Quotes About Books

I want to do something splendid … Something heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead … I think I shall write books.

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

Innocent and ignorant as she was, the books she had read gave her some hints of the existence of sin and her woman's nature warned her when no other voice was near to save.

Nothing makes Penstemon happier than handing a favorite book to someone who wants to read it. I'm the same. I suppose you could say this delights us although 'delight' is a word I rarely use. Delight seems insubstantial; happiness feels more grounded; ecstasy is what I shoot for; satisfaction is hardest to attain.

I'm still not strictly rational. How could I be? I sell books.

Cuando nos gusta un libro, siempre nos parece que sus páginas nos hablan directamente al corazón, que sus palabras son nuestras. Y en alguna medida es cierto que es así, porque al leer completamos la obra, la interpretamos, la enriquecemos con nuestra necesidad y nuestra pasión.

Los libros son la presencia más constante de mi existencia. Mi mayor apoyo. En muchos sentidos el amor de mi vida.

Los escritores solemos pensar que nuestros libros son lo mejor que nosotros somos y, si eso lo desprecian, ¿cómo no van a despreciarte a ti, que eres mucho peor que tus obras?

You never really got to know people properly until you had seen them within the ambiance of their own home. Seen their furniture and their books and the manner of their lifestyle.

But did she read to Cara, the books that Cara loved? The Borrowers and The Railway Children and every word of The Secret Garden.) Did she love the children, or simply possess them?

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.

My rabies fear started with To Kill a Mockingbird, the same way my appendicitis fear started with Madeline, and my brain tumor fear started with Death Be Not Proud. On an ideal planet, children's books wouldn't be censored for references to sex, but for illness.

One can't prescribe books, even the best books, to people unless one knows a good deal about each individual person. If a man is keen on reading, I think he ought to open his mind to some older man who knows him and his life, and to take his advice in the matter, and above all, to discuss with him the first books that interest him.

Hemos venido a verle para saber de este país, para leer un libro sobre él y para que nos enseñe mapas. Queremos que nos diga que estamos locos y que nos enseñe libros.

Hemos venido a verle para saber de este país, para leer un libro sobre él y para que nos enseñe mapas. Queremos que nos diga que estamos locos y que nos enseñe libros.

There are several ways, he said shyly, in which I'm trying to improve myself. I have a great many books and records and now I'm learning to play golf. Do you know golf, Sister? The English think it's a very serious game. I was going to learn a much more serious game called cricket, but you need twenty two people...

Who can know anybody?' said the bookshop owner. 'Every person is like thousands of books. New, reprinting, in stock, out of stock, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, rubbish. The lot. Different every day. One's lucky to be able to put his hand on the one that's wanted, let alone know it.

People who for years had not looked for things in booked found new appetites for knowledge when they spoke to him. To someone who came in asking for the latest novel he might sell not only the novel but a biological treatise on the life of ants, an ecological study of ancient man, a philosophical work, and a history of small sailing-craft.

Something we once loved, and love now, in the shape of a book. Maybe eBooks are going to take over, one day, but not until those whizzkids in Silicon Valley invent a way to bend the corners, fold the spine, yellow the pages, add a coffee ring or two and allow the plastic tablet to fall open at a favorite page.

Truth is like the moon in the sky. Words are like a finger. A finger can point to the moon's location, but it is not the moon. To see the moon, you must look past the finger. To look for the truth in books, the Sixth Patriarch was saying, is like mistaking the finger for the moon. The moon and the finger are not the same thing. Not same, old Jiko would have said. Not different, either.

story is more than just a discarded by-product if your bare experience. Story is its own bare experience. Fish swim in water, unaware that it is water. Birds fly in air, unaware that it is air. Story is the air that you people breathe, the ocean you swim in, and we books are the rocks along the shoreline that channel your currents and contain your tides. Books will always have the last word, even if nobody is around to read them.

Ruth was a novelist, and novelists, Oliver asserted, should have cats and books.

The world has given you the eyes to see the beauty of its mountains and rivers, and the ears to hear the music of its wind and sea, and the voice you need to tell it. We books are evidence that this is so. We are here to help you.

Is it odd to see a book within a book? It shouldn't be. Books like each other. We understand each other. You could even say we are all related, enjoying a kinship that stretches like a rhizomatic network beneath human consciousness and knits the world of thought together. Think of us as a mycelium, a vast, subconscious fungal mat beneath a forest floor, and each book a fruiting body. Like mushrooms, we are a collectivity. Our pronouns are we, our, us.