quotations about books
We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.
JOHN LUBBOCK
The Pleasures of Life
There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island and at the bottom of the Spanish Main ... and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.
WALT DISNEY
attributed, Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time
When you’re reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners?
ELIF BATUMAN
interview, The Rumpus, Apr. 25, 2012
And books, they offer one hope - that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.
ANNE RICE
Blackwood Farm
One reads books in order to gain the privilege of living more than one life. People who don't read are trapped in a mine shaft, even if they think the sun is shining.
GARRISON KEILLOR
"The More Noble Prize,", Salon, Nov. 30, 2005
One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.
GEORGE W. BUSH
"W's Greatest Hits: The top 25 Bushisms of all time", Slate, January 12, 2009
If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Heroes and Hero Worship
If you would understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
Every few seconds a new book sees the light of day. Most of them will just be a part of the hum that makes us hard of hearing. Even the book is becoming an instrument of forgetting. A truly literary work comes into being as its creator’s cry of protest against the forgetting that looms over him, over his predecessors and his contemporaries alike, and over his time, and the language he speaks. A literary work is something that defies death.
IVAN KLIMA
speech at conference in Lahti, 1990
The majority of the books of our time give one the impression of having been manufactured in a day out of books read the day before.
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary
My main disappointment was always that a book had to end. And then what? But I don't think I was ever disappointed by the books. I must have been what any author would consider an ideal reader. I felt every pain and pleasure suffered or enjoyed by all the characters. Oh, but I identified!
EUDORA WELTY
Conversations with Eudora Welty
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
"There is no frigate like a book"
Don't judge a book by its cover.
ENGLISH PROVERB
The best books are those which lift us to a higher plane where we breathe a purer atmosphere.
ORISON SWETT MARDEN
Architects of Fate
Books admitted me to their world open-handedly, as people for their most part, did not. The life I lived in books was one of ease and freedom, worldly wisdom, glitter, dash and style.
JONATHAN RABAN
For Love and Money
The book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty -- and vice versa.
DORIS LESSING
introduction, The Golden Notebook
Books are all right, but dead men's brains are no good unless you mix a live one's with them.
GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
Old Gorgon Graham
Savages and primitives believed in books that could suck your soul out through your eyes as you read them, books that could wrap their pages around your head and swallow you, words that crawled into your brain like tapeworms.
K. J. PARKER
The Escapement
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 ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
The thing one reads and likes, and then forgets, is of no account. The thing that stays, and haunts one, and refuses to be forgotten, that is the sincere thing.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
Ponkapog Papers