset if folks start drooling in the books

~ Christopher Paul Curtis

DEAR DI­ARYYou are greater than the BibleAnd the Con­fer­ence of the BirdsAnd the Up­an­ishadsAll put to­geth­erYou are more se­vereThan the Scrip­turesAnd Ham­mura­bi’s CodeMore dan­ger­ous than Luther’s pa­perNailed to the Cathe­dral doorYou are sweet­erThan the Song of SongsMight­ier by farThan the Epic of Gil­gameshAnd braverThan the Sagas of Ice­landI bow my head in grat­itudeTo the ones who give their livesTo keep the se­cretThe dai­ly se­cretUn­der lock and keyDear Di­aryI mean no dis­re­spectBut you are more sub­limeThan any Sa­cred TextSome­times just a listOf my eventsIs holi­er than the Bill of RightsAnd more in­tense

~ Leonard Cohen

We can trace the communitarian fantasy that lies at the root of all humanism back to the model of a literary society, in which participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring messages. At the heart of humanism so understood we discover a cult or club fantasy: the dream of the portentous solidarity of those who have been chosen to be allowed to read. In the ancient world—indeed, until the dawn of the modern nation-states—the power of reading actually did mean something like membership of a secret elite; linguistic knowledge once counted in many places as the provenance of sorcery. In Middle English the word 'glamour' developed out of the word 'grammar'. The person who could read would be thought easily capable of other impossibilities.

~ Peter Sloterdijk

There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest, “I want you to love her, too!” It is a jealous passion also. He feels a little indignant if he finds that any one else has discovered the book, too.

~ Christopher Morley

And tell them all about the books you've read. Better still, buy some more books and read them. That's an order. You can never read too many books.

~ P.b. Kerr

In a book, even the real bastards can't hurt you. And you can never loose a friend you make in a book. When you get to a sad part, no one's there to see you cry. Or wonder why you don't cry when you should.

~ Dean Koontz

LibrariesAreNeccessaryGardens,UnsurpassedAtGrowingExcitement

~ J. Patrick Lewis

Let me begin with a heartfelt confession.I admit it. I am a biblioholic, one who loves books and whose life would seem incomplete without them. I am an addict, with a compulsive need to stop by nearly any bookstore I pass in order to get my fix. Books are an essential part of my life, the place where I have spent many unforgettable moments. For me, reading is one of the most enjoyable ways to pass a rainy afternoon or a leisurely summer day. I crave the knowledge and insights that truly great books bring into my life and can spend transported hours scouring used book stores for volumes which I simply must have. I love the smell and feel of well-loved books and the look of a bookcase full of books waiting to be taken down and read.

~ Terry W. Glaspey