BOOK QUOTES V

quotations about books

A book is a Fantastic Book, though time and space be commonplace enough, though the time be today and the place Camberwell, if only the mind perpetually travels, seeing one after another unexpected things in the consequences of human action or in the juxtaposition of emotions.

HILAIRE BELLOC

On Everything


A book is a suicide postponed.

EMIL CIORAN

The Trouble with Being Born


Books are nothing but repositories for those lies the author wants his reader to believe.

GLEN COOK

Water Sleeps


Books! The chosen depositories of the thoughts, the opinions, and the aspirations of mighty intellects; like wondrous mirrors that have caught and fixed bright images of souls that have passed away; like magic lyres, whose masters have bequeathed them to the world, and which yet, of themselves, ring with unforgotten music, while the hands that touched their chords have crumbled into dust. Books! they are the embodiments and manifestations of departed minds--the living organs through which those who are dead yet speak to us.

E. H. CHAPIN

Living Words


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


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


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


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


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


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"


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


Books were the sustenance of God. And His munitions.

RéGIS DEBRAY

God: An Itinerary


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


He who possesses good books without gaining any profit from them, is like an ass that carries a rich burden and feeds upon thistles.

JOHN THORNTON

Maxims and Directions for Youth