Books Quotes

Choose thy friends like thy books, few but choice

~ Howell James

Reading's not a luxury, art's not a luxury. It's about your soul, and it's about yourself. And if reading is a luxury, being human is a luxury

~ Jeanette Winterson

I do lend my books, but I have to be a bit selective because my marginalia are so incriminating.” --Alison Bechdel

~ Leah Price

I've had many more thousands of books in my possession than my shelves at home would indicate. At one time, I tried to keep them all, but that quest soon became impossible; I now only keep the ones I'm sure I'm going to reread, the ones I'm definitely going to read before I die, and the ones I can't bear to part with because of an aesthetic or emotional attachment.

~ Lewis Buzbee

Myrna could spend happy hours browsing bookcases. She felt if she could just get a good look at a person’s bookcase and their grocery cart, she’d pretty much know who they were.

~ Louise Penny

Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.

~ Louis L'amour

Real lives have no end. Real books have no end.

~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio

Now, public libraries are most admirable institutions, but they have one irritating custom. They want their books back.

~ Cecil B. Demille

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.

~ Roberto Bolaño

Fenworth owned a world-famous library. More rooms held books than beds. Pillows stuffed in niches and comfortable chairs scattered throughout each room offered abundant paces to curl up and read.

~ Donita K. Paul

There were thousands of brown books in leather bindings, some chained to the book-shelves and others propped against each other as if they had had too much to drink and did not really trust themselves. These gave out a smell of must and solid brownness which was most secure.

~ T.h. White

The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about.” Mallarmé repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said; “tout aboutit en un livre,” everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmé speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is the same; the idea that we are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

So -- I confess I have been a rake at reading. I have read those things which I ought not to have read, and I have not read those things which I ought to have read, and there is no health in me -- if by health you mean an inclusive and coherent knowledge of any body of great literature. I can only protest, like all rakes in their shameful senescence, that I have had a good time.

~ Robertson Davies

I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth a hundred 'great books' - and one brave deed is worth a thousand.

~ Edward Abbey

she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.

~ Alan Hollinghurst

Books? Ridley looked disgusted. Carry?

~ Kami Garcia

But really it says everything that’s wrong about the publishing industry, that a quarter of a million people bought and read a sex and shopping novel that wasn’t even written by one of those footballer girlfriends, and yet most of the shortlisted titles on the Orange Prize, which is an award for women writers, don’t even sell ten thousand copies. It’s just not right.

~ Sarra Manning

Books have always been among my most trusted of friends, Mr. Linden replied. The best of them allow the mind to wander wherever the author's musings lead.

~ Walter Dean Myers

Use more caution the next time you make a reading selection. Books, you know, are a lot like people, and each and every one of us is ultimately judged by the company we keep

~ Ethan Russell Erway

Everybody in the world ought to care for books, and if there are some who do not, why that is a perfectly convincing reason why books ought to be given to them, to be a rebuke to them and, perchance, to rescue them from the error of their ways.

~ Willis Johnson

A self without a shelf remains cryptic a home without books naked.

~ Leah Price

The story was so thoroughly believed that a Springfield, Massachusetts, missionary society resolved to send missionaries to the moon to convert and civilize the bat-men, apparently unaware that bat-men have lost all faith since they saw their parents gunned down in that alleyway.

~ Cracked.com

They were the sisterhood: their mothers at a younger age.

~ Ann Brashares

I don't know why we stopped reading together, but gradually we were not doing it regularly, and then without realizing it was happening we were reading different books, and gradually we came not to care about the book the other one was reading, because it was not the book we were reading, and we became bored and drifted off when the other one talked about his book. What we were doing, reading different books, was furnishing different rooms, constructing separate worlds almost, in which we could sit and be ourselves again. Of course those were rooms in which we each sat alone, and we gradually spent more and more time in them and less and less in the house we lived in together.

~ Sam Savage

All told, she owned fourteen books, but she saw her story as being made up predominantly of ten of them. Of those ten, six were stolen, one showed up at the kitchen table, two were made for her by a hidden Jew, and one was delivered by a soft, yellow-dressed afternoon.

~ Markus Zusak

Materializations are often best produced in rooms where there are books. I cannot think of any time when materialization was in any way hampered by the presence of books.

~ Shirley Jackson

And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before.

~ Ray Bradbury

There was a time in the ancient world - a very long time - in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books. Where to put them all? How to organize them on the groaning shelves? How to hold the profusion of knowledge in one's head? The loss of this plenitude would have been virtually inconceivable to anyone living in its midst. Then, not all at once but with the cumulative force of a mass extinction, the whole enterprise came to an end. What looked stable turned out to be fragile, and what had seemed for all time was only for the time being.

~ Stephen Greenblatt

I was never very good with either my hands or feet. It always seemed to me they'd just been stuck on as an afterthought during my making. Dreams didn't translate through sports, or music, dancing, carpentry, plumbing. I was the bookish kid, more at home in the pages of a fantasy than in the room in the town on the planet.

~ Steve Rasnic Tem

Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar. You have to hold it, you have to read it.

~ Ben Elton

You could never be certain what you would find in a book that had spent time with someone else.

~ Erica Bauermeister

And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.

~ Gregory Maguire

Back then I could not understand one word of what I read.Reading did, however, give me heart. Even if you cannot understand what you are reading you can get something from books.

~ Peter Høeg

Where's your common sense? None of those books agree with each other. You've been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived. Come on now!

~ Ray Bradbury

I've always believed in spreading the gospel of good books.

~ S. Evan Townsend

Escapism sold books, to be sure, but not nearly as many as were sold by exposing America’s flaws and making the average American reader (and book club member) look closely at his or her most cherished social assumptions. Americans might not be eager to accept integration, feminism, homosexuality, juvenile delinquency, and the drug culture– or to shoulder the blame for the existence of these problems– but they were certainly willing to read about them.

~ Michael Korda

The evils arising from the loss of her uncle were neither trifling nor likely to lessen; and when thought had been freely indulged, in contrasting the past and the present, the employment of mind and dissipation of unpleasant ideas which only reading could produce made her thankfully turn to a book.

~ Jane Austen

So we may use our books to form a barricade against the world,interweaving their words with our own to ward off the heat of the day.

~ Peter Ackroyd

I am not man or beast; I am bibliosexual, and a seedy bibliosexual who haunts the streets, laden with carrier bags held by blistered fingers, stooping under the weight of the rucksack that has brought on sciatica and a Dickensian demeanour.

~ Robin Ince

At times, I have been convinced that books hold all the material of life--at least all the stuff that fits between an A and a Z.

~ Abelardo Morell