Quotes about books
page 11

“Everyone probably thinks that I'm a raving nymphomaniac, that I have an insatiable sexual appetite, when the truth is I'd rather read a book.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

Variant: Everyone probably thinks that I'm a raving nymphomaniac, that I have an insatiable sexual appetite, when the truth is I'd rather read a book.

Truth, Thinking, Reading

“Some books are lies frae end to end,
And some great lies were never penn'd…”

Robert Burns (1759–1796) Scottish poet and lyricist

Death and Dr. Hornbook, st. 1 (1787)
Variant: Some books are lies frae end to end.

“… I will not allow books to prove any thing."
"But how shall we prove any thing?"
"We never shall.”

Jane Austen book Persuasion

Source: Persuasion

“Until we see each other again, keep your head together, read some good books, be useful, be happy.”

Stephen King book Different Seasons

Source: Different Seasons

Reading, Happiness

“it was books that made me feel that perhaps i was not completely alone”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Variant: It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them.
Source: Clockwork Prince

Feeling

“I couldn’t remember the last time I had stayed up into the squeaky hours of the night because I couldn’t put a book down, and that was a tragedy.”

Shannon Hale (1974) American fantasy novelist

Time, Night

“She reads a lot of books. Good things, books.”

Thorne Smith (1892–1934) an American writer of humorous supernatural fantasy fiction

Reading

“The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Truth, Beauty, Way, Thinking

“On books and friends I spend my money;
For stones and bricks I haven't any.”

Ruskin Bond (1934) British Indian writer

Source: Rain in the Mountains: Notes from the Himalayas

Money

“Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Variant: Blustery cold days should be spend propped up in bed with a mug of hot chocolate and a pile of comic books.
Source: The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book

Home, Tea

“There weren't any curtains in the windows, and the books that didn't fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a bunch of intellectual refugees.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

“What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

Universe, Reading, Dependency

“Good books make you ask questions. Bad readers want everything answered.”

Scott Westerfeld (1963) American science fiction writer

Question

“A good book is never finished—-it goes on whispering to you from the wall.”

Virginia Euwer Wolff (1937) American children's writer

“O grant me a house by the beach of a bay,
Where the waves can be surly in winter, and play
With the sea-weed in summer, ye bountiful powers!
And I'd leave all the hurry, the noise, and the fray,
For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.”

Andrew Lang (1844–1912) Scots poet, novelist and literary critic

Flowers, Winter, Summer, Housing

“When mauma saw my raw eyes, she said, “Ain’t nobody can write down in a book what you worth.”

Sue Monk Kidd (1948) Novelist

Source: The Invention of Wings

“One day's exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books. See how willingly Nature poses herself upon photographers' plates. No earthly chemicals are so sensitive as those of the human soul.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

1872(?), page 95
John of the Mountains, 1938

Soul, Mountain, Nature

“…books are always good company if you have the right sort. Let me pick out some for you.' And Mrs. Jo made a bee-line to the well-laden shelves, which were the joy of her heart and the comfort of her life.”

Louisa May Alcott book Jo's Boys

Source: Jo's Boys

Life, Bee, Heart, Joy

“I read stuff. Books are not my only friends, but we’re friendly. So there.”

Maria Dahvana Headley (1977) American writer

Source: Magonia

Reading

“Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

“… that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them.
(Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

Thinking, Time, Reading

“No book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep, it's meant to make you jump out of your bed in your underwear and run and beat the author's brains out.”

Bohumil Hrabal book Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age

Source: Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age

Sleep

“It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world - what pretensions humans have!”

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

World, Music, Color, Bird

“So long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot fail to be of use.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Nature

“I always say, 'Books beat boredom,' said Amanda wisely.”

Mo Willems (1968) American children's illustrator and writer

Source: Hooray for Amanda & Her Alligator!

“When rivers flooded, when fire fell from the sky, what a fine place the library was, the many rooms, the books. With luck, no one found you. How could they!--when you were off to Tanganyika in '98, Cairo in 1812, Florence in 1492!?”

Ray Bradbury book Something Wicked This Way Comes

Source: Something Wicked This Way Comes

“Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Reading

“Some lessons you learned by the book. Others you learned from cold hard experience. The latter may not be the best way to learn, but it damn well stuck.”

Maya Banks (1964) Author

Source: No Place to Run

Way, Learning

“When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn't control what came through it.”

Nicole Krauss book Great House

Source: Great House

Life, Feeling

“Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid.”

Dean Koontz (1945) American author

Way, Housing

“We notice things that don't work. We don't notice things that do. We notice computers, we don't notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don't notice books.”

Douglas Adams book The Salmon of Doubt

Source: The Salmon of Doubt

“The community of the Giver had achieved at such great price. A community without danger or pain. But also, a community without music, color or art. And books.”

Lois Lowry book The Giver

Source: The Giver

Pain, Art, Music, Color

“Sir, the fact that the book is in a public library brings no comfort. Books are the one element in which I am personally and nakedly acquisitive. If it weren't for the law I would steal them. If it weren't for my purse I would buy them.”

Harold J. Laski (1893–1950) British academic

Law, Personality

“Let every book-worm, when in any fragrant, scarce old tome, he discovers a sentence, a story, an illustration, that does his heart good, hasten to give it the widest circulation that newspapers and magazines, penny and halfpenny, can afford.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Heart

“I am no theologian. I would not be surprised, however, if Heaven proved to be a cozy kitchen, where delicious treats appeared in the oven and in the refrigerator whenever you wanted them, and where the cupboards were full of good books.”

Dean Koontz (1945) American author

Appearance

“Whatever happened to the good old days when books just got along, cozied up together on bookshelves, hanging out, waiting to be read?”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Burned

Waiting, Reading

“Books, I found, had the power to make time
stand still, retreat or fly into the future.”

Jim Bishop (1907–1987) American journalist and author

Time, Future, Flying

“When confronted with a birthday in a week I will remember that a book can be a really good present, too.”

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (1968) Canadian writer

Source: At Knit's End: Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much

Birthday, Birthday

“A NICE THOUGHT
One was a book thief.
The other stole the sky.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Variant: One was a book thief. The other stole the sky.
Source: The Book Thief

“I wanted to pull down a book, open it proper, and gobble up page after page”

Laurie Halse Anderson book Chains

Source: Chains

“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Coda (1979)
Context: There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

People, World, Way

“There's nothing quite as good as folding up into a book and shutting the world outside. If I pick the right one I can be beautiful, or fall in love, or live happily ever after. Maybe even all three.”

Bill Condon (1955) American film director

Love, World, Beauty

“And her slender white neck was bowed over her book, the fair hair falling on either side of it”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: The Awakening

“Ragnor's important business was probably getting together to write a burn book with Raphael. Magnus could see them now, sharing a bench and scribbling happily away about Magnus's stupid hair.”

Cassandra Clare The Bane Chronicles

Source: The Bane Chronicles

Stupidity, Business

“Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature's profligate generosity.”

Pat Conroy (1945–2016) American novelist

Source: My Reading Life

Feeling, Literature, Parting

“There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away…”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

“How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“Please,” Alec said, pulling out his stele. “I can read your face like a very open, very pornographic book. I wish I couldn’t.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Reading

“I cannot live without books.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to John Adams (10 June 1815)
1810s

“So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?”

Nora Ephron (1941–2012) Film director, author screenwriter

Way, Reading

“Think books aren't scary? Well, think about this: You can't spell "Book" without "Boo!”

Stephen Colbert book I Am America (And So Can You!)

Source: I Am America

Thinking

“Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes!”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

“The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

Universe, Time, Reading

“If you steal any of the books from the library, I will know, and you'll be sorry.
Jessamine Lovelace.”

Cassandra Clare book Lord of Shadows

Source: Lord of Shadows

“Love and Loyalty, run deeper than blood." Love that quote even though I haven't read the book.”

Richelle Mead (1976) American writer

Love, Quotes, Reading, Loyalty

“This book is so interesting. I always wonder what's going to happen next.”

Neal Shusterman book Everlost

Source: Everlost

“Men are more interesting in books than they are in real life.”

Annie Barrows book The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Source: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Life, Men

“One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

“Young men, especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend “a course of reading.” Distrust a course of reading! People who really care for books read all of them. There is no other course.”

Andrew Lang (1844–1912) Scots poet, novelist and literary critic

Source: Adventures Among Books

Men, People, Reading

“For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Life, Men, Age, Past

“You have ink in your blood, boy, and no help for it. Books will never be just a business to you.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Ink and Bone

Boy, Business, Help

“They too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home.”

Donna Tartt book The Secret History

Source: The Secret History

World, Beauty, Home

“Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

“A bookstore is one of the only pieces of physical evidence we have that people are still thinking.”

Jerry Seinfeld (1954) American comedian and actor

Variant: A bookstore is one of the many pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.

People, Thinking

“All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Man of Letters

Lying

“Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again.”

Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) American novelist

Variant: Some stories are so familiar its like going home.

Home, Reading

“We should always choose our books as God chooses our friends, just a bit beyond us, so that we have to do our level best to keep up with them.”

Oswald Chambers (1874–1917) British missionary

God

“I found myself jealous of the people who wrote the books. They were dead and they were still taking up my time. Who did they think they were?”

Ned Vizzini book It's Kind of a Funny Story

Source: It's Kind of a Funny Story

People, Thinking, Time, Dead

“But I think the most important thing those books gave me was a kind of faith. My books promised me that life wasn’t just made up of workaday tasks and prosaic things. The world is bigger and more colorful and more important than that.”

Laura Amy Schlitz (1955) children's author

Source: The Hired Girl

Life, World, Faith, Color

“The atmosphere of the place soothed her automatically; the rich lantern lights, the sheer scent of paper and leather, and the fact that everywhere she looked, there were books, books, beautiful books.”

Genevieve Cogman (1972) novelist and game designer

Source: The Invisible Library

Beauty, Light

“She closed the book and put her cheek against it. There was still an odor of a library on it, of dust, leather, binding glue, and old paper, one book carrying the smell of hundreds.”

Shannon Hale The Goose Girl

Source: The Goose Girl

“I feel that books, just like people, have a destiny. Some invite sorrow, others joy, some both.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

People, Feeling, Joy

“It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.”

Italo Calvino (1923–1985) Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels

Source: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Reading, Personality

“The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books.”

Marguerite Yourcenar book Memoirs of Hadrian

Le véritable lieu de naissance est celui où l'on a porté pour la première fois un coup d'oeil intelligent sur soi-même: mes premières patries ont été des livres.
Source: Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), p. 33

Intelligence, Time

“When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
'His sins were scarlet, But his books were read.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

"On His Books"
Hilaire Belloc (1925)
Variant: When I am dead, I hope it may be said, 'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Hope, Reading, Dead

“I really, really wanted to lose awareness of the here and now. The best way for me to do that was bury myself in a book.”

Charlaine Harris Grave Sight

Source: Grave Sight

Way

“The whole family is a bunch of dangerous freaks… Most are ex-cons or junkies or deranged from inbreeding. Five have died violently, three are back in prison, two have gone insane from untreated venereal disease, and one writes book reviews.”

Tim Dorsey book Triggerfish Twist

Source: Triggerfish Twist

Disease, Family

“You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Source: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“Maybe the best thing to do with favorite books is to leave them be: to achieve such exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be recreated.”

Nick Hornby (1957) English novelist

Life, Time

“I've always said that Watership Down is not a book for children. I say: it's a book, and anyone who wants to read it can read it.”

Richard Adams (1920–2016) English novelist best known as the author of Watership Down

Children, Reading

“There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears a Human soul.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Source: Selected Poems

Soul

“A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not an article for mere consumption, but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Life, Men, Housing

“I want my own books to have their own shelves," you said, and that's how I knew it would be okay to live together.”

David Levithan The Lover's Dictionary

Variant: .

"I want my books to have their own shelves", you said, and that's how I knew it would be okay to live together.
Source: The Lover's Dictionary

“Only five books tonight, Mommy," she says.
No, Olivia, just one."
How about four?"
Two."
Three."
Oh, all right, three. But that's it!”

Ian Falconer (1959) American illustrator and writer, costume and set designer

Source: Olivia