BOOK QUOTES VI

quotations about books

I consider books to be good for our health, and also our spirits, and they help us to become poets or scientists, to understand the stars or else to discover them deep within the aspirations of certain characters, those who sometimes, on certain evenings, escape from the pages and walk among us humans, perhaps the most human of us all.

JOSÉ SARAMAGO

The Notebook


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


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


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

CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI

Eragon


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


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


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


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


If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts.

THOMAS CARLYLE

Heroes and Hero Worship


The book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty -- and vice versa.

DORIS LESSING

introduction, The Golden Notebook


A book is like a money-changer: it pays you back in another form what you brint to it.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought


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


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


The best books are those which lift us to a higher plane where we breathe a purer atmosphere.

ORISON SWETT MARDEN

Architects of Fate


Book is an honourable title, not to be conferred lightly. A volume is not necessarily a book because it can be read without difficulty. The test is, whether it was worth reading. Had the author something to set forth? And had he the specific gift for setting it forth in written words? And did he use this rather rare gift conscientiously and to the full? And were his words well and appropriately printed and bound? If you can say Yes to these questions, then only, I submit, is the title of 'book' deserved.

MAX BEERBOHM

And Even Now


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


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


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


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