quotations about books
A book is a suicide postponed.
EMIL CIORAN
The Trouble with Being Born
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
It is quite too common a practice, both in readers and the more superficial class of critics, to judge a book by what it is not, a matter much easier to determine than what it is.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
The Round Table
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
There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you've read only once can't.
GAIL CARSON LEVINE
Writing Magic
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 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
Don't judge a book by its cover.
ENGLISH PROVERB
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
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
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
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
If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Heroes and Hero Worship
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
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"
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
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
Only in today's sick society can a man be persecuted for reading too many books.
MARKUS ZUSAK
The Book Thief