Quotes About Books

Reading is my passion and my escape since I was 5 years old. Overall, children don't realize the magic that can live inside their own heads. Better even then any movie.

Most people are widely read. I'm thinly read. I've read *** all, and I'm very proud of it.

He longed for the little cabin and the sun-kissed sea - for the cool interior of the well-built house, and for the never-ending wonders of the many books.

Euripides questioned everything. He was a misanthrope who preferred books to men.

Don't you ever mind, she asked suddenly, not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?

Some men, Flamel irresistibly added, think of books merely as tools, others as tooling. I'm between the two; there are days when I use them as scenery, other days when I want them as society; so that, as you see, my library represents a makeshift compromise between looks and brains, and the collectors look down on me almost as much as the students.

He took [the book] up, and found himself plunged in an atmosphere unlike any he had ever breathed in books; so warm, so rich, and yet so ineffably tender, that it gave a new and haunting beauty to the most elementary of human passions.

Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death; yet there are always new countries to see, new books to read (and, I hope, to write), a thousand little daily wonders to marvel at and rejoice in.

Newland never seems to look ahead, Mrs. Welland once ventured to complain to her daughter; and May answered serenely: No; but you see it doesn't matter, because when there's nothing particular to do he reads a book.

Her books, and some inner source of life, had kept her warm.

Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death; yet there are always new countries to see, new books to read (and, I hope to write), a thousand little daily wonders to marvel at and rejoice in.... The visible is a daily miracle for those who have eyes and ears; and I still worm my hands thankfully by the old fire, through every year it is fed with the dry wood of more memories. --A Backward Glance

Many people like books because they're suspenseful or scary or touching or inspirational or because one admires the characters as if they were real people. Maybe it's only writers who like the writing.

When you see a book you want, buy it instantly because you may never find it again.

found these things in Heuvelman's book, In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents, and I suppose some similar account might have given Pike the whole idea

Another d-mn'd thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?

The books of jurisprudence were interesting to few, and entertaining to none: their value was connected with present use, and they sunk forever as soon as that use was superseded by the innovations of fashion, superior merit, or public authority.

If I do not seem to be mentioning anything I've read lately, it is because I am in one of those periods of undifferentiated flux or something in which I am reading about fifty, at a minimum, books at once, so of course I seldom finish one. Eventually this phase will pass, and I'll discover I have about ten pages to go in all of them, and will sit down and systematically finish them, one after another.

I've got an apartment that consists of nothing but books; on the other hand, I don't collect. It's a mania to buy books. I can't go out without buying a book. But it would never occur to me to collect. I collect authors because obviously I want all their work, but this business of first editions and that whole thing doesn't strike me.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books - a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.

At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.... The various qualities of my readings seem to permeate my every muscle, so that when I finally decide to turn off the library light, I carry into my sleep the voices and the movements of the book I've just closed.

If the book is second-hand, I leave all its markings intact, the spoor of previous readers, fellow-travellers who have recorded their passage by means of scribbled comments, a name on the fly-leaf, a bus ticket to mark a certain page.

Old or new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that malignant booksellers attach to the backs. These evil white scabs rip off with difficulty, leaving leprous wounds and traces of slime to which adhere the dust and fluff of ages, making me wish for a special gummy hell to which the inventor of these stickers would be condemned.

I wanted to live among books.