quotations about books
Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later--no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover or how much we learn or forget--we will return.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
When you’re reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners?
ELIF BATUMAN
interview, The Rumpus, Apr. 25, 2012
In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from binding.
CHARLES LAMB
"On Books and Reading", The Last Essays of Elia
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
The popular books are the novels, dealing with life under all possible conditions, and they are widely read not only because they are entertaining, but also because they in a measure satisfy an unformulated belief that to see farther, to know all sorts of men, in an indefinite way, is a preparation for better social adjustment--for the remedying of social ills.
JANE ADDAMS
Democracy and Social Ethics
Only in today's sick society can a man be persecuted for reading too many books.
MARKUS ZUSAK
The Book Thief
Who collects them or preserves them--the Fantastic Books? No one, I think. They are not catalogued under a separate Heading. They puzzle the writers of Indices; they bewilder Librarians. They must be grouted out of the mass of rubbish as Pigs in the Perigord grout out truffles. There is no other way.
HILAIRE BELLOC
On Everything
If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Heroes and Hero Worship
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
Bog-lights, vapours of mysticism, psychic overtones, soul orgies, wailings among the shadows, weird gnosticisms, veils and tissues of words, gibbering subjectivisms, gropings and maunderings, ontological fantasies, pan-psychic hallucinations--this is the stuff, the phantasms of hope, that fills your book shelves.
JACK LONDON
John Barleycorn
A book ... should resemble a tranquil lake, in whose glassy surface the varied wonders of the earth and sky are faithfully imaged.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
The best books are those which lift us to a higher plane where we breathe a purer atmosphere.
ORISON SWETT MARDEN
Architects of Fate
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
One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.
GEORGE W. BUSH
"W's Greatest Hits: The top 25 Bushisms of all time", Slate, January 12, 2009
One only makes books in order to keep in touch with one's fellows after one has ceased to breathe, and thus to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that lives--transitoriness and oblivion.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Selected Stories
Books that have become classics -- books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal -- always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
Ponkapog Papers
The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.
ANITA BROOKNER
Novelists in Interview
Reading useless books is like sowing bad seed--your trouble does not reward you.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
No man living in a world as interesting as this ever writes a book if he can help it.
GERALD STANLEY LEE
Crowds
And books, they offer one hope - that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.
ANNE RICE
Blackwood Farm