Bookshelves Quotes

I love to go the library to borrow books. But I also enjoyed buying books to create my sacred library.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I love walking into a bookstore. It's like all my friends are sitting on shelves, waving their pages at me.

~ Tahereh Mafi

Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.

~ Alberto Manguel

My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closest. Their selves were on their shelves.

~ Anne Fadiman

Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Filmmaker John Waters has said, “Nothing is more important than an unread library.

~ Austin Kleon

Built-in shelves line my bedroom, adjacent to my Japanese platform bed, purchased for its capacious rim, the better to hold those books that must be immediately accessible. Yet still they pile on my nightstand, and the grid of shelves continues in floor-to-ceiling formation across the wall, stampeding over the doorway in disorderly fashion, political memoirs mixed in with literary essays, Victorian novels fighting for space with narrative adventure, the Penguin classics never standing together in a gracious row no matter how hard I try to impose order. The books compete for attention, assembling on the shelf above the sofa on the other side of the room, where they descend by the window, staring back at me. As I lie in bed with another book, they lie in wait.

~ Pamela Paul

Browsing through the shelves in bookstores or libraries, I was completely happy.

~ Louis L'amour

My books are my brain and my heart made visible.

~ Merilyn Simonds

Simply put, I love books, physical books. I own so many--many of which I have not read (yet). I just need to have them . On shelves. In piles. In random conference tote bags. Paper magazines and newspapers too. Some call it clutter. I call it cozy. It's comforting to know I am surrounded by pages of stories. And, thus, by storytellers.

~ Donna Talarico

How can you be bored? There are so many books to read!

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

His chief form of entertainment was reading. The last moments he was in a cabin were usually spent scanning bookshelves and nightstands. The life inside a book always felt welcoming to Knight. It pressed no demands on him, while the world of actual human interactions was so complex. Conversations between people can move like tennis games, swift and unpredictable. There are constant subtle visual and verbal cues, there's innuendo, sarcasm, body language, tone. Everyone occasionally fumbles an encounter, a victim of social clumsiness. It's part of being human.To Knight, it all felt impossible. His engagement with the written word might have been the closest he could come to genuine human encounters. The stretch of days between thieving raids allowed him to tumble into the pages, and if he felt transported he could float in bookworld, undisturbed, for as long as he pleased.

~ Michael Finkel

A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him.

~ Walter Mosley

This is every reader's catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing. There is no way to finish, and perhaps that shouldn't be the goal.

~ Pamela Paul

The pleasure of reading is the greatest solitude.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Until a man begins to read, then He will discover himself.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I am happy to have all the books I need to read.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

How could we love books more than money? This is the state of book lovers.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

There are so many books to read. What a paradise!

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The world of books, the greatest possessions.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

People with large book collections are almost always diligent learners.

~ Marie Kondō

What would I have done without books?

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

My books, my paradise!

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Life is a book.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

A bookshelf is a biography written by others.

~ Kat Lehmann

On a cloudy day, when the dim dance of the firelight and the warmth of the sconces are not enough, the books shed their own form of light. By the hundreds, they fill the shelves that stretch across every inch of exposed wall. They rise up to the ceiling, warriors of an impenetrable army, encircling my over-sized armchair and keeping me safe as they whisper their stories softly in my ear.

~ Kelseyleigh Reber

If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell because to my mind heaven like life must be a thing sensual and real. And my book will be a river and have the Salmon literal and metaphoric leaping inside it and be called History of the Rain, so that his book does not perish, and you will know my book exists because of him and because of his books and his aspiration to leap up, to rise. You will know that I found him in his books, in the covers his hands held, the pages they turned, in the paper and the print, but also in the worlds those books contained, where now I have been and you have been too. You will know the story goes from the past to the present and into the future, and like a river flows.

~ Niall Williams

The worst part about her new chambers was that all these wardrobes and vanities and drapes meant there was no space--none at all--for a bookcase. Who on earth could feel comfortable enough to sleep in a room with no books?

~ Cynthia Hand

The more you read,the eager you read many more.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

A book can become your best companion in times of crisis.Not only do you learn in the journey of your pages, but rediscover yourself, with your virtues and defects ... often makes you question everything, even life itself.The books are fantastic, as they not only transport you to other places and the awakening of sensations, curiosity, laughter, hilarity, sadness, etc. Other times, it can give you a quiet space in truculent moments, and lead you to a level of peace, acceptance, healthy optimism, that I will never tire of recommending it.Never stop reading, there are no excuses ... there are always some minutes in any place, at any time and a huge universe for all tastes !!!

~ Liz Hay

Books are more to treasure than cars.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Bookshelves stood against the four walls. They were shapely and well made, but were all second-hand; Hetty had picked them up on visits to Chesterbourne. She liked her shelves to have personality, as well as the books on them, and thought it would have been simpler to order shelves to be fitted around the room, or to buy those bookcases that grow with the growth of their library, she had stood firm against the amusement of Victor and the irritation of her aunt, and had the shelves she wanted.

~ Stella Gibbons