Quotes About Books

Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.

Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.

Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.

All the proliferating falsifications of what I and everyone I know experienced once in what it is now so convenient to call the "fifties" or "sixties," as if life was really measured or lived in arbitrary decades, when the history books are sold like comix.

My last refuge, my books: simple pleasures, like finding wild onions by the side of the road, or requited love.

That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn't be unread.

The librarian thought the problem was just that the right books weren't breeding with each other and proposed a forced mating program. The library committee had an epic secret meeting about the ethics of literary eugenics which ended in a furious deadlock.

When the oldest Chatwin, melancholy Martin, opens the cabinet of the grandfather clock that stands in a dark, narrow back hallway in his aunt's house and slip through into Fillory...it's like he's opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never ac tually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into something better.

Personally, I think the "Potter" books have too many adverbs and not enough sex.

Plum guessed it stood to reason that out of all these billions of books at least one of them had to be dragon porn.

The lights were too bright, and there were too many TVs, but it was a bar, and that was another place, like bookstores, where Quentin felt at home. Drinks were a lot like books, really: it didn't matter where you were, the contents of a vodka tonic were always more or less the same, and you could count on them to take you away to somewhere better or at least make your present arrangements seem more manageable.

This is a feeling that you had, Quentin,' she said. 'Once, a very long time ago. A rare one. This is how you felt when you were eight years old, and you opened one of the Fillory books for the first time, and you felt awe and joy and hope and longing all at once. You felt them very strongly, Quentin. You dreamed of Fillory then, with a power and an innocence that not many ever experience. That's where all this began for you. You wanted the world to be better than it was.

The librarian thought the problem was just that the right books weren't breeding with each other and proposed a forced mating program.

The library was still giving trouble: a few books in some of the more obscure corners of the stacks retained some autonomy, dating back to an infamous early experiment with flying books, and lately they'd begun to breed. Shocked undergraduates had stumbled on books in the very act.

It didn't matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home. The

They were sitting on the floor in the library. It was too hot for chairs.

That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn't be unread. But

The librarian had imagined he could summon a given book to perch on his hand just by shouting out its call number, but in actuality they were just too willful, and some were actively predatory. The

It didn't matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least half-way home

I understand the fear that by losing contact with books on the printed page, we're somehow surrendering some aspect of our humanity, but that's just not the case…Stories were alive long before pages. Stories were theater. Stories were hieroglyphics…The medium is not the message. The medium is the delivery system. The story is the message.

There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you've read only once can't.

If I couldn't sleep, I could read.

I had to share a room with my sister, who is five and a half years older than I am. We didn't get along well, and I felt that I had no privacy. So books were my privacy, because no one could join me in a book, no one could comment on the action or make fun of it. I used to spend hours reading in the bathroom -- and we only had one bathroom in our small apartment!

I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.