quotations about books
All her life she had known that books were living things, not just a convergence of concept and ink, intellect and paper. They did not breathe or think, but they grew and gave a sense of potential so much larger than whatever was written on their pages.
TIM LEBBON
Dawn
A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw,", Other Inquisitions
A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.
J. M. COETZEE
Summertime
I can't understand why a person will take a year or two to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.
FRED ALLEN
attributed, Books: Their History
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
W. H. AUDEN
attributed, 20,000 Quips & Quotes