Quotes About Books

If you ask me, it's all that schooling. It takes the fun out of life, being cooped up like that day after day...Books, now that's different. There's nothing like a book to keep you company of a long voyage.

I don't hate humanity and I'm not interested in people who do. Although, it's funny, actually, some of my favorite writers really do. Like Martin Amis. My dirty secret. 'London Fields' is one of my favorite books ever. And it's indefensible! But he's so funny... I forgive him everything.

I think it will last," said Grandfather. "In my experience when people once begin to read they go on. They begin because they think they ought to and they go on because they must. Yes. They find it widens life. We're all greed for life, you know, and our short span of existence can't give us all that we hunger for, the time is too short and our capacity not large enough. But in books we experience all life vicariously.

One thing however, Nat did for him. He taught him carpentry. He learned to distinguish between the different kinds of wood, to love them and understand their ways. Realizing that the boy had great skill with his hands Nat gave him a few tools for his own and taught him wood carving.... First the books and then the wood. Each was a milestone for him on the way through.

So this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading.

It is June. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work and lead this life, the one I am leading today. Each morning the blue clock and the crocheted bedspread, the table with the Phone, the books and magazines, the Times at the door.

Ganz allgemein sind mir Bücher inzwischen lieber als Menschen und Menschen in Büchern lieber als Menschen, die woanders sind.

I ran my finger over the text, then held the book up to my face, closed my eyes, and inhaled the sweet-sour scent of old paper and binding glue. Did everyone who loved books do this when they encountered a new one?

I loved the physicality of books just as much as the stories inside, the feel of pages between my fingers, the intricacies of classic fonts winding along the neatly lined rows of words.

could one do a compatibility test based on favourite books? Could an Anais Nin fan love a Dean Koontz fan? An Alice Munro woman love a James Joyce man?

I remembered how it had been first learning to read, how the squiggles of print finally organized themselves slowly and painfully into words, then pieced together into sentences with meaning. Now, for the first time, the squiggles were releasing actual worlds... All of them surfacing from the page so real that when I finally closed my eyes, I was amazed their lives didn't continue around me. A whole world somehow tucked back into the book, waiting for me to set it free.

I'll probably never again feel as intensely about books, read as desperately, and fall as deeply in love with stories and characters as I did that summer. Now when I read, I'm continuously trying to bring back that same immersion, fall in love again, and I judge every book against that impossible ideal. The books I love now aren't necessarily those that are written best, they're those books, like The Thorn Birds and Clan Of The Cave Bear, that bring me closest to that magic.

But the destruction of books is a gesture and a threat. It's like saying to the people of those books: You're next.

Excuse me if I laugh. The roads are dark and large books block our path. The air we breathe is made of evening air. The world is longer than the road that brings us here.

And how could anyone consent to give up the smell of open books, old or new?

When you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.

You could learn that too in books, it's said. I got a heap of books to read and ne'er a one have I read yet but two or maybe three. You could never read all the books in the world, I reckon, if you read all your days until you're old.' 'I don't aim to get old. I wouldn't. Grow up is all I aim.

I learned that there are books and there are readers; given even the worst of circumstances, they get together. In the privacy of their own homes or on park benches or on public buses, in the corner of the reference room, at the end of an aisle of fiction, in the middle of the alphabet, they club up and conspire.

They--the books I mean, not the ladies of Technical Services, though maybe those ladies too--might have dreamed of a different life in a private home, beloved and displayed and well dressed and only occasionally, dreamily read, but they belonged to the city now and had to work for the common good.

I like to hold the chunk of remaining book as I read; I like to feel it diminish.

Library books were, I suddenly realized, promiscuous, ready to lie in the arms of anyone who asked.

There are too many people in the world as it is, but the supply of ancient manuscripts is severely limited.

And Belle? She was an odd girl who liked to read.