Quotes about books

page 10

“Always remember the words of Descartes: The reading of all good books is like conversion with the finest men of the past centuries.”

“Books. Cats. Life is Good.”

“… the state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful book
is one of the main reasons I read;
but it doesn't happen every time
or even every other time,
and when it does happen,
I am truly beside myself.”

“That heartbreaking moment when you finish an amazing book, and you are forced to return to reality.”

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”

“Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.”

“I’ve always found that the better the book I’m reading, the smarter I feel, or, at least, the more able I am to imagine that I might, someday, become smarter.”

“A book should be a garden that fits in the hands. Word-petals of color. Stems of strength. roots of truth. Turn a page and turn the seasons. Read the sentence and enjoy the roses.”

“The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency -- the belief that the here and now is all there is.”

“A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.”

“It's much more entertaining to live books than to write them.”

“that books were mirrors, reflective in sometimes unpredictable ways.”

“What is the quality you most like in a man?
The ability to return books.”

“What is law? Is it what is on the books, or what is actually enacted and obeyed in a society? Or is law what must be enacted and obeyed, whether or not it is on the books, if things are to go right?”

“Books are like friends to me. Words come alive on the page.”

“He ate and drank the precious words,
His spirit grew robust;
He knew no more that he was poor,
Nor that his frame was dust.
He danced along the dingy days,
And this bequest of wings
Was but a book. What liberty
A loosened spirit brings!”

“Being a stranger was like being dead,
and brought to mind how, in a book he had read
that most folks misunderstood one common state:
The flip side of love is indifference, not hate.”

“Stories took twists and turns down fairy-tale paths or down very human everyday ones. You think you’re at the end of the book, and it’s only the end of a chapter.”

“Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

“Every day I ran to that book like it was a bottle of whiskey and crawled inside because it was a world that I had at least some control over, and slowly, in time, it began to take shape.”

“Chico: "Here's the book, it's a dollar"
Groucho: "Here's a ten, and shoot the change."
Chico: "I don't have change I'd have to give you nine more books.”

“I have finished To Kill a Mockingbird. It is now my favorite book of all time, but then again, I always think that until I read another book.”

“Pouring out liquor is like burning books.”

“… A good Book, has no Ending…”

“Weren’t all books ultimately related? After all, the same letters filled them, just arranged in a different order. Which meant that, in a certain way, every book was contained in every other!”

“Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don't leave out a single word.”

“I read my books at night, like that, under the quilt with the overheated reading lamp. Reading all those good lines while suffocating. It was magic.”

“There were some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.”

“She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.”

“He said it was the kind of book you made your own.”

“Have books ‘happened’ to you? Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk to you”

“The plot is so tired that even this reviewer, who in infancy was let drop by a nurse with the result that she has ever since been mystified by amateur coin tricks, was able to guess the identity of the murderer from the middle of the book.”

“When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[…].”

“The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book.”

“Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.”

“Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it.”

“You're never alone when you're reading a book.”

“Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.”

“Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.”

“Wine can be a better teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books”

“An ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is always possible to be happy.”

“In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.”

“The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.”

“In other words, it's one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of "This is me!”

“My life - my personality, my habits, even my speech - is a combination of the books I choose to read, the people I choose to listen to, and the thoughts I choose to tolerate in my mind”

“I was twenty then. What the hell, I used to say, take your time, Bandini. You got ten years to write a book, so take it easy, get out and learn about life, walk the streets. That’s your trouble: your ignorance of life.”

“Books are for reading, not for turning oneself into livestock.”

“A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.”

“Certain unique books seem to be without forerunners or successors as far as their authors are concerned. Even though they may profoundly influence the work of other writers, for their creator they're complete, not leading anywhere.”

“When I was your age, television was called books.”

“Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.”

“Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.”

“If you are anything like me --- Clever, fond of goat cheese, and devilishly handsome --- then you have undoubtedly read many books.”

“Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.”

“skulduggery pleasant is the best book I've ever read and has enspired myself to become an author.”

“He was going through one of those moments that you read about in books, when a character reacts in an unexpectedly extreme way to the normal discontents of living.”

“I guess there isn’t a rule book for what might be unacceptable to do to another human being.”

“If you don't see the book you want on the shelves, write it.”

“Books were despised by the Viking Tribes, as they were seen as a horrible civilizing influence and a threat to the barbarian culture.”

“As I examine my life through this book, I can't help but wonder if my mother was right. Maybe I really was what I ate. And maybe if she'd let me eat a little more sugar, I'd have come out sweeter.”

“If it would benefit you, I would kill every wolf here. But there are things that you need to do -- and interfering with that is not protecting, not in my book. The best way for me to protect you is to encourage you to be able to protect yourself.”

“A precious, mouldering pleasure ’t is
To meet an antique book,
In just the dress his century wore;
A privilege, I think.”

“Some books leave us free and some books make us free.”

“It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.”

“It's against my principles to buy a book I haven't read, it's like buying a dress you haven't tried on.”

“Every book is a world.”

“You can't just be reading books all the time and leave the writting of them to others.”

“Don't wait for it," I said. "Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. Create. And then the love will come to you, then it comes to you. It was only when I wrote my first book that the world I wanted to live in opened to me.”

“we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.”

“And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.”

“Go through your phone book, call people and ask them to drive you to the airport. The ones who will drive you are your true friends. The rest aren't bad people; they're just acquaintances.”

“Here's another piece of advice, only date people who have read a different set of books than you have read, it will save you lots of time in the library.”

“What an author doesn't know could fill a book.”

“They were all brilliant. They wrote books and painted pictures, and if they ever stopped talking, which I was sure they would never do, they planned to change the world.”

“Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”

“Sidda can't help herself. She just loves books. Loves the way they feel, the way they smell, loves the black letters marching across the white pages…”

“Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.”

“Anything can become a children's book if you give it to a child… Children are actually the best (and worst) audience for literature because they have no patience with pretence.”

“When you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.”

“When I read a good book, I wish my life were three thousand years long.”

“You'll never find a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.”

“I realized then that I didn't understand anything. I read all the books I could.”

“There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”

“In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply.”

“One day she's throwing a book at me. The next, we're making out behind the library.”

“The feel of them (books) and the smell of them. A bookshop was like an Aladdin's cave for me. Entire worlds and lives can be found just behind that glossy cover. All you had to do was look." Claire (Watermelon)”

“Books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them.”

“I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn't be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.”

“We forget that the simple gesture of putting a book in someone's hands can change a life. I want to remind you that it can. I want to thank you because it did. - 2010 Indies Choice Award”

“[Books] were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually living in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear.”

“You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.”

“I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often.”

“Was there ever a more horrible blasphemy than the statement that all the knowledge of God is confined to this or that book? How dare men call God infinite, and yet try to compress Him within the covers of a little book!”

“Book! You lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts.”

“How are you? How is your wonderful bathroom? How are the books you read and the things you think? Your dogs and their lives? The weather? Your feelings?”

“To my wonderful readers. Sorry about that apology for that last cliffhanger. I’ll try to avoid cliffhangers in this book. Well, except for maybe a few small ones… because I love you guys.”

“There aren’t many funny bits in Mr Tolkien either,’ Matilda said.
‘Do you think that all children’s books ought to have funny bits in them?’ Miss Honey asked.
‘I do,’ Matilda said. ‘Children are not so serious as grown-ups and love to laugh.”

“If you're not reading - with your heart as well as your brain - you will be one stupid grown up. Even worst, you'll be missing out on one of the best experiences you can possibly have. Nowhere will you meet more interesting people than in books.”

“Will!" Charlotte threw up her hands. "Why didn't you say so?"
"You know, the books on demon pox are in the library," Will said with an injured tone. "I wasn't preventing anyone from reading them”