Books Quotes

He sits at the table and reads novels, old favorites of his, the words and plots and characters comforting and lived-in and unchanged.

~ Hanya Yanagihara

Everybody loves to hate a sinner, reading stories about them makes people feel better about themselves.

~ Tycobbsteeth

Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet. It can never be a sculpture. It can be elegant and very beautiful, but it can never be sculpture. Captive to facts - or predetermined form - it cannot fly.

~ Peter Matthiessen

The best plot twists are the ones you didn't expect.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Like the roller coaster of life...novels aren't fun without ups and downs and even an occasional loop.

~ Carmen Desousa

Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.

~ Novalis

Novels arise out of the shortcoings of history.

~ Novalis

Life is'nt about getting everything you want the instant you want it.Some thing are worth waiting for.

~ Mira Lyn Kelly

You don't spend your life hanging around books without learning a thing or two.

~ Lemony Snicket

She liked books, but the hours spent in small-town libraries were tedious, and she began the first list when she was eight or nine as a means of distraction. A list of names, eventually expanding to ten or twelve pages: Lilia, Gabriel, Anna, Michelle. In every town her name was different.

~ Emily St. John Mandel

It's night in the Free People's World Tree Library. All the librarians are asleep, ... between the pages of their enchanted novels.

~ Kelly Link

The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering myself.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I remember as a very young child being warned that libraries and bookstores were quiet places where noise wasn’t allowed. Here was yet another thing the adults had gotten wrong, for these book houses pulsed with sounds; they just weren’t noisy. The books hummed. The collective noise they made was like riding on a large boat where the motor’s steady thrum and tickle vibrated below one’s sneakers, ignorable until you listened, then omnipresent and relentless, the sound that carried you forward. Each book brimmed with noises it wanted to make inside your head the moment you opened it; only the shut covers prevented it from shouting ideas, impulses, proverbs, and plots into that sterile silence.

~ Wendy Welch

I am often asked a stock question: 'Have you actually read all those books?' To this I have my answer ready: 'Is there anybody who has read all the books in his library?' That would be like claiming to enjoy the incredible luxury and good fortune of being able to accomplish everything in this life that one would wish.

~ Konstantinos Staikos

They could take the money from building enough nukes to kill all the Russians in the world and give it to libraries. What good does an independent nuclear deterrent do Britain, compared to the good of libraries?

~ Jo Walton

when the press and problems of humanity become too much, I love to escape into books, where people are served up in digestible portions and can be pushed to one side when one is satiated.

~ Jane Wilson-Howarth

Morris tried to keep the books in some sort of order, but they always mixed themselves up. The tragedies needed cheering up and would visit with the comedies. The encyclopedias, weary of facts, would relax with the comic books and fictions. All in all it was an agreeable jumble.

~ William Joyce

Libraries are brothels for the mind. Which means that librarians are the madams, greeting punters, understanding their strange tastes and needs, and pimping their books.

~ Guy Browning

One of the many reasons I love libraries. Everyone is lost and not wanting to be found in a library.

~ Sarah Noffke

Millions of pages cloaked in dust and inspiration and wisdom.

~ Sarah Noffke

You poor girl, what sort of aged, unfriendly Libraries have you met in short life? A silent Library is a sad Library ... A Library should be full of exclamations! ... A Library should be full of now-just-a-minutes and that-can't-be-rights and scientifick folk running skelter to prove somebody wrong... A Library should not shush ; it should roar !

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Shara was already an avid reader by then, but she had never realized until that moment what books meant, the possibility they presented: you could protect them forever, store them up like engineers store water, endless resources of time and knowledge snared in ink, tied down to paper, layered on shelves.... Moments made physical, untouchable, perfect, like preserving a dead hornet in crystal, one drop of venom forever hanging from its stinger.She felt overwhelmed. It was--she briefly thinks of herself and Vo, reading together in the library--a lot like being in love for the first time.

~ Robert Jackson Bennett

Libraries are always bigger on the inside because every book has an entire word inside of it.

~ Robert Arger

But I didn't mind. I loved that everything was cataloged and ready to go and that I was technically now living and sleeping in a library.

~ B.j. Novak

Papa thought that any book worth reading twice was worth owning. So instead of buying desserts, we bought books.

~ Natalie S. Bober

She read her way around the library, hungry for journeys, adventures, laughter and passion. She took each new book to bed like a lover, savouring every chapter, going too far some nights until the letters danced like insects and she was groggy next day at work. But still she'd sneak away for lunchtime trysts, her eager fingers fumbling for the bookmark.

~ Cath Staincliffe

There is a sad disconnectedness that overcomes a library when its owner is gone.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thoughts were your own.

~ Jeanette Winterson

For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.

~ Gustave Flaubert

A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination.

~ Caitlin Moran

I told him. We got a library here. Got plenty of good books, too. -Larry Brown, Dirty Work

~ Larry Brown

For the rest of the afternoon, Miss Bloom smiled almost as bright as the big yellow sun shining through the front picture window. Her library was filled up with people who loved books.

~ Augusta Scattergood

An ancient mustiness padded the air, tinged with with an acrid scent-a trace of the war between paper and oxygen, played out in slow inexorable burn that would one day crumble this empire to dust. -page 62

~ Jennifer Lee Carrell

Inside the front flap of the book were handwritten names of the dozen or so people who had checked the book out before Naomi. Instead of writing her name, Naomi had a thin paper receipt with the due date printed on it. She could never possess this book the way those other people had. It was one of those uselessly nostalgic and sentimental thoughts that serve only our own romantic ideals, but I couldn't help believing it was true nonetheless. I took a pencil out from behind the register and handed it to her.

~ Dinaw Mengestu

Massive changes may have occurred in libraries in recent years, with new digital resources and services supplementing the old traditional resources and services, the dog-eared card catalogues ripped up and destroyed, workstations suddenly everywhere, but one essential aspect of “libraryness” has not changed: libraries remain places dedicated to storage. Books continue to be published in greater and greater numbers – so great in fact that there are no accurate figures as to exactly how many are published: some say one every thirty seconds, others four thousand per day, others a million per year – and somehow, whether through the off-site storage of the physical books themselves, or microfilm copying, or digital scanning, we remain obliged to keep up with or afloat in this vast deluge of paper. Even the new, high-tech rebranded libraries opened to great fanfare in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in the 1990s could not get away from this essential fact of paper hoarding: they were called “Idea Stores.” - p.56

~ Ian Sansom

we're just paper on a shelf, in the end

~ Rachel Caine

A lexicographer a writer of dictionaries a harmless drudge.

~ Samuel Johnson

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.

~ Ernest Hemingway

All the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.

~ Richard De Bury

Books are the most mannerly of companions accessible at all times in all moods frankly declaring the author's mind without offense.

~ Amos Bronson Alcott