quotations about books
Don't judge a book by its cover.
ENGLISH PROVERB
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
I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.... Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.
RAY BRADBURY
Coda
You know, not every good book needs to be a movie, or a television series, or a video game. There's great work in those mediums, of course, but sometimes a book should remain a book. I still believe nothing tells a story with the richness and complexity of a good novel. When people say they think a book would make a good movie, they say this sometimes because, if it worked, they already saw all the images in the movie theatre that is in their brains. And sometimes that is the way it should stay.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
"Carlos Ruiz Zafon's love letter to literature", New Zealand Listener, Mar. 14, 2013
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
Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.
W. H. AUDEN
The Complete Works of W. H. Auden
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 am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.
DORIS LESSING
Time Bites
There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.
CHARLES DICKENS
Oliver Twist
All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words.
AMY LOWELL
Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds
Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.
NICHOLSON BAKER
attributed, New York Times Book Review, 1994
For books are more than books, they are the life
The very heart and core of ages past,
The reason why men lived and worked and died,
The essence and quintessence of their lives.
AMY LOWELL
"The Boston Athenæum", A Dome of Many-coloured Glass
It is only a novel ... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.
JANE AUSTEN
Northanger Abbey
The covers of this book are too far apart.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.
ROALD DAHL
The Telegraph, Sep. 13, 2011
There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island and at the bottom of the Spanish Main ... and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.
WALT DISNEY
attributed, Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time
Books are not seldom talismans and spells.
WILLIAM COWPER
The Task
For out of old fields, as men saith,
Cometh all this new corn from year to year;
And out of old books, in good faith,
Cometh all this new science that men learn.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
"Parliament of Foules"
No two persons ever read the same book, or saw the same picture.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Airelles,", The Writings of Madame Swetchine