BOOK QUOTES VI

quotations about books

Books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life.

CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI

Eragon


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"


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


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


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


We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.

JOHN LUBBOCK

The Pleasures of Life


Don't judge a book by its cover.

ENGLISH PROVERB


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


One reads books in order to gain the privilege of living more than one life. People who don't read are trapped in a mine shaft, even if they think the sun is shining.

GARRISON KEILLOR

"The More Noble Prize,", Salon, Nov. 30, 2005


Books are but pictures--the world is their original; to know the former well, we must necessarily have much acquaintance with the colors and shades of the latter.

NORMAN MACDONALD

Maxims and Moral Reflections


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


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


There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!

EMILY DICKINSON

"There is no frigate like a book"


Books are all right, but dead men's brains are no good unless you mix a live one's with them.

GEORGE HORACE LORIMER

Old Gorgon Graham


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


My main disappointment was always that a book had to end. And then what? But I don't think I was ever disappointed by the books. I must have been what any author would consider an ideal reader. I felt every pain and pleasure suffered or enjoyed by all the characters. Oh, but I identified!

EUDORA WELTY

Conversations with Eudora Welty


Savages and primitives believed in books that could suck your soul out through your eyes as you read them, books that could wrap their pages around your head and swallow you, words that crawled into your brain like tapeworms.

K. J. PARKER

The Escapement


Books admitted me to their world open-handedly, as people for their most part, did not. The life I lived in books was one of ease and freedom, worldly wisdom, glitter, dash and style.

JONATHAN RABAN

For Love and Money


Books are the training weights of the mind.

EPICTETUS

The Art of Living


I'm much more willing to buy a novel electronically by someone I don't know. Because if halfway through I think, I don't really like this, I can just stop. I can't throw books out, even if I think they're crummy. I feel like I've got to give it to the library. I've got to loan it to somebody, or I keep it on my shelf. It's like a plant.

SUSAN ORLEAN

Newsweek, Jul. 13, 2009