Quotes About Books

Materializations are often best produced in rooms where there are books.

Eleanor—"I plan to stay up and read for a while." "Are you still reading Pamela?" Eleanor asked the doctor. "Volume two. I have three volumes to go, and then I shall begin Clarissa Harlowe, I think. Perhaps Luke would care to borrow—" "No, thanks," Luke said hastily. "I have a suitcase full of mystery stories.

One of the most terrifying aspects of publishing stories and books is the realization that they are going to be read, and read by strangers. I had never fully realized this before, although I had of course in my imagination dwelt lovingly upon the thought of the millions and millions of people who were going to be uplifted

Almost all of Mr. Cobb's function—aside from lighting cigarettes for me, and pausing respectfully when my husband spoke—seemed to consist of taking objects which actually existed in almost square feet, and translating them into cubic feet—rugs had to be rolled, books had to be boxed, pictures had to be put into packing cases.

If I get hold of a book and see that the sun shone, the moon floated by, the air was fragrant, the birds tweeted—I fling it across the room.

average Russian reads three times as many books a year as the average United States citizen.

Books, books, books. It was not that I read so much. I read and re-read the same ones. But all of them were necessary to me. Their presence, their smell, the letters of their titles, and the texture of their leather bindings.

Civilization and Its Discontents is one of the last of Freud's books, written in the decade before his death and first published in German in 1929.

Gustavo Solivellas dice: La humanidad progresa. La gente hoy solamente quema mis libros; siglos atrás me hubieran quemado a mí (Sigmund Freud)

Whenever he saw his books in a store, he felt like he'd gotten away with something, said John Updike. Who also expressed the opinion that a nice person wouldn't become a writer. The problem of self-doubt. The problem of shame. The problem of self-loathing. You once put it like this: When I get so fed up with something I'm writing that I decide to quit, and then, later, I find myself irresistibly drawn back to it, I always think: Like a dog to its vomit.

The internet needs as many good dogs and books as it can get right now.

I like that library books have secret lives. All those hands that have held them. All those eyes that have read them. I

Mind you, according to Walter Benjamin, the twentieth century's great philosopher of collecting, browsing and what we'd now call vintage shopping, 'the non-reading of books' is a defining characteristic of serious bibliomaniacs; he cites Anatole France, who blithely admitted that he'd barely read one-tenth of the books in his library.)

the way to an intellectual's heart is via her library...

Les livres que j'aimais devinrent une Bible où je puisais des conseils et des secours.

When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values, and it is impossible for me to examine this conviction with an objective eye.

Cuando era niña, cuando era adolescente, los libros me salvaron de la desesperación: eso me convenció de que la cultura era el valor más alto.

The books I liked became a Bible from which I drew advice and support; they created a kind of communion between myself and those twin souls which existed somewhere out of reach.

Tant que les livres existeront, mon bonheur sera garanti.

The author says one character's definition of a classic is any book he'd heard of before he was thirty.

I know, but the poor souls – Well, I'm sure you will agree with me in one thing: The chief task of a librarian is to get people to read." "You feel so? My feeling, Mrs. Kennicott, and I am merely quoting the librarian of a very large college, is that he first duty of the conscientious librarian is to preserve the books.

Reading old Gray?  That's right.  Physician's library just three books:  'Gray's Anatomy' and Bible and Shakespeare.  Study.  You may become great doctor.

though I'm afraid, Mrs. Dodsworth, that you'll find our house too dreadfully bookish. Beautiful people like you are superior to books. You ought never to read anything--you ought only to live. You ought to exist imperishably on some Grecian isle amid the wine- dark sea, dancing in the sunshine.

Y jamás se mostraba tan formidable como después de pasar días enteros en su sillón, sumido en sus improvisaciones y en sus libros antiguos.