quotations about books
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
I feel that books, just like people, have a destiny. Some invite sorrow, others joy, some both.
ELIE WIESEL
Night
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
A book ... should resemble a tranquil lake, in whose glassy surface the varied wonders of the earth and sky are faithfully imaged.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
A book is a suicide postponed.
EMIL CIORAN
The Trouble with Being Born
We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.
JOHN LUBBOCK
The Pleasures of Life
It's tricky turning a book into a movie. Sometimes people love the book so much that no adaptation lives up to what they imagined. You can avoid that disappointment by never, ever reading books.
CRAIG FERGUSON
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Mar. 21, 2012
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
Books that have become classics -- books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal -- always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
Ponkapog Papers
The popular books are the novels, dealing with life under all possible conditions, and they are widely read not only because they are entertaining, but also because they in a measure satisfy an unformulated belief that to see farther, to know all sorts of men, in an indefinite way, is a preparation for better social adjustment--for the remedying of social ills.
JANE ADDAMS
Democracy and Social Ethics
I would like to save all books, those that are banned, those that are burned, or forgotten with contempt by the mandarins who want to tell us what is good and what is bad. Every book has a soul ... and I believe every book is worth saving from either bigotry or oblivion.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
"An interview with Carlos Ruiz Zafon", Book Browse
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
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
No man living in a world as interesting as this ever writes a book if he can help it.
GERALD STANLEY LEE
Crowds
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 a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Heroes and Hero Worship
Books were the sustenance of God. And His munitions.
RéGIS DEBRAY
God: An Itinerary