BOOK QUOTES II

quotations about books

Book quote

Book reading is a solitary and sedentary pursuit, and those who do are cautioned that a book should be used as an integral part of a well-rounded life ... A book should not be used as a substitute or an excuse.

GARRISON KEILLOR

The Book of Guys


Look at a railway stall; you see books of every colour--blue, yellow, crimson, "ringstreaked, speckled, and spotted," on every subject, in every style, of every opinion, with every conceivable difference, celestial or sublunary, maleficent, beneficent--but all small. People take their literature in morsels, as they take sandwiches on a journey.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies


Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.

CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON

The Shadow of the Wind


Books ... were merely nodes in a near-infinite matrix of information that exists in four dimensions, evolving toward the idea of the concept of the approximation of the shadow of Truth vertically through time as well as longitudinally through knowledge.

DAN SIMMONS

Olympos


I think a great book--leaving aside other qualities such as narrative power, characterization, style, and so on--is a book that describes the world in a way that has not been done before; and that is recognized by those who read it as telling new truths.

JULIAN BARNES

The Paris Review, winter 2000


Reading a book is a dangerous thing, Justine. A book can make you find room in yourself for something you never thought you'd understand. Or worse, something you never wanted to understand.

GLEN DUNCAN

By Blood We Live


I don't know myself, what to do, where to go ... I lie in the crack of a book for my comfort ... it's what the world offers ... please leave me alone to dream as I fancy.

WILLIAM H. GASS

Omensetter's Luck


Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.

JULIAN BARNES

Flaubert's Parrot


The plainest row of books that cloth or paper ever covered is more significant of refinement than the most elaborately carved furniture.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Man, that’s the only kind of book I like – one that’s so real you want to find out everything there is to know about the person who wrote it, like how tall he is and what kind of music he likes and whether or not he really went through all the stuff he was writing about.

ADAM RAPP

Under the Wolf


To say that the publishing world is not interested in literature is to overstate it. They are extremely interested in it, they just don’t want to publish it, you see. Publishers are brave, as brave as the famous diving horses of Atlantic City, but they’re increasingly owned by conglomerates, businesses which have nothing to do with publishing, and these companies demand a certain profit out of their publishing divisions. They take very few risks and they publish an enormous number of things which look like books, sort of feel like books, but in reality are buckets of peanut butter with a layer of whipped cream on top.

DONALD BARTHELME

"A Symposium on Fiction"


Who collects them or preserves them--the Fantastic Books? No one, I think. They are not catalogued under a separate Heading. They puzzle the writers of Indices; they bewilder Librarians. They must be grouted out of the mass of rubbish as Pigs in the Perigord grout out truffles. There is no other way.

HILAIRE BELLOC

On Everything


How many good books suffer neglect through the inefficiency of their beginnings!

EDGAR ALLAN POE

"Marginalia"


We go to a book as Narcissus went to the fountain, see ourselves therein, and are enamored.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought


Why can't people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?

DAVID BALDACCI

The Camel Club


A book is a suicide postponed.

EMIL CIORAN

The Trouble with Being Born


A good book, in the language of the booksellers, is a saleable one; in the language of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructful one.

ELIZA COOK

Diamond Dust


Be not content with the best book; seek sidelights from the others.

LORD ACTON

The Study of History


Book publishing would be so much easier without the authors.

DAN BROWN

The Lost Symbol


The burning of a book is a sad, sad sight, for even though a book is nothing but ink and paper, it feels as if the ideas contained in the book are disappearing as the pages turn to ashes and the cover and binding--which is the term for the stitching and glue that holds the pages together--blacken and curl as the flames do their wicked work. When someone is burning a book, they are showing utter contempt for all of the thinking that produced its ideas, all of the labor that went into its words and sentences, and all of the trouble that befell the author ...

DANIEL HANDLER (as Lemony Snicket)

The Penultimate Peril