quotations about books
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 feel that books, just like people, have a destiny. Some invite sorrow, others joy, some both.
ELIE WIESEL
Night
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
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
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
In perusing the writings of sensible men, we have frequent opportunities of examining our own hearts, and by that means, of attaining a more certain knowledge of ourselves.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
The book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty -- and vice versa.
DORIS LESSING
introduction, The Golden Notebook
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
Books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI
Eragon
Books were the sustenance of God. And His munitions.
RéGIS DEBRAY
God: An Itinerary
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
Don't judge a book by its cover.
ENGLISH PROVERB
A man who keeps a diary pays,
Due toll to many tedious days;
But life becomes eventful--then,
His busy hand forgets the pen.
Most books, indeed, are records less
Of fulness than of emptiness.
WILLIAM ALLINGHAM
A Diary
I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the "vain and superstitious habit" of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines on the palms of one's hand.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"The Library of Babel"