Books Quotes

We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise.

Books are for nothing but to inspire

There are books... which rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences.

I was kind of relieved with the way the book [The Proud Highway] came out. It's beyond an autobiography or a biography. I never knew what was going to come up next.

I think that the Peeps or Peppies or Pipes diaries would be much more popular had there been a universal pronuncation of his name.

Mrs Weaver nosed among the books, too dim-witted to grasp that they were in alphabetical order.

We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

Anyone buying this book is going to be out a tidy sum if he is sucked in by the title. I wish I could write a real sexy book that would be barred from the mails. Apparently nothing whets a reader's appetite for literature more than the news that the author has been thrown into a federal pokey for disturbing the libido of millions of Americans.

In the end all books are written for your friends.

You can't get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.

Out in the world not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather anything might happen, always did.

The rain has spoiled the farmer's day;Shall sorrow put my books away?Thereby are two days lost.

If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.

Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.

The written word may be man's greatest invention. It allows us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn.

She liked books more than anything else, and was, in fact, always inventing stories of beautiful things and telling them to herself.

And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East.

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

People come, people go – they’ll drift in and out of your life, almost like characters in a favorite book. When you finally close the cover, the characters have told their story and you start up again with another book, complete with new characters and adventures. Then you find yourself focusing on the new ones, not the ones from the past.

To stand in a great bookshop crammed with books so new that their pages almost stick together, and the gilt on their backs is still fresh, has an excitement no less delightful than the old excitement of the second-hand bookstall.

If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it.

If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life we live. I knew there were writers who wore tweed coats and lived in Connecticut and somehow made a living, and that's what I aimed to do. I've tried to write as well as I can with books that say something to any reader.

Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.

I did toy with the idea of doing a cook-book. . . . I think a lot of people who hate literature but love fried eggs would buy it if the price was right.

Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes!

Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller.

Our books approach very slowly the things we most wish to know.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read; what I haven't read.

So it may well be believed that when I found him taking a complete holiday, with a vast supply of books at command, he had the air of indulging in a literary debauch, if the term may be applied to so honorable an occupation.

It certainly is my opinion that a book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.

Some of the sweetest hours in life, in retrospect will be found to have been spent with books.

An index is a great leveller.

Our hope is that the elementary reading of comics will lead to the joy of reading good books.

I want to hold onto this funny thing. God, it's gotten big on me. I don't know what it is. I'm so damned unhappy, I'm so mad, and I don't know why. I feel like I'm putting on weight. I feel fat. I feel like I'm saving a lot of things, and I don't know what. I might even start reading books.

Millions of students now, in all the schools of America, are reading science fiction and especially, thank God, 'The Martian Chronicles.'

Human intelligence discovered a way of perpetuating itself, one not only more durable and more resistant than architecture, but also simpler and easier. Architecture was dethroned. The stone letters of Orpheus gave way to the lead letters of Gutenburg. The book will kill the edifice.

Most recently I read Michael Lewis "Boomerang." The other guy I love is Bill Bryson.

The virtue of books is to be readable.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies.

People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or temperament. Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold and defective store?

I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.

Walden - all his books, indeed - are packed with subtle, conflicting, and very fruitful discoveries. They are not written to prove something in the end. They are written as the Indians turn down twigs to mark their path through the forest. He cuts his way through life as if no one had ever taken that road before, leaving these signs for those who come after, should they care to see which way he went.

The modernness of all good books seems to give men an existence as wide as man.

I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather, C. S. Lewis.

Me, poor man, my library Was dukedom large enough.

Garrett," said Stendahl, "do you know why I've done this to you? Because you burned Mr. Poe's books without really reading them. You took other people's advice that they needed burning. Otherwise you'd have realized what I was going to do to you when we came down here a moment ago. Ignorance is fatal, Mr. Garrett.

If people like to read their books, it is all very well, but to be at so much trouble in filling great volumes, which, as I used to think, nobody would willingly ever look into, to be labouring only for the torment of little boys and girls, always struck me as a hard fate.

Twenty-volume folios will never make a revolution. It’s the little pocket pamphlets that are to be feared.

Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.

It is with books as with the fires of our grates, everybody borrows a light from his neighbor to kindle his own, which in turn is communicated to others, and each partakes of all.

Come, and take choice of all my library, And so beguile thy sorrow.

I do not read a book; I hold a conversation with the author.

Libraries are absolutely at the center of my life. Since I couldn't afford to go to college, I attended the library three or four days a week from the age of eighteen on, and graduated from the library when I was twenty-eight.