BOOK QUOTES VII

quotations about books

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


The thing one reads and likes, and then forgets, is of no account. The thing that stays, and haunts one, and refuses to be forgotten, that is the sincere thing.

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH

Ponkapog Papers


Your borrowers of books--those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.

CHARLES LAMB

"The Two Races of Men", Essays of Elia


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


Books are not seldom talismans and spells.

WILLIAM COWPER

The Task


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


Books are influential in proportion to their obscurity, provided that the obscurity be that of inexpressible Realities. The Bible is the most obscure book in the world. He must be a great fool who thinks he understands the plainest chapter of it.

COVENTRY PATMORE

The Rod


A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That's a sign of a good novel. Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.

ALAN LIGHTMAN

interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000


He who possesses good books without gaining any profit from them, is like an ass that carries a rich burden and feeds upon thistles.

JOHN THORNTON

Maxims and Directions for Youth


A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

G. K. CHESTERTON

Heretics


The covers of this book are too far apart.

AMBROSE BIERCE

The Devil's Dictionary


Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

W. H. AUDEN

"Reading", The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays


One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.

GRAHAM GREENE

Travels with My Aunt


So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.

ROALD DAHL

The Telegraph, Sep. 13, 2011


Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.

DORIS LESSING

The Times, Nov. 23, 2003


The greatest advantage of books does not always come from what we remember of them, but from their suggestiveness. A good book often serves as a match to light the dormant power within us.

ORISON SWETT MARDEN

Architects of Fate


Books are the training weights of the mind.

EPICTETUS

The Art of Living


The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer's ink is the greater explosive: it will win.

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

The Haunted Bookshop


All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words.

AMY LOWELL

Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds


Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason--they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON

Lacon