Books: A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counsellor, a multitude of counsellors. ~Henry Ward Beecher
Books: A book is like a garden carried in the pocket. ~Chinese Proverb
Books: A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy. ~Edward P. Morgan
Books: A book is to me like a hat or coat - a very uncomfortable thing until the newness has been worn off. ~Charles B. Fairbanks
Books: A book is very like a money-changer: it pays you back in another form what you bring to it. ~Austin O'Malley
Books: A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul. ~Franz Kafka
Books: A book that is shut is but a block. ~Thomas Fuller
Books: A dirty book is rarely dusty. ~Author unknown
Books: A Full and True Account, of the Battle Fought last Friday, between the Ancient and the Modern Books in St. James's Library ~Jonathan Swift
Books: A good book has no ending. ~R.D. Cumming
Books: A good book is always on tap; it may be decanted and drunk a hundred times, and it is still there for further imbibement. ~Holbrook Jackson
Books: A good book on your shelf is a friend that turns its back on you and remains a friend. ~Author unknown
Books: A good book should leave you... slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it. ~William Styron, interview
Books: A house without books is like a room without windows. ~Heinrich Mann
Books: A large, still book is a piece of quietness, succulent and nourishing in a noisy world, which I approach and imbibe with a sort of greedy enjoyment, as Marcel Proust said of those rooms of his old home whose air was saturated with the bouquet of silence. ~Holbrook Jackson
Books: A man may as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading. ~Jeremy Collier
Books: A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint.... What I began by reading, I must finish by acting. ~Henry David Thoreau
Books: A writer only begins a book, it is the reader who completes it; for the reader takes up where the writer left off as new thoughts stir within him. ~David Harris Russell
Books: Always look on the bright side of life. Otherwise it'll be too dark to read. ~Author Unknown
Books: Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. ~P.J. O'Rourke
Books: Americans like fat books and thin women. ~Russell Baker
Books: An odour of a book is a complex mixture of odorous volatiles, emitted from different materials from which books are made. Due to the different materials used to make books throughout history, there is no one characteristic odour of old books.... The pleasant aromatic smell is due to aromatic compounds emitted mainly from papers made from ground wood which are characterised by their yellowish-brown colour. They emit vanilla-like, sweetly fragrant vanillin, aromatic anisol and benzaldehyde, with fruity almond-like odor. On the other hand, terpene compounds, deriving from rosin, which is used to make paper more impermeable to inks, contribute to the camphorous, oily and woody smell of books. A mushroom odour is caused by some other, intensely fragrant aliphatic alcohols. ~Jana Kolar (The Naked Scientists' Science Questions, 2008 February 17th
Books: An ordinary man can... surround himself with two thousand books... and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy. ~Augustine Birrell
Books: Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book. ~Author unknown
Books: As a child I read books which were inappropriate. Naturally they contained words I had to look up. Later in life I became quite addicted to the Oxford English Dictionary. ~Lemony Snicket, answer to Caitlin
Books: As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need to celebrate! ~William James
Books: Book lovers never go to bed alone. ~Author unknown
Books: Book nerds are better under the covers. ~Terri Guillemets
Books: Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity. ~George Steiner
Books: Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books. ~Karl Lagerfeld
Books: Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world. ~Walter Pater
Books: Books are a uniquely portable magic. ~Stephen King
Books: Books are embalmed minds. ~Bovee
Books: Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people-people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book. ~E.B. White, letter to child patrons of the Troy Public Library (Michigan), 1971 April 14th, reply to request from children's librarian Marguerite Hart
Books: Books are immortal sons deifying their sires. ~Plato
Books: Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time. ~E.P. Whipple
Books: Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. ~Henry Ward Beecher
Books: Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind. ~James Russell Lowell
Books: Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life. ~Jesse Lee Bennett
Books: Books are the glass of council to dress ourselves by. ~Bulstrode Whitlock
Books: Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers. ~Charles W. Eliot
Books: Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled This could change your life. ~Helen Exley
Books: Books had instant replay long before televised sports. ~Bern Williams
Books: Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West. ~E.M. Forster
Books: Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own. ~William Hazlitt
Books: Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all. ~Abraham Lincoln
Books: Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution - such call I good books. ~Henry David Thoreau
Books: Books, too, begin like the week - with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday. ~Walter Benjamin
Books: Bookshops are the most charming of all shops because they relate themselves so intimately to their visitors. Mr. Rowlandson's had stairs worn by the footfalls of four generations of book-hunters. Against the background of his overflowing shelves, with his old-fashioned clothes, his stooping shoulders, his iron-gray hair, and his firm, tender, and melancholy face,-you will never visit his shop without wishing to frame him as he stands, and set him in the window, among the other rare old prints. Not that all the books in his shop are old; the moderns are there, too. But these newer books are the minority. The composed, brown calf bindings give the shop its tone,-and its faint odor, too; a cultivated taste, the liking for that odor of old books. ~Munson Havens
Books: Bookstores are emotional places both for their patrons and for the employees. They are built on the sweat and tears of hardworking people, each bookshelf lined with the lifework of hundreds of artists. Each of those books represent endless hours of grind and toil. Often the bookstore owner and employees are also writers. Is there a space with more fulfilled or unfulfilled dreams? ~Bob Eckstein, Introduction to , 2016
Books: Borrowers of books - those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes. ~Charles Lamb
Books: Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book. ~John Ruskin
Books: But you said he drank. Is it likely he has a taste for manuscripts? He's almost sure to have had. Most probably it was the manuscripts that drove him to drink. They would, you know, unless he was exceptionally strong minded. ~George A. Birmingham
Books: Catalogues of imaginary libraries are an obscure but fruitful area of collecting. The tradition of imaginary books, which exist only within other books, goes back at least to Rabelais, who invented a list of book titles for the Abbey of Saint-Victor in (c. 1532). ~Emi Hastings
Books: Characteristically, the budding litterateur has had his nose in a book. ~Pierre de la Ruffiniere du Prey
Books: Children don't read to find their identity, to free themselves from guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion or to get rid of alienation. They have no use for psychology.... They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.... When a book is boring, they yawn openly. They don't expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish illusions. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1978
Books: Christie loved books... This amusement lightened many heavy hours, peopled the silent house with troops of friends, and, for a time, was the joy of her life. ~Louisa May Alcott
Books: Classics are not classics because hoary with age - they are the steel balls which have worn down mountains but remained unchanged in the mill of time. ~Martin H. Fischer
Books: Emmy read all sorts of pretty books, every word of which I eagerly listened to, and felt so much interested, and so delighted, and so anxious and curious to hear more. She read pretty stories of little boys and girls, and affectionate mammas and aunts, and kind old nurses, and birds in the fields and woods, and flowers in the gardens and hedges; and then such beautiful fairy tales; and also pretty stories in verse, all of which gave me great pleasure, and were indeed my earliest education. ~Richard Hengist Horne
Books: Encourage and pursue an inclination to reading early in life; it is laying up a treasure for the latter part of it... ~Countess Dowager of Carlisle
Books: Every man likes to be his own librarian... ~Thomas Frognall Dibdin
Books: Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message to us from the dead, - from human souls whom we never saw, who lived perhaps thousands of miles away; and yet these, on those little sheets of paper, speak to us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers. ~Charles Kingsley
Books: Far more seemly were it for thee to have thy study full of books, than thy purse full of money. ~John Lyly
Books: Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. ~Jessamyn West
Books: For friends... do but look upon good Books: they are true friends, that will neither flatter nor dissemble. ~Francis Bacon
Books: From every book invisible threads reach out to other books; and as the mind comes to use and control those threads the whole panorama of the world's life, past and present, becomes constantly more varied and interesting, while at the same time the mind's own powers of reflection and judgment are exercised and strengthened. ~Helen E. Haines
Books: From my point of view, a book is a literary prescription put up for the benefit of someone who needs it. ~S.M. Crothers
Books: God be thanked for books! they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. ~W.E. Channing
Books: Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one. ~Augustine Birrell
Books: Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. ~Mark Twain
Books: Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes. ~John LeCarre
Books: He fed his spirit with the bread of books. ~Edwin Markham
Books: He read and read and read, and when he didn't have his nose stuck in a book, he wrote and wrote and wrote. ~Paul Magrs
Books: He retired to his bibliomaniacal bed... ~Thomas Frognall Dibdin
Books: He was a tall old man, bowed with a scholar's stoop, and never seen without his silver-rimmed spectacles. He had been glad to find a place where he might live the life of a recluse among his books. As he sat now, his white wig falling in lovelocks about his face, he drummed with taper fingers upon the little round stand beside him, where a musty volume lay at his elbow. He was a bookworm first, and everything else afterward, and he longed to be back in his study where he had been engaged for many years upon a neverending commentary upon Homer. ~Florence Bone
Books: He who lends a book is an idiot. He who returns the book is more of an idiot. ~Arabic proverb
Books: How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. ~Henry David Thoreau
Books: How vast an estate it is that we came into as the intellectual heirs of all the watchers and searchers and thinkers and singers of the generations that are dead! What a heritage of stored wealth! What perishing poverty of mind we should be left in without it! ~J.N. Larned
Books: I am unpacking my library.... The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood - it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation - which these books arouse in a genuine collector. ~Walter Benjamin
Books: I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults. ~Desiderius Erasmus
Books: I divide all readers into two classes; those who read to remember and those who read to forget. ~William Lyon Phelps
Books: I do not wish to be misunderstood or to do any wrong to the bookworm, a class to whom I feel most kindly. They generally spend their years and money in the endeavor to climb as high as possible on the ladder of mental perfection, and they out not to be ridiculed, as they often are. They may appear a dry class of people to the convivial nature of our modern (Chicago), March 1886
Books: I don't think we should read for instruction but to give our souls a chance to luxuriate. Feelings come before intellect. ~Henry Valentine Miller
Books: I fancy that at the beginning some fairy may have offered me the choice between great power and station and the privilege of living always among books, and that I, like the good child in the fairy tale, chose the latter. ~James L. Whitney
Books: I find it necessary to confine my purchases strictly to books. My me! Yes, strictly to books. ~Munson Havens
Books: I have friends whose society is delightful to me; they are persons of all countries and of all ages; distinguished in war, in council, and in letters; easy to live with, always at my command. ~Francesco Petrarch
Books: I have my nose stuck in a book just about as often as I breathe. ~Terri Guillemets
Books: I just love books, don't you?... My sister always says to me... 'you always have your nose stuck in a book.' And that's the truth…I always have got my nose stuck in a book. I'm always reading.... I just love books! I'd like to buy every book in the shop. ~Frances Klenett
Books: I knew a gentleman who was so good a manager of his time that he would not even lose that small portion of it which the calls of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary-house; but gradually went through all the Latin poets in those moments. ~Lord Chesterfield
Books: I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things. ~George Robert Gissing
Books: I love all bookstores. Chains, independents, big, small. Once you walk into a bookstore, time stands still. ~Alec Baldwin, 2015
Books: I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go into the library and read a good book. ~Groucho Marx
Books: I need fiction. I'm an addict. This is not a figure of speech.... Colonies of prose have formed in the bathroom and in the dimness of the upstairs landing, so that I don't go without text even in the leftover spaces of the house where I spend least time. ~Francis Spufford
Books: I never studied any particular writer, but have always read simply what pleased me, and remembered whatever impressed itself on my memory as it were without any help of mine, or at any rate apart from any set purpose. ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Books: I often derive a peculiar satisfaction in conversing with the ancient and modern dead, - who yet live and speak excellently in their works. My neighbors think me , - and yet at such times I am in company with more than five hundred mutes - each of whom, at my pleasure, communicates his ideas to me by dumb signs - quite as intelligently as any person living can do by uttering of words. ~Laurence Sterne
Books: I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves. ~E.M. Forster
Books: I was a bookman; I had always been a bookman. From adolescence books had been one of my passions. Books not merely - and perhaps not chiefly - as vehicles of learning or knowledge, but books as books, books as entities, books as beautiful things, books as historical antiquities, books as repositories of memorable associations. Questions of type, ink, paper, margins, watermarks, paginations, bindings, were capable of really agitating me. I was too sensitive and catholic a lover a books to be a scholar in the strict modern meaning of the term. My was not a work of scholarship, and even such scholarship as it comprised had been attained by a labor hateful to me. I would inhale the scholarship of others as a sweet smell. I would gather it like honey, but eclectically, never exhausting one flower before trying the next. My knowledge was, perhaps, considerable, but it was unorganized. And my principal claim to consideration was that I could wander in any demesne of culture without having the awkward air of a stranger. In brief, I was comprehensively bookish. ~Arnold Bennett
Books: I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. ~Anna Quindlen
Books: I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it. ~Woodrow Wilson
Books: I? Never in the world-lying here with my nose in a book and never seeing anything. ~Henry James
Books: I'm a bad girl. I read past my bedtime. ~Author unknown
Books: I'm a bookaholic on the road to recovery. Ha, not really. I'm on the road to the bookstore. ~Author unknown
Books: I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised. ~Wisława Szymborska
Books: I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage. ~Charles de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu
Books: If the book is second-hand, I leave all its markings intact, the spoor of previous readers, fellow-travellers who have recorded their passage by means of scribbled comments, a name on the fly-leaf, a bus ticket to mark a certain page. ~Alberto Manguel
Books: If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. ~Toni Morrison
Books: If you have never said Excuse me to a parking meter or bashed your shins on a fireplug, you are probably wasting too much valuable reading time. ~Sherri Chasin Calvo
Books: If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into what you believe? The things most worth reading are precisely those that challenge our convictions. ~Author unknown
Books: In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time: the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. ~Thomas Carlyle
Books: In my garden I spend my days; in my library I spend my nights. My interests are divided between my geraniums and my books. With the flower I am in the present; with the book I am in the past. I go into my library, and all history unrolls before me. I breathe the morning air of the world while the scent of Eden's roses yet lingered in it.... ~Alexander Smith
Books: In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation. ~Stephane Mallarme
Books: In the attic Christie was discovered lying dressed upon her bed, asleep or suffocated by the smoke that filled the room. A book had slipped from her hand, and in falling had upset the candle on a chair beside her.... "I forbade her to keep the gas lighted so late, and see what the deceitful creature has done with her private candle!" cried Mrs. Stuart.... "Look at her!... She has been at the wine, or lost her wits.... She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain." ~Louisa May Alcott
Books: In the charming romance, "Realmah," the noble African prince prescribes monogamy to his subjects, but he allows himself three wives - a State wife to sit by his side on the throne; a Household wife to rule the kitchen and homely affairs; and a Love-wife to be cherished in his heart and bear him children. Why would it not be fair to the Book-Worm to concede him a Book-wife, who should understand and sympathize with him in his eccentricity, and who should care more for rare and beautiful books than for diamonds, laces, Easter bonnets and ten-button gloves?... A woman who has a true and wise sympathy with her husband's book-buying is an adored object. ~Irving Browne
Books: It is better to have your nose in a book than in someone else's business. ~Adam Stanley
Books: It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it. ~Oscar Wilde
Books: It often requires more courage to read some books than it does to fight a battle. ~Sutton Elbert Griggs
Books: Jack Wootton is a Virginian and bookworm, in the sense of 'worm' meaning 'dragon' - he hoards books on shelves and in spare rooms and likes to sleep surrounded by them. ~J. Aleksandr Wootton
Books: Judith stood before her little library in the dark November dawn, with a candle in her hand, scanning the familiar titles with weary eyes.... these last few days she had taken to waking at dawn, to lying for hours wide-eyed in her little white bed, while the slow day grew. But to‑day it was intolerable, she could bear it no longer.... She would try a book; not a very hopeful remedy in her own opinion, but one which [those] who were troubled by sleeplessness, regarded, she knew, as the best thing under the circumstances. ~Amy Levy
Books: Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we inquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and the backs of books in libraries. ~Samuel Johnson, 1775 Books: Let your bookcases and your shelves be your gardens and your pleasure-grounds. Pluck the fruit that grows therein, gather the roses, the spices, and the myrrh. ~Judah Ibn Tibbon
Books: Librarians Dewey it better. ~As seen on a bumper sticker, 2005
Books: Lord! when you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book. ~Christopher Morley
Books: Many people, other than the authors, contribute to the making of a book, from the first person who had the bright idea of alphabetic writing through the inventor of movable type to the lumberjacks who felled the trees that were pulped for its printing. It is not customary to acknowledge the trees themselves, though their commitment is total. ~Forsyth and Rada
Books: Many persons read and like fiction. It does not tax the intelligence and the intelligence of most of us can so ill afford taxation that we rightly welcome any reading matter which avoids this. ~Rose Macaulay
Books: Many, many books. It is likely I will die next to a pile of things I was meaning to read. ~Lemony Snicket, when asked "Are there any books you wish you had read, but never got the chance?" during a live Facebook chat hosted by Scholastic Reading Club, 2013 January 16th
Books: Medicine for the soul. ~Inscription over the door of the Library at Thebes
Books: Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death hath no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever. ~J. Swartz
Books: My imagination doesn't require anything more of the book than to provide a framework within which it can wander. ~Alphonse Daudet
Books: My test of a good novel is dreading to begin the last chapter. ~Thomas Helm
Books: Never judge a book by its movie. ~J.W. Eagan
Books: Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me. ~Anatole France
Books: No doubt most of you think biography dull reading. You would much rather sit down with a good story. But have you ever thought what a story is? It is nothing but a bit of make-believe biography. ~Burton E. Stevenson
Books: No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. ~Mary Wortley Montagu
Books: No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books. ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Books: No matter what his rank or position may be, the lover of books is the richest and happiest of the children of men. ~John Alfred Langford
Books: No person who can read is ever successful at cleaning out an attic. ~Ann Landers
Books: Nothing is more beautiful than a beautiful book. ~Joseph Joubert
Books: Nothing is worth reading that does not require an alert mind. ~Charles Dudley Warner
Books: Old or new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that malignant booksellers attach to the backs. These evil white scabs rip off with difficulty, leaving leprous wounds and traces of slime to which adhere the dust and fluff of ages, making me wish for a special gummy hell to which the inventor of these stickers would be condemned. ~Alberto Manguel
Books: One cannot celebrate books sufficiently. After saying his best, still something better remains to be spoken in their praise. ~A. Bronson Alcott
Books: One of the advantages of reading books is that you get to play with someone else's imaginary friends, at all hours of the night. ~Dr. SunWolf
Books: One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind. ~Ishmael Reed
Books: One to whom books are as strangers has not yet learned to live. He is a solitary, though he dwell amid a vast population. On the other hand, he to whom books are as friends possesses a Key to the Garden of Delights, where the purest pleasures are open for his entertainment, and where he has for his companions the master minds of all the ages. ~Charles Noel Douglas
Books: Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. ~Attributed to Groucho Marx
Books: People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. ~Logan Pearsall Smith
Books: Psychopathia librorum.... I surround myself with the printed word. ~Sven Birkerts
Books: Readers of novels. I sometimes think that I could, if put to it, pick the real readers of novels out of a crowd. They have a strangeness about the eye, almost as if there were an extra bit of lens on the cornea.... The glance of a reader shows me a soul with a different orientation to time... ~Sven Birkerts
Books: Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay. ~William Styron
Books: Reading and writing are as necessary to him as eating and drinking, and he hopes he will never lack for books. ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Books: Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. ~Richard Steele
Books: Reading means borrowing. ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Books: Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you. ~Harold Bloom
Books: Sit bona librorum copia. ~Horace
Books: Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. ~Francis Bacon
Books: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But a book is never just a book. ~The Old Sage Bookshop in Prescott, Arizona
Books: Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies... I say to myself, "What a pity I can't buy that book, for I already have a copy at home." ~Jorge Luis Borges
Books: Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are books... which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal. It wasn't even that the book was so good or anything; it was just that the author... seemed to understand me in weird and impossible ways. ~John Green
Books: Speed reading? Why would anyone give up the pleasure of letting the writer set the pace? Of using one's ears to adjust to a new voice?... This sort of reading does away with the writer, and is probably best used on textbooks which eliminate the write from the start. If you must read everything at the same speed, why not choose to read slowly?... slowly enough to let the words reverberate, to draw the imagination to them. ~William Corbett
Books: That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit. ~Amos Bronson Alcott
Books: The alluring influences of bibliophilism, or book-loving, have silently crept into thousands of homes, whether beautiful or humble; for the library is properly regarded as one of the most important features of home as well as mental equipment. ~Henry H. Harper
Books: The ardor of possessing books, commonly called bibliomania, also styled bibliophilism and "biblio"-whatever else that has suggested itself to the fruitful imaginations of dozens of felicitous writers upon the subject,-is described by Dibdin as a "disease which grows with our growth, and strengthens with our strength." ⁂ It should be remembered, however, that one possessing a fondness for books is not necessarily a bibliomaniac. There is as much difference between the inclinations and taste of a bibliophile and a bibliomaniac as between a slight cold and the advanced stages of consumption. Some one has said that "to call a bibliophile a bibliomaniac is to conduct a lover, languishing for his maiden's smile, to an asylum for the demented, and to shut him up in the ward for the incurables." A bibliomaniac might properly be called an insane or crazy bibliophile. It is, however, a harmless insanity. ~Henry H. Harper
Books: The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one's encounter with it in a book. ~Andre Maurois
Books: The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes
Books: The book of the moment often has immense vogue, while the book of the age, which comes in its company from the press, lies unnoticed; but the great book has its revenge. It lives to see its contemporary pushed up shelf by shelf until it finds its final resting-place in the garret or the auction room. ~Hamilton Wright Mabie
Books: The book-lover, so-called, who lacks any of the thrills that go with the establishment as well as the enjoyment of a library in all of its appointments has deprived himself of many of the most pleasurable literary and semi-literary emotions. His books are servants rather than companions. Look out for that man! He is not of us. ~Roswell Field
Books: The bookworm had intellectual gifts - wise, vast, and blazing bliss philosophized. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne
Books: The brown book in his hand was his beloved Malory. He had not yet grown tired of its pages, nor had they lost their magic. They wore a halo, as they must do for natures like Antony's, which is a grail in itself. Is it not true that the realism of yesterday becomes the idealism of today? ~Florence Bone
Books: The literary man must needs be a thinking one, and every day he lives he becomes wiser-if wiser, then better-if better, then happier. ~Charles Lanman
Books: The man that I named the Giver passed along to the boy knoweldge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing. It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom. Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things. ~Lois Lowry (b.1937), Newberry Medal acceptance speech, 1994
Books: The man who doesn't read has no advantage over the man who can't read. ~Author unknown
Books: The mere brute pleasure of reading - the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing. ~Lord Chesterfield
Books: The multitude of books is making us ignorant. ~Voltaire
Books: The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them. ~Samuel Butler
Books: The publishers are wholeheartedly cooperating in the effort to conserve vital materials and manpower by manufacturing this book in full conformity with War Production Board Ruling L-245, curtailing the use of paper by book publishers, and all other United States Government regulations. This has been accomplished without abbreviating the book in any way. It is absolutely complete and unabridged. Not a word, not a paragraph, not a comma has been omitted. ~Note in , copyright 1923 by The Roycrofters, printed by the American Book-Stratford Press at their shops in New York City, Wm. H. Wise & Co.
Books: The scholar only knows how dear these silent, yet eloquent, companions of pure thoughts and innocent hours become in the season of adversity. When all that is worldly turns to dross around us, these only retain their steady value. ~Washington Irving
Books: The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television. ~Andrew Ross
Books: The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived. ~Howard Pyle
Books: The tedium of many a book is its salvation: the critic, after raising his javelin, falls asleep before he hurls it. ~Marie Dubsky, Freifrau von Ebner-Eschenbach
Books: The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practised at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness. ~Holbrook Jackson
Books: The title of a book fills the place of the face in a human being. ~Gustav Boehm
Books: The truest owner of a library is he who has bought each book for the love he bears to it; who is happy and content to say, "Here are my jewels, my choicest possessions!" ~Frank Carr
Books: The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters. ~Ross MacDonald
Books: The wise man reads both books and life itself. ~Lin Yutang
Books: The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it. ~James Bryce
Books: There are biblio-mercenaries of such sordid inclinations that they would readily part with almost any book in their possession,-even inscribed presentation copies!- if lightly tempted with money considerations. Verily, these parsimonious traders would barter their own souls, if they possessed any value. ~Henry H. Harper
Books: There are books from which one inhales an exquisite air. ~Joseph Joubert
Books: There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. ~George Santayana
Books: There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book? ~Marina Tsvetaeva
Books: There are four thousand books on those overweighted shelves; all sorts and conditions of books; big folios and little duodecimos, ragged books and books clothed by Riviere and Bedford. ~Munson Havens
Books: There are many persons pretending to have a refined literary taste, who seldom read any books but those which are fashionable... ~Charles Lanman
Books: There are more truths in a good book than its author meant to put into it. ~Marie Dubsky, Freifrau von Ebner-Eschenbach
Books: There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. ~Joseph Brodsky
Books: There is a feebler but still more irritating form of outrage upon books in public libraries, which consists in scrawling on the margins the vapid and frivolous criticisms or opinions of the reader, who often unconsciously gives evidence that he is incapable of appreciating what he reads. ~"The Sufferings and Death of Books,"
Books: There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read. ~G.K. Chesterton
Books: There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs. ~Henry Ward Beecher
Books: There is a wonder in reading Braille that the sighted will never know: to touch words and have them touch you back. ~Jim Fiebig
Books: There is also that kind of reading which is just looking at books. From time to time-I can't say what dictates the impulse-I pull a chair up in front of a section of my library. An expectant tranquility settles over me. I move my eyes slowly, reading the spines, or identifying the title by its color and positioning. Just to see my books, to note their presence, their proximity to other books, fills me with a sense of futurity. "Books," I once noted grandly, "embody the spirit's dream of perpetual youth." What is important at these moments is not the contents of the books, but the idea of their existence. I have not read every one, nor is it likely that I will-but to know that I might! ~Sven Birkerts
Books: There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book; books are well written or badly written. ~Oscar Wilde
Books: There is no thief worse than a bad book. ~Italian Proverb
Books: There is reading, and there is reading. Reading as a means to an end, for information, to cultivate oneself; reading as an end in itself, a process, a compulsion. ~Sven Birkerts
Books: There's nothing to match curling up with a good book when there's a repair job to be done around the house. ~Joe Ryan
Books: These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice... and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart. ~Gilbert Highet
Books: They... were kept nose-in-books... ~Richard D. Lewis
Books: This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication. ~Logan Pearsall Smith
Books: This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum. ~Elbert Hubbard
Books: Thomas Quiller Couch.... used to drive about the country in a queer-shaped carriage filled with books, and read all the way. Very often you'd meet the carriage first, filled with halt, maimed, and blind, who had crowded him out: and the old man following on foot, zig-zagging along the road, with his nose in a book... ~Arthur T. Quiller Couch
Books: Through all of my youth these books were my companions, and now, as I write these lines, after sixty years, they still look down upon me with their old friendliness. ~James L. Whitney
Books: Titles of Books.-Decoys to catch purchasers. ~Paul Chatfield
Books: To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. ~W. Somerset Maugham
Books: To choose a good book, look in an inquisitor's prohibited list. ~John Aikin
Books: To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend; to read it for a second time is to meet an old one. ~Chinese Saying
Books: To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting. ~Edmund Burke
Books: To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is a pleasure beyond compare. ~Kenko Yoshida
Books: TV. If kids are entertained by two letters, imagine the fun they'll have with twenty-six. Open your child's imagination. Open a book. ~Author Unknown
Books: Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing. ~Harper Lee
Books: We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Books: We live in an age of science and of abundance. The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to 'the needs of society', or to the conservation of learning. The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden. ~Ezra Pound, Chapter One
Books: We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind. ~Anna Quindlen
Books: We talked books. We just simply enumerated books without end, praising or damning them, and arranged authors in neat pews.... No pastime is more agreeable to people who have the book disease, and none more quickly fleets the hours, and none is more delightfully futile. ~Arnold Bennett
Books: What a silence in those old books as of a half-peopled world-what bleating of flocks-what green pastoral rest-what indubitable human existence!... O men and women, so far separated yet so near, so strange yet so well-known, by what miraculous power do I know ye all! Books are the true Elysian fields where the spirits of the dead converse, and into these fields a mortal may venture unappalled. What king's court can boast such company? What school of philosophy such wisdom?... Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural. They are not collections of printed pages, they are ghosts. I take one down and it speaks with me in a tongue not now heard on earth, and of men and things of which it alone possesses knowledge. I call myself a solitary, but sometimes I think I misapply the term. No man sees more company than I do. ~Alexander Smith
Books: What holy cities are to nomadic tribes - a symbol of race and a bond of union - great books are to the wandering souls of men: they are the Meccas of the mind. ~G.E. Woodberry
Books: What the candystore was to other kids, the bookstore was to me. The library was my vacation. ~Terri Guillemets
Books: What thrills have been mine as I stood perched on one leg like a stork, half way up a ladder, utterly oblivious of time and space, drinking in equal parts Jules Verne and the dust of the Central Library...! ~Robert Haven Schauffler, Foreword to , 1914
Books: When a new book is published, read an old one. ~Samuel Rogers
Books: When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in than was there before. ~Clifton Fadiman
Books: Why, then, am I so uneasy about the page-to-screen transfer—a skeptic if not a downright resister? Perhaps it is because I see in the turning of literal pages—pages bound in literal books—a compelling larger value, and perceive in the move away from the book a move away from a certain kind of cultural understanding, one that I'm not confident that we are replacing, never mind improving upon. I'm not blind to the unwieldiness of the book, or to the cumbersome systems we must maintain to accommodate it—the vast libraries and complicated filing systems. But these structures evolved over centuries , 2009 March 2nd
Books: You can't get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me. ~C.S. Lewis Books: You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend. ~Paul Sweeney