quotations about books
Books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI
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Eragon
Books are the training weights of the mind.
EPICTETUS
The Art of Living
The covers of this book are too far apart.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
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
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
My main disappointment was always that a book had to end. And then what? But I don't think I was ever disappointed by the books. I must have been what any author would consider an ideal reader. I felt every pain and pleasure suffered or enjoyed by all the characters. Oh, but I identified!
EUDORA WELTY
Conversations with Eudora Welty
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
All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words.
AMY LOWELL
Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds
Books are influential in proportion to their obscurity, provided that the obscurity be that of inexpressible Realities. The Bible is the most obscure book in the world. He must be a great fool who thinks he understands the plainest chapter of it.
COVENTRY PATMORE
The Rod
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
The sincere love of books has nothing to do with cleverness or stupidity any more than any other sincere love. It is a quality of character, a freshness, a power of pleasure, a power of faith. A silly person may delight in reading masterpieces just as a silly person may delight in picking flowers. A fool may be in love with a poet as he may be in love with a woman.
G. K. CHESTERTON
"A Midsummer Night's Dream," , On Lying in Bed and Other Essays
We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.
JOHN LUBBOCK
The Pleasures of Life
Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.
CHINA MIÉVILLE
The City and the City
For every good book is worth the reader's while when there is a real communion of the spirit, and this is possible only when he feels he is being taken into the author's confidence and the author is willing to reveal to him the innermost searchings of his heart and talk, as it were, in an unbuttoned mood, collar and tie loose, as by a friend's fireside.
LIN YUTANG
Between Tears and Laughter
I want to do something splendid ... something heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead ... I think I shall write books.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women
Your borrowers of books--those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.
CHARLES LAMB
"The Two Races of Men", Essays of Elia
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
W. H. AUDEN
"Reading", The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Heretics
Books are all right, but dead men's brains are no good unless you mix a live one's with them.
GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
Old Gorgon Graham
Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason--they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon