Quotes About Books

We can live in a society founded on the book and yet not read, or we can live in a society where the book is merely an accessory and be, in the deepest, truest sense, a reader.

There are those who, while reading a book, recall, compare, conjure up emotions from other, previous readings <...> This is one of the most delicate forms of adultery.

Sartre, in his memoirs, confessed to much the same experience. Like Plato, I passed from knowledge to its subject. I found more reality in the idea than in the thing because it was given to me first and because it was given for a thing. It was in books that I encountered the universe: digested, classified, labelled, mediated, still formidable.

Alexandria and its scholars […] never mistook the true nature of the past; they knew it to be the source of an ever-shifting present in which new readers engaged with old books which became new in the reading process. Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.

For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end.

I have no feeling of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days. They don't require that I pretend to know them all, nor do they urge me to become one of the professional book-handlers ... who greedily collect books but do not read them....

Já eu, raramente empresto um livro. Se quero que alguém leia um certo livro, compro um exemplar e ofereço-lho. Acredito que emprestar um livro é incitar ao furto.

I've often felt that my library explained who I was, gave me a shifting self that transformed itself constantly throughout the years.

I enjoyed learning the poems, but I didn't understand of what use they might possibly be. 'They'll keep you company on the day you have no books to read,' my teacher said.

any library, by its very existence, conjures up its forbidden or forgotten double: an invisible but formidable library of the books that, for conventional reasons of quality, subject matter or even volume, have been deemed unfit for survival under this specific roof.

The books on my shelves do not know me until I open them, yet I am certain that they address me — me and every other reader — by name; they await our comments and opinions. I am presumed in Plato as I am presumed in every book, even in those I'll never read.

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book - that string of confused, alien ciphers - shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.

A library is not only a place of both order and chaos; it is also the realm of chance. Books, even after they have been given a shelf and a number, retain a mobility of their own.

The web will not be the container of our cosmopolitan past, like a book, because it is not a book and will never be a book, in spite of the endless gadgets and guises invented to force it into that role.

One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries. A half-remembered line is echoed by another for reasons which, in the light of day, remain unclear. If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonably wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle.

Like Petrach's, my books know infinitely more than I do, and I'm grateful that they even tolerate my presence. At times I feel that I abuse the privilege.

The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned. Books are transformed by the sequence in which they are read.

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Imensamente generosos, os meus livros, não me fazem nenhuma exigência, antes me oferecem todo tipo de iluminação.

Geschichten sind unser Gedächtnis, Bibliotheken die Lagerstätten für dieses Gedächtnis und Lesen das Handwerk, mit dem wir dieses Gedächtnis neu erschaffen können, indem wir es rezitieren und glossieren, es wieder in unsere eigene Erfahrung rückübersetzen und so auf dem aufbauen, was frühere Generationen für bewahrenswert hielten.

Books have long been instruments of the divinatory arts. A big library, mused Northrop Frye in one of his many notebooks, really has the gift of tongues & vast potencies of telepathic communication.

Tal como os livros de Petrarca, os meus sabem infinitamente mais do que eu e agradeço-lhes por sequer tolerarem a minha presença. Por vezes, sinto que abuso desse privilégio.

I could perhaps live without writing. I don't think I could live without reading.

La mia biblioteca è una sorta di autobiografia. Nel proliferare degli scaffali vi è un libro per ogni istante della mia vita, per ogni amicizia, per ogni delusione, per ogni cambiamento. Segnano i miei anni come le pietre bianche che indicano la strada di un pellegrino.