quotations about books
Why not leave the reading of great books till a great age? Why plague and perplex childhood with complex facts remote from its experience and inapprehensible by its imagination?
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
Books are nothing but repositories for those lies the author wants his reader to believe.
GLEN COOK
Water Sleeps
Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a dangerous enemy indeed.
ANNE RICE
The Witching Hour
A book is a suicide postponed.
EMIL CIORAN
The Trouble with Being Born
It is quite too common a practice, both in readers and the more superficial class of critics, to judge a book by what it is not, a matter much easier to determine than what it is.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
The Round Table
The majority of the books of our time give one the impression of having been manufactured in a day out of books read the day before.
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary
I think a book that is over 400 pages should be split in two. I don't know that there's anything that interesting that can go on for 700 pages. I think that is a little bit indulgent.
CHRIS ABANI
The Boston Globe, Mar. 22, 2014
What could be better, really, than to sit by the fire in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the windowpanes, and the lamp burns?... You forget everything ... and hours go by. Without moving, you walk through lands you imagine you can see, and your thoughts, weaving in and out of the story, delight in the details or follow the outlines of the adventures. You merge with the character; you think you're the one whose heart is beating so hard within the clothes he's wearing.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Madame Bovary
For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.
ANNE LAMOTT
Bird by Bird
In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.
THOMAS MANN
letter
There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!
EMILY DICKINSON
"There is no frigate like a book"
Don't judge a book by its cover.
ENGLISH PROVERB
I consider books to be good for our health, and also our spirits, and they help us to become poets or scientists, to understand the stars or else to discover them deep within the aspirations of certain characters, those who sometimes, on certain evenings, escape from the pages and walk among us humans, perhaps the most human of us all.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
The Notebook
It's tricky turning a book into a movie. Sometimes people love the book so much that no adaptation lives up to what they imagined. You can avoid that disappointment by never, ever reading books.
CRAIG FERGUSON
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Mar. 21, 2012
Savages and primitives believed in books that could suck your soul out through your eyes as you read them, books that could wrap their pages around your head and swallow you, words that crawled into your brain like tapeworms.
K. J. PARKER
The Escapement
What makes the success of many books consists in the affinity there is between the mediocrity of the author's ideas and those of the public.
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary
A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That's a sign of a good novel. Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000
Books were the sustenance of God. And His munitions.
RéGIS DEBRAY
God: An Itinerary
If you would understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd