Books Quotes

Time…Once it’s gone, it belongs to the past.We do not hold on to the now, andWe do not treasure the future…We keep receiving this present, but we never open and cherish it until it is too late.Until it comes no more.

~ Michelle Horst

Quote from “FUTURE GONE”:“…I set the house on fire. It’s dark outside. The fire tears down the darkness. I turn my back to the place and leave, not knowing where. And suddenly I understand…All dreams are dead now”.

~ Alexandar Tomov

When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.

~ Julian Barnes

But even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight — matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows.

~ Leon Wieseltier

Her seven-year-old self had decided that stealing books was morally bankrupt, but since the books hadn’t actually left the library—they’d merely been relocated—it wasn’t technically stealing. Echo looked around at her sea of tomes, and a single word came to mind: Tsundoku. It was the Japanese word for letting books pile up without reading them all.

~ Melissa Grey

The core – and perhaps unexpected – thing that books do for us is simplify. It sounds odd, because we think of literature as sophisticated. But there are powerful ways in which books organise, and clarify our concerns – and in this sense simplify.

~ Alain De Botton

Literature recounts history, explores knowledge, narrates universal themes of human existence, actives human conscience, enhances understanding of human motives, and explicates the nuances of human behavior.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge.

~ Thomas C. Foster

In literature, the reader standing at the threshold of the end of a book harbors no illusion that the end has not come—he or she can see where it finishes, the abyss the other side of the last chunk of text. Which means that the writer is never in danger of ending too soon—or if he does the reader has been so forewarned. This is the advantage a book has over a film—it is the brain that marshals forward the text and controls the precise moment of conclusion of the book, as the density of the pages thins. A film can end without you if you’ve fallen asleep or, because you can’t wait any longer to use the bathroom, slipped out of the darkness of the theatre salon, and missed it. There will never be a form more perfect than the book, which always moves at your pace, that sits waiting for you exactly where you’ve left it and never goes on without you.

~ John M. Keller

But now books and men had gone their separate ways. Who has the patience for a book? Only a book.

~ John M. Keller

Stories shape the world.

~ Lance Conrad

I can imagine her memories of the novel, or, more likely, of who she was and how she felt when reading it.

~ Rabih Alameddine

I want all the books on the she

~ E.l. Konigsburg

A vision of the little house in Soho flickered across his mind’s eye, his mother at a desk, writing in her journal, with hazy sunlight streaming through the morning windows. The woman inhabited a world he had once thought his own – a world of publishers and reliable suppliers. A London that was confident and competent amid its grey, puddle-strewn streets.

~ Sara Sheridan

Reading is an intimate act, perhaps more intimate than any other human act. I say that because of the prolonged (or intense) exposure of one mind to another.

~ Harold Brodkey

Our existence has always and everywhere been tragic, but man has converted these numberless tragedies into works of art. I know of nothing more astonishing or more wonderful than this transformation.

~ Maxim Gorky

Like some wondrous birds out of fairy tales, books sang their songs to me and spoke to me as though communing with one languishing in prison; they sang of the variety and richness of life, of man’s audacity in his strivings towards goodness and beauty.

~ Maxim Gorky

Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I at the other end of the Age of the Written Word am impressed by the sturdiness and reliability of words on paper... The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies.

~ Jonathan Franzen

And did the distress I was feeling derive from some internal sickness of the soul, or was it imposed on me by the sickness of society? That someone besides me had suffered from these ambiguities and had seen light on their far side... that I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf—felt akin to an instance of religious grace.

~ Jonathan Franzen

Technically, you cannot really own a book you bought; you can only own the sheets of paper your copy is printed on; unless, of course, you are the book’s publisher.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Books have that strange quality, that being of the frailest and tenderest matter, they outlast brass, iron and marble.

~ William Drummond

Words are the only things that last for ever.

~ William Hazlitt

Literature is life.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression, they exist where a word has never intruded.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Publishers are businesses and I don’t blame them for that. If they didn’t make money by publishing books, there wouldn’t be any books.

~ Johnny Rich

A good book is not the same as a successful one.

~ Johnny Rich

A novel must be judged on its merits, not on how hard the journey was to write it.

~ Johnny Rich

It was pretty silly quoting poetry around free and easy like that. It was the act of a silly damn snob. Give man a few lines of verse and he thinks he's the Lord of all Creation. You think you can walk on water with all your books. Well, the world can get by just fine without them.

~ Ray Bradbury

No matter how revolutionary people were, he said, they could not live without books. Without books, we would not understand the world; without books, we could not develop; without books, nature could not serve humanity.

~ Xinran

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently

~ Jeanette Winterson

A book did not qualify as literature unless it had polysyllabic words and incomprehensible passages.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Words are just words, a book never harmed anyone by itself.

~ Rob May

Later that night though, as I stayed awake into the early hours of morning devouring the second novel in a series, I understood what it meant to befriend a book. The books knew me, far better than I knew them; they knew my fears, my doubts, my dreams. They gave words to feelings I did not even realize I experienced. They listened. They consoled. They kept me company. The books gave me a life outside of my own.

~ Kelseyleigh Reber

To leap over the wall of self, to look through another’s eyes--this is valuable experience, which literature offers.

~ X. J. Kennedy

The night I sat down to read Dostoievski for the first time was a most important event in my life, even more important than my first love. It was the first deliberate, conscious act which had significance for me; it changed the whole face of the world. Whether it is true that the clock stopped that moment when I looked up after the first deep gulp I don't know any more. But the world stopped dead for a moment, that I know. It was my first glimpse into the soul of a man, or shall I say simply that Dostoievski was the first man to reveal his soul to me?Henry Miller

~ Henry Miller Shreve

The world of books, the greatest possessions.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Literature is impossible, in exactly this sense: every new generation has so much 'catching up' to do that the real choice that presents itself soon is the following one: one either spends ones entire life just reading all the classics, or one pretends to be 'contemporary and hip' and never reads any of the classics because in order to pretend to be contemporary one has to at least superficially read the works of contemporaries. Hence the dilemma: one either does not care about being fashionable, or one is fashionable and just learns to mimic some knowledge about the classics. As time develops this rift just becomes bigger, because the amount of books written grows and grows to insane proportions. Conclusion: one can only be hip in the future if one does not read at all, which is a phenomenon I am already witnessing in the media.

~ Martijn Benders

Give at least fifteen minutes everyday to reading. Sometimes, we spend a lot of time watching television - surfing through channels; not really watching anything in particular. Fifteen minutes out of that time is not a big deal. Soon you will find yourself reading for more than fifteen minutes. Soon you will find yourself turning to a book when you need to relax. Soon you will realize that reading a book heals you in a way you never imagined possible.

~ Arti Honrao

I think of literature - she wrote - as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but cannot possibly reach. And I have started too late. I will never catch up.

~ Alan Bennett

In classrooms and living rooms across the globe, an agnostic or an atheist may be heard to strenuously argue, 'But the Bible is just a book.' Similar arguments may be raised against other holy books. But they all are too ironic, by half. A book is the Bible.

~ Gerald Weaver