quotations about books
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
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
Books are all right, but dead men's brains are no good unless you mix a live one's with them.
GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
Old Gorgon Graham
So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.
ROALD DAHL
The Telegraph, Sep. 13, 2011
Books admitted me to their world open-handedly, as people for their most part, did not. The life I lived in books was one of ease and freedom, worldly wisdom, glitter, dash and style.
JONATHAN RABAN
For Love and Money
All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words.
AMY LOWELL
Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds
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
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 the training weights of the mind.
EPICTETUS
The Art of Living
There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.... Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.
RAY BRADBURY
Coda
The covers of this book are too far apart.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
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
Books are not seldom talismans and spells.
WILLIAM COWPER
The Task
Books are influential in proportion to their obscurity, provided that the obscurity be that of inexpressible Realities. The Bible is the most obscure book in the world. He must be a great fool who thinks he understands the plainest chapter of it.
COVENTRY PATMORE
The Rod
One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.
GRAHAM GREENE
Travels with My Aunt
For every good book is worth the reader's while when there is a real communion of the spirit, and this is possible only when he feels he is being taken into the author's confidence and the author is willing to reveal to him the innermost searchings of his heart and talk, as it were, in an unbuttoned mood, collar and tie loose, as by a friend's fireside.
LIN YUTANG
Between Tears and Laughter
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Heretics
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
W. H. AUDEN
"Reading", The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays
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
Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.
CHINA MIÉVILLE
The City and the City