Quotes About Books

For coffee-stained girls in libraries.

Hovering somewhere between seventy and eighty years old, the Chair nestled in an office feathered with the books, papers, notes, and tchotchkes accumulated over a lifetime career devoted to the study of the Orient. He had hung an elaborate Oriental rug on his wall, in lieu, I suppose, of an actual Oriental.

But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch.

And the process of reading is such a private one. I once came into a room where a friend of mine was reading one of my books, and he clicked his tongue impatiently and shooed me off.

Good books get praised, bad books get praised. Good books get ignored, bad books get ignored

A skilled teacher and a few good books can always cure ignorance.

I am a writer. Books are my home and words are my friends.

One who does not like to read is equal to one who cannot read.

The man who never lends his books probably remembers how he acquired them.

I was taken up by books, as if by the strong arms of a parent I'd never known and had been badly missing.

So often, a visit to a bookshop has cheered me, and reminded me that there are good things in the world.

É a primeira vez depois de muitos meses que eu pego um livro nas mãos. Isto me diz muito e me cura consideravelmente.

I am in the middle of reading Balzac, César Birotteau. I will send it to you when I have finished it - I think I shall read the whole of Balzac again.

She lived passionately on very little money and a great deal of curiosity, courage, and enthusiasm for books, nature, a cigarette, a bodice she was cutting out, a concert, a lecture, a fingernail file.

Somewhere there must be women reading books, and talking of chicken rissoles to their cooks … (from,'Somewhere in England')

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.

As is invariably noted at the beginning of positively all literary biographies, the little boy was a glutton for books.... For his first writing exercise he painstakingly reproduced: "Obey your sovereign, honor him and submit to his laws," and the compressed ball of his index finger thus remained ink-stained forever. Now the thirties are over and the forties have begun.

Read a minimum of four good books a year, a monthly magazine like The Reader's Digest, and your daily morning and evening newspapers.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten, none are undeservedly remembered

Atacar los libros malos no solo supone una pérdida de tiempo, sino que es malo para el carácter. Tratándose de un libro verdaderamente malo, el único interés que puede desprenderse de lo que escriba sobre él tendrá que provenir de mí mismo: de toda la inteligencia, ingenio y malicia que yo consiga desplegar. Es imposible reseñar un gran libro sin presunción.

From my 25+ years in publishing, I've observed that selling books does not occur without the author taking action.

THE REALISTS Hope that you may understand! What can books of men that wive In a dragon-guarded land, Paintings of the dolphin-drawn Sea-nymphs in their pearly waggons Do, but awake a hope to live That had gone With the dragons?

I praise but in brief words the noble writing of these books, for words that praise a book, wherein something is done supremely well, remain, to sound in the ears of a later generation, like the foolish sound of church bells from the tower of a church when every pew is full.

Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.