Quotes About Books

I've received two key pieces of advice in regard to my books. The first is, "You should lay off the f-bombs." The other is, "You should add more f-bombs.

We sat in his library. amidst his beloved books, whose company I knew he would rather seek than that of most of his acquaintances, did they but know it.

a type I would never have met, only read about in books, for books were where you found life, without the effort of being in the real world.

The glory of the library for me is how many of the books are in poor physical condition. They are books that have been read and read intensely. They are knocked about and shopworn. I would be ashamed of a book whose spine was not broken.

You cannot have a taste for minimalist décor if you seriously read books.

I was the girl whose face fell when she saw a wrapped present in the shape of a box, perhaps a jigsaw puzzle. Worst of all, that preparation for the future slave-house of motherhood, a doll. I only wanted book tokens or books themselves – but better a book token. The worst present is the book you don't want to read.

Reading wasn't my religion – it was my oxygen.

When I look at my books I feel like Alice in the closing pages of Wonderland, when the cards all rise up and overwhelm her.

The idea that I was building a library to bequeath to the next generation is one of the greatest fallacies of my life. The next generation don't want old books – they don't seem to want books at all.

Books are too personal as objects to be displayed, in case a potential buyer is put off by your taste for Nietzsche or Marian Keyes. You would not display the contents of your knicker and sock drawer, or your bathroom cabinet with its face creams and cough remedies, so why put off potential buyers with your taste in literature?

The books, as I have already said, are a library. In a library, you do not read a book to the last page and dispose of it: you return, you return. ... I return in memory and imagination, but I return by taking a book down from the shelf, and reading a few pages. That is a library. A full larder for the soul.

Just letting readers know that I have written some works under Linda Chaffee Taylor (Chaffee was my maiden name, and that is where you will find my main profile) and Linda K. Taylor (middle initial). I can't figure out how to get Goodreads to combine, but if you want to find all my books, go to the author profile for Linda Chaffee Taylor. And thanks for reading and supporting.

Just looking at them I grow greedy, as if they were freshly baked loaves waiting on their shelves to be broken open--that one and that--and I make my choice in a mood of exalted luck, browsing among them like a cow in sweetest pasture. For life is continuous as long as they wait to be read--these inked paths opening into the future, page after page, every book its own receding horizon. And I hold them, one in each hand, a curious ballast weighing me here to earth.

upon row of books, most of them bound in leather, reached to the ceiling several stories over their heads, illuminated by the faint glow of autumn sunlight through the marble. It was truly striking.

Have any sheep been seen walking out of the Library with seagoing adventurers clinging to their wool?

For the longest time I was so sick I didn't have the strength or inclination to read, but looking at my books stacked up on the bedside table was comforting, like having old friends sitting in the room with me, friends who didn't require anything of me, friends who brought me great pleasure just with their presence, waiting until I could engage with them again.... bibliophiles know the inanimate pleasure of the friendship with books.

Look. All books are weird when you think about it.... It goes without saying that real life is also weird.

I like living in the city where I have all my books and music and can go out to buy that night's dinner or easily see a band. But I also like the wild places, especially hiking in the desert and the Eastern woodlands. Do I have to choose?

I'm really bad at describing my books. Journalists like to have things like "It's The Terminator Meets the Seven Dwarfs." And I can't do that with my books. If I could, I probably wouldn't write them.

Reading time is precious. Don't waste it. Reading bad books, or books that are wrong for a certain time in your life, can dangerously put you off the activity altogether.

The size of a man's income has considerable effect on his access to the world beyond his neighborhood. With money he can overcome almost every tangible obstacle of communication, he can travel, buy books and periodicals, and bring within the range of his attention almost any known fact of the world.

Read. Read until your eyes are sore. Then read some more.

Overall, books and art were a safer escape from reality than sleep.

She spent all her free time either drawing the strange things she saw in her dreams, or with her nose inside historical novels. The world held in the pages of history felt like the real world, and the present day an illusion she had to suffer through until she could escape back into the pages of a book.