quotations about books
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
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
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
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
I feel that books, just like people, have a destiny. Some invite sorrow, others joy, some both.
ELIE WIESEL
Night
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
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
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
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
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
Books were the sustenance of God. And His munitions.
RéGIS DEBRAY
God: An Itinerary
Books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI
Eragon
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
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
Only in today's sick society can a man be persecuted for reading too many books.
MARKUS ZUSAK
The Book Thief
If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Heroes and Hero Worship