quotations about books
It is so very easy and so very pleasant, too, to read only books which lead to nothing, light and interesting books, and the more the better, that it is almost as difficult to wean ourselves from it as from the habit of chewing tobacco to excess, or of smoking the whole time, or of depending for stimulus upon tea or coffee or spirits.
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS
American Library Journal, 1876
My last refuge, my books: simple pleasures, like finding wild onions by the side of the road, or requited love.
TRACY LETTS
August: Osage Country
The best books are those which lift us to a higher plane where we breathe a purer atmosphere.
ORISON SWETT MARDEN
Architects of Fate
There are many, many types of books in the world, which makes good sense, because there are many, many types of people, and everybody wants to read something different.
DANIEL HANDLER (as Lemony Snicket)
The Bad Beginning
Books are nothing but repositories for those lies the author wants his reader to believe.
GLEN COOK
Water Sleeps
A book is a Fantastic Book, though time and space be commonplace enough, though the time be today and the place Camberwell, if only the mind perpetually travels, seeing one after another unexpected things in the consequences of human action or in the juxtaposition of emotions.
HILAIRE BELLOC
On Everything
Bog-lights, vapours of mysticism, psychic overtones, soul orgies, wailings among the shadows, weird gnosticisms, veils and tissues of words, gibbering subjectivisms, gropings and maunderings, ontological fantasies, pan-psychic hallucinations--this is the stuff, the phantasms of hope, that fills your book shelves.
JACK LONDON
John Barleycorn
Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.
UMBERTO ECO
The Name of the Rose
Books were the sustenance of God. And His munitions.
RéGIS DEBRAY
God: An Itinerary
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
Every few seconds a new book sees the light of day. Most of them will just be a part of the hum that makes us hard of hearing. Even the book is becoming an instrument of forgetting. A truly literary work comes into being as its creator’s cry of protest against the forgetting that looms over him, over his predecessors and his contemporaries alike, and over his time, and the language he speaks. A literary work is something that defies death.
IVAN KLIMA
speech at conference in Lahti, 1990
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
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
One only makes books in order to keep in touch with one's fellows after one has ceased to breathe, and thus to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that lives--transitoriness and oblivion.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Selected Stories
Only in today's sick society can a man be persecuted for reading too many books.
MARKUS ZUSAK
The Book Thief
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
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
No man living in a world as interesting as this ever writes a book if he can help it.
GERALD STANLEY LEE
Crowds
Reading useless books is like sowing bad seed--your trouble does not reward you.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The power of a book lies in its power to turn a solitary act into a shared vision. As long as we have books, we are not alone.
LAURA WELCH BUSH
Bringing Out the Best in Everyone You Coach