quotations about books
A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance, particularly if the library is very tall and the surrounding area has been flooded.
DANIEL HANDLER (as Lemony Snicket)
Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation, as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.
JOSEPH ADDISON
The Spectator, Sep. 10, 1711
Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Partial Magic in the Quixote," Labyrinths
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
J. D. SALINGER
The Catcher in the Rye
For books are more than books, they are the life
The very heart and core of ages past,
The reason why men lived and worked and died,
The essence and quintessence of their lives.
AMY LOWELL
"The Boston Athenæum", A Dome of Many-coloured Glass
I know not how it is, but during a voyage I collect books as a ship does barnacles.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
letter to Charles Sumner, September 17, 1842
The Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger (tutor to Nero) complained that his peers were wasting time and money accumulating too many books, admonishing that "the abundance of books is a distraction." Instead, Seneca recommended focusing on a limited number of good books, to be read thoroughly and repeatedly.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
The Organized Mind
When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape into different countries, mores, speech patterns but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.
JULIAN BARNES
A Life with Books
You know, not every good book needs to be a movie, or a television series, or a video game. There's great work in those mediums, of course, but sometimes a book should remain a book. I still believe nothing tells a story with the richness and complexity of a good novel. When people say they think a book would make a good movie, they say this sometimes because, if it worked, they already saw all the images in the movie theatre that is in their brains. And sometimes that is the way it should stay.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
"Carlos Ruiz Zafon's love letter to literature", New Zealand Listener, Mar. 14, 2013
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Studies,", Essays
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 that book.
JOHN GREEN
The Fault in Our Stars
As many as six out of ten American adults have never read a book of any kind, and the bulletins from the nation’s educational frontiers read like the casualty reports from a lost war.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy
McDonald’s has announced that for the next month in the United Kingdom, Happy Meals will come with a book instead of a toy. And they will be renamed "Disappointment Meals."
JIMMY KIMMEL
Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Jan. 12, 2012
The history of books shows the humblest origin of some of the most valued, wrought as these were out of obscure materials by persons whose names thereafter became illustrious. The thumbed volumes, now so precious to thousands, were compiled from personal experiences and owe their interest to touches of inspiration of which the writer was less author than amanuensis, himself the voiced word of life for all times.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
The inspiration of a single book has made preachers, poets, philosophers, authors, and statesmen. On the other hand, the demoralization of a single book has sometimes made infidels, profligates, and criminals.
ORISON SWETT MARDEN
Architects of Fate
I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Angel's Game
Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.
GEORGE ORWELL
Confessions of a Book Reviewer
A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw,", Other Inquisitions
I think the thing about reading is to read a lot, so you open lots of different views on the world. I'd much rather they read six random books than just one brilliant one. And what you get out of a book as an adult isn't what you'd get out of it when you're fifteen and encountering ideas for the first time and they can blow your head off. Whenever I think of narrowing it down to just one I can't bear to exclude the others.
JO WALTON
interview, RT Book Reviews
I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer is not aware of.
UMBERTO ECO
The Paris Review, summer 2008