Quotes About Books

What my parents kept failing to understand was how happy I was when I was alone with my books. There was no pressure to perform or be cute, and books never disappoint — unless, of course, you've chosen a bad one. But then, you can always put it down and pick up another one without any repercussions.

And I am coming from the library with my arms full of books. I think of those prizes that were ours for the taking and wonder when the choices got made we don't remember making.

We don't need to have just one favorite. We keep adding favorites. Our favorite book is always the book that speaks most directly to us at a particular stage in our lives. And our lives change. We have other favorites that give us what we most need at that particular time. But we never lose the old favorites. They're always with us. We just sort of accumulate them.

I had found a new friend. The surprising thing is where I'd found him – not up a tree or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the hill streams, but in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend. Or that you could slip inside the skin of another. Or travel to another place with marshes, and where, to our ears, the bad people spoke like pirates.

The surprising thing is where I'd found him – not up a tree or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the hill streams, but in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend.

Let not men think there is no truth, but in the sciences that they study, or the books that they read.

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

People say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

The man that I named the Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing. It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom. Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things. [from her Newberry Award acceptance speech]

I know not how it is, but during a voyage I collect books as a ship does barnacles.

With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some books, I live without envy

Some men are daylight readers, who peruse the ambiguous wording of clouds or the individual letter shapes of wandering birds. Some, like myself, are librarians of the night, whose ephemeral documents consist of root-inscribed bones or whatever rustles in the thickets upon solitary walks.

She had a bit of a dustup with another student, set fire to the kid's books in the school cafeteria.

They were perfectly suited. They would speak of books the livelong day and night and bore everyone else but themselves to distraction.

What parents needed, I believed, wasn't another book about how they had to calm down and take a break. What they needed was an actual break from the deluge of parenting books.

his powerful legs in tall books

Aubrey didn't know what to think of this. People came here for books. Or, in Ben's case, to drive her crazy.

Scary movies and books were too much for her—she read only romance.

I always considered myself a loner. I mean, not like a poor-me, Byron-esque, I-should-have-brought-a-swimming-buddy loner. I mean the sort of person who doesn't feel too upset about the prospect of a weekend spent seeing no one, and reading good books on the couch. It wasn't like I was a people hater or anything. I enjoyed activities and the company of friends. But they were a side dish. I always thought I would be happy without them.

The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level ? there weren't any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader's head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer's work and skill and the reader's imagination. Parents, of a sort.

Rip her dress off!" Bob shouted. Bob the Skull takes paperback romances very seriously. The next page turned so quickly that he tore the paper a little. Bob is even harder on books than I am. "That's what I'm talking about!" Bob hollered, as more pages turned.

A smile fought its way through her expression of pain for a moment, and she said, "Yeah, it really kind of was, wasn't it? Was that a Salamander?" "Pretty sure," I said. "They're so much bigger than in those Xanth books.

and several bulging bookshelves which I really will organize one day.

Books were expensive, as well. But she'd read enough of them to know that they were only as valuable as the contents of their writers' minds—and to her it seemed that a great many writers, had they been merchants, would have precious little inventory.