Quotes About Books

Library books were, I suddenly realized, promiscuous, ready to lie down in the arms of anyone who asked. Not like bookstore books, which married their purchasers, or were brokered for marriages to others.

The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder.

Fire is a speed reader, which is why the ignorant burn books: fire races through pages, takes care of all the knowledge, and never bores you with a summary.

The books said that the problem with autism was in the brain, and that made me feel like a faulty computer, something that should be sent back or scrapped. All the interventions, all the training, were like software designed to make a bad computer work right. It never does, and neither did I.

But the books brought me things. This is my point. They made me feel less alone.

Nor would I willingly miss the early darkness and the pleasant firelight tea and the long evenings among my books.

Give me a book. There is no present I care about but that.

And then when I got home I burrowed about among my books, arranging their volumes and loving the feel of them.

All I want is to read quietly the books that I at present prefer.

Books, the books that I loved above all else to spend my time with, were the great tools for understanding one's life and the lives of other people.

Learning is often spoken of as if we are watching the open pages of all the books which we have ever read, and then, when occasion arises, we select the right page to read aloud to the universe.

Books won't stay banned - Ideas won't go to jail.

The dark side of life, and the horror of it, belonged to a world that lay remote from his own select little atmosphere of books and dreamings.

His little sister is brilliant. She is at her desk deep in a book, half-opened books all over her desk, all over the floor and the bed. She likes to read, she reads all the time, and she prefers to be reading several things at once, she says it gives endless perspective and dimension.

You hold me very tight in under my clothes, and if there's a library anywhere near then someone just removed its roof, the shelves just flooded with the sun and all the old books just remembered what it means to be bound in skin and to have a spine.

Oh yes, I admire books. I still do. They can preserve a truth for twice a thousand years and teach it to any who has the skill and cares to read it. They can also fix a lie in stone forever. But worse still, they—the books—can be about nothing at all. Nothing real.

What the future held for her she didn't know. Of two things only she was certain. There would be children-her own or other people's-and there would be books.

What sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which every one else is reading.

At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, "Mythology and Archetypal Experience," confounded me. I didn't understand why we couldn't just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then

If you know how to read, you know how forever. You can't unread.

I prefer to be left alone with my books.

If only they would all just leave me alone with my books and my letters, I would be content to let life, and the world pass me by

Contrary to what is commonly thought, without the book even the idea of the order of the whole is lost.

So you're a secret society … of librarians?