About Books Quotes

great books are the ones we need

How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!

Every book is a great action and every great action is a book!

I have never experienced a sorrow that was not relieved by an hour of reading.

Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.

It's a good idea to have your own books with you in a strange place

Before the first before and after the last after, there is night waiting.

Beware the man of a single book.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

Pose your questions to people and you will get countless useless answers.

I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.

He whom the gods love dies young.

To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose.

[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.

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.

Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.

Words are the only things that last for ever.

Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!

Novels are food for the leftover hours of life, the in-between times, the moments of waiting.

Everything comes to him who waits, except a loaned book.

Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.

If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you.

My life - my personality, my habits, even my speech - is a combination of the books I choose to read, the people I choose to listen to, and the thoughts I choose to tolerate in my mind

No one knows as well as I how much nonsense is printed in books.

Overall, the library held a hushed exultation, as though the cherished volumes were all singing soundlessly within their covers.

Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.

The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books.

When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic, yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.

Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.

If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.

In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world.

A censor is an expert in cutting remarks. A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.

Many books are longer than they seem. They have indeed no end. The boredom that they cause is truly absolute and infinite.

Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.

People tend to find books when they are ready for them.

Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes!

I love to lose myself in other men's minds.... Books think for me.

Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.

Discretion is not the better part of biography.

I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.

They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.

It is as great a thing to love as it is to be loved. Love is not something that can be wasted.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

Books should go where they will be most appreciated, and not sit unread, gathering dust on a forgotten shelf, don't you agree?

When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.

To all my librarian friends, champions of books, true magicians in the House of Life. Without you, this writer would be lost in the Dust.

Remember, when you don’t know what to do, it never hurts to play Scrabble. It’s like reading the I Ching or tea leaves.

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

A library is a hospital for the mind.” - Anonymous