Quotes About Books

All books have to be researched, but readable books have their research buried.

By the highway, the Hudson—the library books straining at their delibags, corners poking. Straining my arms, throttling my hands, the numb rewards of literacy.

He's like Super Librarian, y'know? Everyone forgets, Willow, that knowledge is the ultimate weapon.

Books smell musty and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is... It has no texture, no context. It's there and then it's gone. If it's to last, then the getting of knowledge should be tangible. It should be... smelly.

The world doesn't always happen in a linear manner. Nature is much more creative than that, especially when it comes to time and the manipulation of time and space. Europe has gifted us with inventions, books and the intricate mechanics of imposing structures on the earth, but there are other means to knowledge and the structuring of knowledge that have no context in the European mind.

And we can read - there is always the prospect of escape, through books. Books are not a means of 'escape', Meta! Books are a means of knowledge, and of learning how to cope with the future.

the hopeful young author had no doubt that books might change the world.

The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children's books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she'd been a little girl. There hadn't been such books in the Spivak household on County Line Road, nor would there have been any time for such interludes.

A library is a mausoleum: books of the dead. And so many. And so many secrets lost to him forever. Hadn't time for it all and if he couldn't do it all then there was no point in doing any of it. For such an effort would be like drawing a single breath in the knowledge that you would not draw another. You were fated to suffocate, to die. You were fated to become extinct.

My governing principle as a critic is to call attention solely to books and writers that merit such attention, and to avoid whenever possible reviewing books "negatively" except in those instances in which the "negative" is countered by an admiring consideration of earlier books by the same author.

All prices of all things—at least, useless beautiful things like rare books—are inherently absurd, rooted in the human imagination and in the all-too-human predilection to desperately want what others value highly, and to scorn what others fail to value.

Despite all of my moaning and groaning about the romantic disasters that continued to befall me, I knew if I were ever forced to choose I would take a good book over a good relationship any day of the week.

If books could kill, I would have written more of them before I died.

In this age of censorship, I mourn the loss of books that will never be written, I mourn the voices that will be silenced-writers' voices, teachers' voices, students' voices-and all because of fear.

So many adults are exhausting themselves worrying about other people corrupting their children with books, they're turning kids off to reading instead of turning them on.

And I'm Hermione from—

No puede tenerse una vida plena en mente sin libros y tiempo para estudiarlos, sin oportunidad para viajar y observar o sin compañerismo intelectual.

[T]hat old September feeling... of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air.... Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year's mistakes and failures had been wiped clean by summer.

Well, there's so much to read, and I'm so far behind.

you must have brought something. Books? I never saw you without a green bag of books.

An acquaintance with books and learning was not a thing that a frontier boy like John Wesley Powell could take for granted; he had to seize it as he could. Abe Lincoln said it for every such boy with brains and dreams in his head: "The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is a man who'll git me a book I ain't read.

I like Rhine wine, blue grapes, good cheese, endive and lots of books, etc., etc., etc., as much as I like supreme fiction.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

The reason that there are so few good books written is that so few people who write know anything.