Words Quotes

So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.

~ Roald Dahl

The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.

~ Roald Dahl

There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you've read only once can't.

~ Gail Carson Levine

The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.

~ René Descartes

I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.

~ Emily Dickinson

I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.

~ Roger Zelazny

Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

~ Marcel Proust

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.

~ Alberto Manguel

She was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells.

~ Dean Koontz

A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn't know how to read.

~ Benjamin Franklin

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarna

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

~ Harold Bloom

The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

~ Malcolm X

There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.

~ Muriel Barbery

I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.

~ Wisława Szymborska

Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.

~ Alberto Manguel

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.

~ Marcel Proust

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

~ Jeanette Winterson

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows... I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul.

~ Fernando Pessoa

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

~ Virginia Woolf

I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul.

~ Henry Miller

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

~ Umberto Eco

We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

~ Franz Kafka

I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.

~ Naomi Shihab Nye

I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.

~ Sylvia Plath

Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.

~ Samuel Butler

Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.

~ Bohumil Hrabal

I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em.

~ Ray Bradbury

Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.

~ David Quammen

Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head.

~ Orhan Pamuk

What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.

~ John Updike

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

~ Helen Keller

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

~ E.m. Forster