Quotes About Books

i'd hate to read all these books...that much reading could put your eyes out.

Bernard Berenson once said that the formation of the great library he assembled at I Tatti was his greatest achievement. I feel much the same way about the library (as distinct from the bookshop) that I've put together in Archer City. The collection—or, more properly, the accumulation—now numbers about 28,000 volumes. If I were beamed up tomorrow my library would attest to the fact that a reader had once been there. -- On Rereading, NYRB July 14, 2005

There's no one book that would define me; I'd have to name nearly every book that I've read over the past 70 years. Reading has sustained me and has been the one constant throughout my life.

There can be secondary and tertiary reasons for wanting a particular book. One is the pleasure of holding the physical book itself: savoring the type, the binding, the book's feel and heft. All these things can be enjoyed apart from literature, which some, but not all, books contain.

Dune; Nova; Double Star; The Corridors of Time; Cat's Cradle; Half Past Human; Murder in Retrospect; Gideon's Day; The Red Right Hand; The Trojan Hearse; A Deadly Shade of Gold; Conjure Wife; Rosemary's Baby; Silverlock; King Conan. He'd packed books not to entertain, nor even to illustrate philosophies of life, but to rebuild civilization.

Spray a book with insect spray, drop it in a bag, add some mothballs and seal it. Put it in another bag and seal it. Another. The packages piled up on the floor, each a book sealed in four plastic envelopes.

I'd read a great many books, even Dharma books, but I was making this itch into one of the worst catastrophes in human history.

Und alles hatte den leichten Schimmelduft, den Bücher im mittleren Texas haben. Zuviel Feuchtigkeit. Zuviel Wärme. Ein Land, das niemals imstande sein wird, Bücher längere Zeit aufzubewahren. Bücher halten sich hier nicht. Sie schimmeln. (Die Sache mit dem Hund)

There's a serendipity to real life that the Internet can't duplicate. Do you use the library? For anything? Well, sometimes you end up picking up the book next to the one you were looking for, and it's that book that changes your life.

You're a big help, Mr. I Read So Many Books.

Like most real writers, she was a stronger person in her books than in her life. But she had a constant urge to re-create the women of her childhood, the faith she had in their comforting omniscience.

He kissed me for a long moment, holding my shoulders, perhaps to keep me from pressing my whole body against his. Then he tried to lift my bag. My God, he said. What happened? I found out one may check out twenty books at a time from the school library.

As I look around the quiet room, I see a thousand leather covers like doorways into worlds unknown.

Ronnie indossava calzoncini porpora e una T-shirt che diceva: AL DI FUORI DEL CANE, IL LIBRO è IL MIGLIOR AMICO DELL'UOMO. DENTRO IL CANE, è TROPPO BUIO PER LEGGERE.

This, thought Charlotte despairingly, was the problem with the world outside the cover of a book. She couldn't craft Robert's dialogue for him, putting the words she wanted to say into his lips. She couldn't control the direction of his emotions. All she could do was attempt to discipline her own.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! - take them out of this book, for instance, - you might as well take the book along with them

Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.

This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses. The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close.

Censoring books that deal with difficult, adolescent issues does not protect anybody. Quite the opposite. It leaves kids in the darkness and makes them vulnerable. Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance. Our children cannot afford to have the truth of the world withheld from them

None of [the books are] worth reading. There are no fairy tales, no faerie tails, no sword-swinging princesses or lightning-throwing gods.

The books I'd checked out of the library earlier in the week were still stacked on my bureau, whispering my name and begging to be read.

I watch some kids ask the cafeteria ladies to sign their books. What do they write: Hope your chicken patties never bleed? Or, maybe, May your Jell-O always wiggle?

Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance. Our children cannot afford to have the truth of the world withheld from them. They need us to be brave enough to give them great books so they can learn how to grow up into the men and women we want them to be.

I open books, but the stories are all locked up and I don't know the magic words.