Quotes About Books

I learned to read silently too. That's why I could finish one book after another without getting tired.

I opened my trunk and almost burst into tears. At such times I always sought refuge in a bookstore.

Children have a natural antipathy to books - handicraft should be the basis of education. Boys and girls should be taught to use their hands to make something, and they would be less apt to destroy and be mischievous.

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

library terror - that feeling of being hopelessly overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of available books...

Elizabeth was trying not to laugh. How did you get the sons of reivers to read books? Well, you told them they couldn't have them and let nature take its course.

He [his uncle, Pliny the Elder] used to say that there was no book so bad that it was not useful at some point. Pliny the Younger, Epistula III.5.10

There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.

Through the study of books one seeks God; by meditation one finds him.

Why do all your friends talk like books?

I'm hardly the first to point out that middle-class America has a parenting problem. In hundreds of books and articles this problem has been painstakingly diagnosed, critiqued, and named: overparenting, hyperparenting, helicopter parenting, and, my personal favorite, the kindergarchy.

I've got the first two books," Calla said. "I'll loan them to you." The young woman seemed momentarily surprised and then happily agreed. "I guess that's what people who read stuff do," she said. "They loan books to each other.

This is every reader's catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing. There is no way to finish, and perhaps that shouldn't be the goal.

At this point, there is no human way that I could read even those books I've deliberately marked as absolute must-reads. [ . . . ] This is every reader's catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing

Like all collectors, I exist in a perpetual state of want that bears no reasonable relationship to the quantity of unread books mounting up on my shelves.

Books gnaw at me from around the edges of my life, demanding more time and attention. I am always left hungry.

Dark books say to us, "This isn't about you. You are in fact alive and safe." Yes, there's an implicit and unavoidable warning, an edge of danger; these things happen, the books say. And yet, as bad as it gets inside this book, you, the reader, are securely outside. If

For a girl who often felt like she lived more in the cozy world of books than in the unforgiving world of the playground, a book of books was the richest journal imaginable; it showed a version of myself I recognized and felt represented me. Over

Tillie Olsen. James Joyce. Robert Stone. I must have read Updike's Rabbit, Run five times and Bellow's Herzog

My sort wants the book in its entirety. We need to touch it, to examine the weight of its paper and the way text is laid out on the page. People like me open books and inhale the binding, favoring the scents of certain glues over others, breathing them in like incense even as the chemicals poison our brains. We consume them.

When I look through Bob, the actual stories between his mottled covers may have been written by others, but they belong to me now. Nobody else on the planet has read this particular series of books in this exact order and been affected in precisely this way. Each of us could say the same about our respective reading trajectories. Even if we don't keep a physical Book of Books, we all hold our books somewhere inside us and live by them. They become our stories.

Children are notoriously literal readers, and I was no exception. Books, I believed, contained the entire truth about everything, and if you could just read every book or even a good chunk of the Truly Important Ones, you would know what you needed to know about real life. And you could be a part of it. Naturally, I got a lot of things wrong.

At the dinner table, make "what you're reading" as regular a part of conversation

School is where children learn that they have to read. Home is where kids learn to read because they want to. It's where they learn to love to read.