Books Quotes

Often something looks, or is felt to look, better in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things. (Hence, one is always disappointed by a photograph that is not flattering.)

~ Susan Sontag

A place is not really a place without a bookstore.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

This allowed her two glorious hours sitting quietly by herself in a cozy corner, devouring one book after another. When she had read every single children's book in the place, she started wandering round in search of something else.

~ Roald Dahl

A professional headshot in front of a bookshelf says you're an intellectual. A professional headshot peeking though a bookshelf says you're probably under a restraining order.

~ Ryan Lilly

Never before had I felt trapped, so seduced and caught up in a story,' Clara explained, 'the way I did with that book. Until then, reading was just a duty, a sort of fine one had to pay teachers and tutors without quite knowing why. I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel. This is a world of shadows, Daniel, and magic is a rare asset. That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn't matter to anyone, changed my life.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Every time you open a book for the first time, there is something akin to safe-breaking about it. Yes, that's exactly it: the frantic reader is like a burglar who has spent hours digging a tunnel to enter the strongroom of a bank. He emerges face to face with hundreds of strongboxes, all identical, and opens them one by one. And each time a box is opened, it loses its anonymity and becomes unique: one is filled with paintings, another with a bundle of banknotes, a third with jewels or letters tied in ribbon, engravings, objects of no value at all, silverware, photos, gold sovereigns, dried flowers, files of paper, crystal glasses, or children’s toys--and so on. There is something intoxicating about opening a new one, finding its contents and feeling overjoyed that in a trice one is no longer in front of a set of boxes, but in the presence of the riches and wretched banalities that make up human existence.

~ Jacques Bonnet

The book that simply demands to be read, for no good reason, is asking us to change our lives by putting aside what we usually think of as good reasons. It's asking us to stop calculating. It's asking us to do something for the plain old delight and interest of it, not because we can justify its place on the mental spreadsheet or accounting ledger (like the one Benjamin Franklin kept) by which we tote up the value of our actions.

~ Alan Jacobs

Let this little book be thy friend, if, owing to fortune or through thine own fault, thou canst not find a dearer companion.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

So much is yet to come. Soon will be blankets and pillows, and books by the bed to make the stuff of dreams. And then tomorrows.

~ Jim Mccann

You are what you eat and read.

~ Maya Corrigan

Somewhere between 'not enough' and 'not at all.' I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it - to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once. But they never gave that to me. Never, not once.

~ Haruki Murakami

No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lyingas in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.

~ Thomas Carlyle

What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

~ Anthony Burgess

My fingers burn behind the keys of my typewriter, the lettering fading with every thoughtful strike. The many words I write I dare not stall; my mind perpetually alert for my magnum opus call.

~ A.k. Kuykendall

Who can know anybody?' said the bookshop owner. 'Every person is like thousands of books. New, reprinting, in stock, out of stock, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, rubbish. The lot. Different every day. One's lucky to be able to put his hand on the one that's wanted, let alone know it.

~ Russell Hoban

Books are the only things worth stealing.

~ Sully Tarnish

You can viddy that everything in this wicked world counts. You can pony that one thing always leads to another. Right right right.

~ Anthony Burgess

The thrill of theft, of violence, the urge to live easy - is it worth it when we have undeniable proof, yes, yes, incontrovertible evidence that hell exists?

~ Anthony Burgess

I still love the book-ness of books, the smell of books: I am a book fetishist—books to me are the coolest and sexiest and most wonderful things there are.

~ Neil Gaiman

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there wil always be a place for them.

~ Neil Gaiman

Choosing a new book was like looking for treasure.

~ Kit Pearson

I am no novel-reader -- I seldom look into novels -- Do not imagine that I often read novels -- It is really very well for a novel. Such is the common cant. And what are you reading, Miss -- ? Oh! It is only a novel! replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.

~ Jane Austen

No, but I do read a lot. I love to read. I could read for days and never stop. I use to be such a bookworm. I would barely look up to notice much of anything.

~ Jennifer Loren

Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.

~ Anthony Powell

There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on--a more reliable world in so far as it does not hide that its premise is illusion.

~ Graham Swift

Life without books, chocolate & coffee is just useless.

~ Nadun Lokuliyanage

Katey's the hottest bookworm you'll ever meet. If you took all the books that she's read and piled them in a stack, you could climb to the Milky Way.

~ Amor Towles

But eating was the last thing on my mind. And I didn't see how Miss Wilcox could eat, or teach, or sleep or ever find any reason to leave this room. Not with all these books in it, just begging to be read.

~ Jennifer Donnelly

I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.

~ Nick Hornby

More than at any other time, when I hold a beloved book in my hand my limitations fall from me, my spirit is free.

~ Helen Keller

Jesus, Mary …”She said it out loud, the words distributed into a room that was full of cold air and books. Books everywhere! Each wall was armed with overcrowded yet immaculate shelving. It was barely possible to see the paintwork. There were all different styles and sizes of lettering on the spines of the black, the red, the gray, the every-colored books. It was one of the most beautiful things Liesel Meminger had ever seen.With wonder, she smiled.That such a room existed!Even when she tried to wipe the smile away with her forearm, she realized instantly that it was a pointless exercise. She could feel the eyes of the woman traveling her body, and when she looked at her, they had rested on her face.There was more silence than she ever thought possible. It extended like an elastic, dying to break. The girl broke it.“Can I?”The two words stood among acres and acres of vacant, wooden-floored land. The books were miles away.The woman nodded.Yes, you can

~ Markus Zusak

I hate it when everyone is so noble and good in a story that you can't imagine it being true at all.

~ Patricia Finney

Gro Rollag was no beauty, but she was a strong capable young woman with a long face, prominent cheekbones, high forehead, and a kindly intelligent look in her rather narrow eyes. According to family lore, she was not the most conscientious housekeeper because she preferred reading to housework. A love of books and reading ran in the family. Of all the possessions they were forced to sell or leave behind in Norway, what the Rollags remembered with deepest regret was the library they inherited from an eighteenth-century ancestor - lovely old books sold to pay for their passage to America.

~ David Laskin

Dr. Manning said he'd thought at first it might be sleeping sickness, or even narcolepsy, whatever that was, but - no, Pete was healthy enough physically. Manoel growled that the boy was bone-lazy, spending his time fishing and reading. Reading! No good could come of such things.'In a way you're right, Manoel,' Dr. Manning said hesitantly. 'It's natural for a boy to day-dream now and then, but I think Pedro does it too much. I've let him use my library whenever he wanted, but it seems... h'm... it seems he reads the wrong things. Fairy tales are very charming, but they don't help a boy to cope with real life.''Com certeza,' Manoel agreed. 'You mean he has crazy ideas in the head.''Oh, they're rather nice ideas,' Dr. Manning said. 'But they're only fairy tales, and they're beginning to seem true to Pete. You see, Manoel, there are really two worlds, the real one, and the one you make up inside your mind. Sometimes a boy - or even a man - gets to like his dream world so much he just forgets about the real one and lives in the one he's made up.''I know,' Manoel said. 'I have seen some who do that. It is a bad thing.''It would be bad for Pete. He's a very sensitive boy. If you live too much in dreams, you can't face real life squarely.'(Before I Wake...)

~ Henry Kuttner

Maelyn smiled. If books could have litters, she'd be just as happy.

~ Anita Valle

I suppose if I had to give a one-word answer to the question of why I read, that word would be pleasure. The kind of pleasure you can get from reading is like no other in the world.

~ Wendy Lesser

The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.

~ Ross Macdonald

Only a few days earlier he had explained to her that he did not merely read books but traveled with them, that they took him to other countries and unfamiliar continents, and that with their help he was always getting to know new people, many of whom even became his friends.

~ Jan-Philipp Sendker

While art thrives on the blazing colours of scandal, literature blossoms on the dark soil of tragedy.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

Learning to decipher words had only added to the pleasures of holding spines and turning pages, measuring the journey to the end with a thumb-riffle, poring over frontispieces. Books! Opening with a crackle of old glue, releasing perfume; closing with a solid thump.

~ John Crowley