BOOK QUOTES II
quotations about books
Book reading is a solitary and sedentary pursuit, and those who do are cautioned that a book should be used as an integral part of a well-rounded life ... A book should not be used as a substitute or an excuse.
GARRISON KEILLOR
The Book of Guys
Look at a railway stall; you see books of every colour--blue, yellow, crimson, "ringstreaked, speckled, and spotted," on every subject, in every style, of every opinion, with every conceivable difference, celestial or sublunary, maleficent, beneficent--but all small. People take their literature in morsels, as they take sandwiches on a journey.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
Reading a book is a dangerous thing, Justine. A book can make you find room in yourself for something you never thought you'd understand. Or worse, something you never wanted to understand.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
The plainest row of books that cloth or paper ever covered is more significant of refinement than the most elaborately carved furniture.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
I think a great book--leaving aside other qualities such as narrative power, characterization, style, and so on--is a book that describes the world in a way that has not been done before; and that is recognized by those who read it as telling new truths.
JULIAN BARNES
The Paris Review, winter 2000
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
To say that the publishing world is not interested in literature is to overstate it. They are extremely interested in it, they just don’t want to publish it, you see. Publishers are brave, as brave as the famous diving horses of Atlantic City, but they’re increasingly owned by conglomerates, businesses which have nothing to do with publishing, and these companies demand a certain profit out of their publishing divisions. They take very few risks and they publish an enormous number of things which look like books, sort of feel like books, but in reality are buckets of peanut butter with a layer of whipped cream on top.
DONALD BARTHELME
"A Symposium on Fiction"
I don't know myself, what to do, where to go ... I lie in the crack of a book for my comfort ... it's what the world offers ... please leave me alone to dream as I fancy.
WILLIAM H. GASS
Omensetter's Luck
Books ... were merely nodes in a near-infinite matrix of information that exists in four dimensions, evolving toward the idea of the concept of the approximation of the shadow of Truth vertically through time as well as longitudinally through knowledge.
DAN SIMMONS
Olympos
Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.
JULIAN BARNES
Flaubert's Parrot
What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore, it knows it's not fooling a soul.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
Why can't people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?
DAVID BALDACCI
The Camel Club
We go to a book as Narcissus went to the fountain, see ourselves therein, and are enamored.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Man, that’s the only kind of book I like – one that’s so real you want to find out everything there is to know about the person who wrote it, like how tall he is and what kind of music he likes and whether or not he really went through all the stuff he was writing about.
ADAM RAPP
Under the Wolf
Books are the mirrors of the soul.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Between the Acts
To buy books as some do who make no use of them, only because they were published by an eminent printer, is much as if a man should buy clothes that did not fit him, only because they were made by some famous tailor.
ALEXANDER POPE
"Thoughts on Various Subjects"
The burning of a book is a sad, sad sight, for even though a book is nothing but ink and paper, it feels as if the ideas contained in the book are disappearing as the pages turn to ashes and the cover and binding--which is the term for the stitching and glue that holds the pages together--blacken and curl as the flames do their wicked work. When someone is burning a book, they are showing utter contempt for all of the thinking that produced its ideas, all of the labor that went into its words and sentences, and all of the trouble that befell the author ...
DANIEL HANDLER (as Lemony Snicket)
The Penultimate Peril
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 reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"Marginalia"