Quotes About Books

I suspect it may be like the difference between a drinker and an alcoholic; the one merely reads books, the other needs books to make it through the day.

A library is infinity under a roof.

If I couldn't sleep, I could read.

Pearl spent the passing days buried so deep in the musty, dusty sorcery tomes that sometimes when she emerged, she spoke in archaic english. "Hast thou a light?" she'd asked him this afternoon when her study room had grown dark with gathering clouds.

Obviously it was meant to tell us nothing, which is exactly the opposite function of a book.

It's funny that I got to do 'On the Road' because the thing that had the biggest impact on me growing up was reading books. I was very inspired by the book and this spirit of Dean Moriarty and how envious we all are of somebody who can be that carefree.

You know how teachers are. If they get you to take out a book they love too, they're yours for life.

Mr Powell raised an eyebrow. 'I'm a librarian' he said. 'I always know what I'm talking about.

An hour spent in any bookstore will also tune you in to what the world is thinking (and writing about), what is hot, what is popular, what the trends are. Just browsing, without even buying anything, is an education in itself.

I have adopted what I call a "fat book" strategy. A movement that seeks to change the world cannot make its claims believable with only short books. The world is much too large and much too complex to be capable of being restructured in terms of large-print, thin paperback books - the only kind of books that most Christians read these days. The best that any movement can expect to achieve if it publishes only short books is to persuade readers that the world cannot be changed.

Then I celebrated my Wall of Books. I counted the volumes on my twenty-foot-long modernist bookshelf to make sure none had been misplaced or used as kindling by my subtenant. "You're my sacred ones," I told the books. "No one but me still cares about you. But I'm going to keep you with me forever. And one day I'll make you important again." I thought about that terrible calumny of the new generation: that books smell.

She folds the pages of the books she reads when she wants to remember something important. Her favorite books are accordions, testaments to an endless search for meaning.

I felt the weakness of these books, their immateriality, how they had failed to change the world, and I didn't want to sully myself with their weakness anymore.

In this huge old occidental culture our teaching elders are books. Books are our grandparents!

It appears these days I don't have much of a life because my nose is often stuck in a book. But I discovered that reading builds a life inside the mind.

I find it fascinating that a lot of business books that do well are from people who've never made any money in business.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

Talking with friends about books harks back to the original impulse behind storytelling, the forging of human bonds. We have told ourselves stories not just, in Joan Didion's phrase, in order to live, but in order to live with one another.

I love book signings: kids waiting in line for you to scribble on their new books, haha!

What you are he said, is a complicated girl with simple needs. You need your books and time to read, and you need a few friends, and you need someone not to take care of you, but to care for you. If you have all those things, you will always be all right.

Hugo headed off toward the door to leave, but the bookstore was warm and quiet, and the teetering piles of books fascinated him.

How did you learn to do that?" asked Hugo. "Books," answered Isabelle.

Every night, I have to read a book, so that my mind will stop thinking about things that I stress about.

If only my mother had a book to hold, she wouldn't have looked so lonely. And maybe this was another reason why people read: not so they would feel less lonely, but so that other people would think they looked less lonely with a book in their hands and therefore not pity them and leave them alone.