Quotes About Literature

People need books, but they don't know they need them. Generally they are not aware that the books they need are in existence. - Roger Mifflin

You know at once, if you are clairvoyant in these matters (libre-voyant, one might say), when you have met your book. You may dally and evade, you may go on about your affairs, but the paragraph of prose your eye fell upon, or the snatch of verses, or perhaps only the spirit and flavour of the volume, more divined than reasonably noted, will follow you.

La notte ha una mistica affinità con la letteratura.

The people in books become more real to you than any one in actual life.

Der Hunger nach guten Büchern ist weiter verbreitet und hartnäckiger, als Sie glauben, aber in gewisser Weise trotzdem vielfach unbewusst. Die Menschen brauchen Bücher, wissen es aber nicht. Meistens wissen sie gar nicht, dass es die Bücher, die sie brauchen, überhaupt gibt.

They go in not because they need any certain volume but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them.

That's what this country needs -- more books!

There is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.

That's why I call this place the Haunted Bookshop. Haunted by the ghosts of the books I haven't read. Poor uneasy spirits, they walk and walk around me. There's only one way to lay the ghost of a book, and that is to read it.

Long ago I fell back on books as the only permanent consolers. They are the one stainless and unimpeachable achievement of the human race. It saddens me to think that I shall have to die with thousands of books unread that would have given me noble and unblemished happiness.

Living in a bookshop is like living in a warehouse of explosives. Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the world--the brains of men.

Books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life.

It's amazing that a man who is dead can talk to people through these pages. As long as this books survives, his ideas live.

For I bless God in the libraries of the learned and for all the booksellers in the world.

It is gaol that finally reveals to me the beauty of Shakespeare, the spirit in his words, the jaw-dropping audacity of his language.

once, if you told people you were self-published, they'd look at you like you were a smelly old jobless hobo just come off a dusty boxcar with soupcan shoes and a hat made from a coyote skull.

She lifted the book to her nose. A book had a smell more soothing than any of Mrs. Hawkins's herbs. There was nothing like a good story to take her out of a world she didn't much like.

He was an average-looking, hard working fellow who was more comfortable reading about people in books than socializing with them.

Models of style: the swearword, the telegram, the epitaph.

She's got Marian Keyes's new one ready to begin.

Fiction can accommodate ambivalence as polemic cannot

He left a trail like a meteor, and everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens.

Oh this? It's a 'bookworm.' They live in books, and they love to eat important or valuable words.

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall, nations perish, civilizations grow old and die out, and after an era new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts of the heart of men centuries dead.