Books Quotes

at home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.

~ Lisel Mueller

With a slow wink, he set the book in Tamaqua’s hands. “One of my favorites.

~ C.j. Milbrandt

Writers: read books. Read good books. Read bad books. Learn what does and does not work.

~ Kira Hawke

There were two immediate results of my forced loneliness: I began to find company in books, and greater pleasure in music.

~ James Weldon Johnson

I think I'm going through a bit of ADD. I'm reading 3 books simultaneously and it's something that I don't recommend. It's like watching TV with two others who keep changing the channels...

~ S.j. Romero

If e-book readers were invented before print books, (petty things such as) the smell of ink would have been some people’s only reason for not abandoning e-books.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Feel-good books were ones you could put down with a smile on your face, books that made you think the world was a little crazier, stranger, and more beautiful when you looked up from them.

~ Katarina Bivald

There's always a person for every book. And a book for every person.

~ Katarina Bivald

Some books are so special that you never forget where you were the first time you read them.

~ Natalie Lloyd

Amedeo loved thick tomes, and in tackling them he felt the physical pleasure of undertaking a great task. Weighing them in his hand, thick, closely printed, squat, he would consider with some apprehension the number of pages, the length of the chapters, then venture into them, a bit reluctant at the beginning, without any desire to perform the initial chore of remembering the names, catching the drift of the story; then he would entrust himself to it, running along the lines, crossing the grid of the uniform page, and beyond the leaden print the flame and fire of battle appeared, the cannonball that, whistling through the sky, fell at the feet of Prince Andrei, and the shop filled with engravings and statues where Frederic Moreau, his heart in his mouth, was to meet the Arnoux family. Beyond the surface of the page you entered a world where life was more alive than here on this side…

~ Italo Calvino

Books required no interchanges of thoughts and feelings, no trading of expectations, no traffic of words, no menace of real loss. Reading books required far less energy than reading people; the pages seldom disappointed him and they never died.

~ Dan Groat

As long as she had books and money, nothing could be a catastrophe.

~ Katarina Bivald

I do not think that there can ever be enough books about anything; and I say that knowing that some of them are going to be about Pilates. The more knowledge, the better seems like the a solid rule of thumb, even though I have watched enough science fiction films to accept that humanity's unchecked pursuit of learning will end with robots taking over the world.

~ Sarah Vowell

People experience books so very differently.

~ Amy Neftzger

Reading had always been, through bad, boring, or better times, his best connection to humans.

~ Dan Groat

If you are brave, you will open the book and read it.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

~ Oscar Wilde

In a way, the books were protection. An escape she would always have access to.A sanctuary, there for when she needed it.

~ C.m. Spivey

Reading is solitude. One reads alone, even in another's presence.

~ Italo Calvino

For many of our Greek friends a book is a final desperate attempt to fill the existential void when there is no one to talk to, nothing to do, no television to view, nothing in the street to watch and even the middle distance holds nothing to stare at. To be seen carrying a book in public, let alone reading one, is a mark of eccentricity or foreignness.

~ John Mole

There are so many works of the mind, so much humanity, that to disburden ourselves of ourselves is an understandable temptation. Open a book and a voice speaks. A world, more or less alien or welcoming, emerges to enrich a reader's store of hypotheses about how life is to be understood. As with scientific hypotheses, even failure is meaningful, a test of the boundaries of credibility. So many voices, so many worlds, we can weary of them. If there were only one human query to be heard in the universe, and it was only the sort of thing we were always inclined to wonder about--Where did all this come from? or, Why could we never refrain from war?--we would hear in it a beauty that would overwhelm us. So frail a sound, so brave, so deeply inflected by the burden of thought, that we would ask, Whose voice is this? We would feel a barely tolerable loneliness, hers and ours. And if there were another hearer, not one of us, how starkly that hearer would apprehend what we are and were.

~ Marilynne Robinson

I know the mind of ancient souls by reading ancient books.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I can understand now why people read, why they like to get lost in somebody else's life. Sometimes I'll read a sentence and it will make me sit up, jolt me, because it is something that I have recently felt but never said out loud. I want to reach in to the page and tell the characters that I understand them, that they're not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's okay to feel like this.

~ Cecelia Ahern

Nearly all our associations are determined by chance or necessity; and restricted within a narrow circle. We cannot know whom we would; and those whom we know, we cannot have at our side when we most need them. All the higher circles of human intelligence are, to those beneath, only momentarily and partially open... there is a society continually open to us, of people who will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our rank or occupation; — talk to us in the best words they can choose, and of the things nearest their hearts. And this society, because it is so numerous and so gentle, and can be kept waiting around us all day long, — kings and statesmen lingering patiently, not to grant audience, but to gain it! — in those plainly furnished and narrow ante-rooms, our bookcase shelves, — we make no account of that company, — perhaps never listen to a word they would say, all day long!

~ John Ruskin

Cats and books are my universe. Both are infinitely fascinating and full of mystery.

~ Rai Aren

The point is, every book we had could save us in a different way -- only, we had to open it. We had to drop our eyes to the page and drink in the words that were there.

~ Nova Ren Suma

It is rather whenWe gloriously forget ourselves, and plungeSoul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound,Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth--'Tis then we get the right good from a book.

~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I loved books, even as I loved the similar way opium had of transporting a mind elsewhere

~ Karina Cooper

The best feeling in the world might be when you finish a book and you get to pick out another.

~ Kira Hawke

There are books written to be read.There are books written to be sold.The first ones have the soul and lessons you need.The second ones are just plain, empty, and cold.

~ Alexandr Iscenco

The treasures in my house are books.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Reading sparks writing.

~ A.d. Posey

How you feel after reading something indicates not what you’ve read but where you are at.

~ A.d. Posey

Reading opens up other pockets of the mind.

~ A.d. Posey

Maslow said sex is the primary need. Does that mean pornstars spend more money in books than anyone else?

~ Daniel Marques

I love the smell of old books,” Mandy sighed, inhaling deeply with the book pressed against her face. The yellow pages smelled of wood and paper mills and mothballs.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

Books are my greatest treasures.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The greatest treasures are books.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Well there's these things called books.... They are like TV for smart people.

~ Robert Redford

The nobles had made reading unpopular, as it showed that one couldn’t afford to buy spells or magical devices, since one had to get knowledge to do things the ordinary way; even if this view held little logic, the king himself was known to insult readers as “bookfaces” or “unable to think for themselves, so they need to spout what others have said,” and these opinions became popular, as did most views expressed by the king or his son.

~ Colleen Chen