c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:the Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages,the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success,the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment,the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case,the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified,Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.
— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
I can promise you books and conversation and all my heart.
— Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.
— Samuel Butler
The point is, it didn’t really matter what the book was about. It was what it meant that was important.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.
— Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude
A good book should leave you....slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
— William Styron
Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.And while we're on the subject, I'd like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if it's a bad thing. As if "escapist" fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn't you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.
— Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction
I think a good book is a good book forever.I don't think they get less good because times change.
— Megan Whalen Turner
He'll be down with the books. My old septon used to say books are dead men talking. Dead men should keep quiet is what I say. No one wants to hear a dead man's yabber.
— George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
How does it feel, anyway?"How does what feel?"When you take one of those books?"At that moment, she chose to keep still. If he wants an answer, he'd have to come back, and he did. "Well?" he asked, but again, it was the boy who replied, before Liesel could even open her mouth.It feels good, doesn't it? To steal something back.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Adult librarians are like lazy bakers: their patrons want a jelly doughnut, so they give them a jelly doughnut. Children’s librarians are ambitious bakers: 'You like the jelly doughnut? I’ll get you a jelly doughnut. But you should try my cruller, too. My cruller is gonna blow your mind, kid.
— John Green
An unread book does nobody any good. Stories happen in the mind of a reader, not among symbols printed on a page.
— Brandon Mull
If your library is not "unsafe," it probably isn't doing its job.
— John Berry
Break the spine of one of my books and I break yours.
— Mia James, By Midnight
It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part.
— Voltaire
One day, she ventured to the palace library and was delighted to find what good company books could be.
— E. Lockhart, We Were Liars
Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier. 
— Kathleen Thompson Norris, Hands Full of Living
I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
You have to remember that it is impossible to commit a crime while reading a book.
— John Waters
The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That's why we go to movies and say, "Oh, the book is better.
— Paulo Coelho
She read books quickly and compulsively, paperback after paperback, as if she might drift away without the anchor of the printed page.
— Jane Hamilton
Just handle the books gently and you’ll get along fine.
— Patrick Rothfuss
October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or of shutting a book, did not end a tale. Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: "It is simply a matter," he explained to April, "of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content.
— Neil Gaiman, Season of Mists
Nudge threw her arms around my neck. 'I love you Max! I love all of us too!'Yeah, me too,' Said the Gasman. 'I don't care if we have our house, or a cliff ledge, or a cardboard box. Home is wherever we all are, together.
— James Patterson
I don’t have many friends, not the living, breathing sort at any rate. And I don’t mean that in a sad and lonely way; I’m just not the type of person who accumulates friends or enjoys crowds. I’m good with words, but not spoken kind; I’ve often thought what a marvelous thing it would be if I could only conduct relationships on paper. And I suppose, in a sense, that’s what I do, for I’ve hundreds of the other sort, the friends contained within bindings, pages after glorious pages of ink, stories that unfold the same way every time but never lose their joy, that take me by the hand and lead me through doorways into worlds of great terror and rapturous delight. Exciting, worthy, reliable companions - full of wise counsel, some of them - but sadly ill-equipped to offer the use of a spare bedroom for a month or two.
— Kate Morton, The Distant Hours
When I'm really into a novel, I'm seeing the world differently during that time— not just for the hour or so in the day when I get to read. I'm actually walking around in a haze, spellbound by the book and looking at everything through a different prism.
— Colin Firth
An active mind didn't need distractions in its physical environment. It needed a collection of outstanding books and a good lamp. Maybe some cheese and crackers.
— J.R. Ward, Lover Unbound
People talk about books being an escape, but here on the tube, this one feels more like a lifeline...The motion of the train makes her head rattle, but her eyes lock on the words the way a figure skater might choose a focal point as she spins, and just like that, she's grounded again.
— Jennifer E. Smith, The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight
And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book.
— C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
(in response to the question: what do you think of e-books and Amazon’s Kindle?)Those aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.
— Ray Bradbury
Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.
— Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Bloodthirsty little beasts. Never trust a duck.
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel
Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.
— Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
— James Russell Lowell
Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.
— Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy.
— Edward P. Morgan
Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.
— David Quammen, The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder
The old man was peering intently at the shelves. 'I'll have to admit that he's a very competent scholar.'Isn't he just a librarian?' Garion asked, 'somebody who looks after books?'That's where all the rest of scholarship starts, Garion. All the books in the world won't help you if they're just piled up in a heap.
— David Eddings, King of the Murgos
What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier.
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head. They’re all the time talkin’ about it, but it’s jus’ in their head.
— John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose.
— Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
For a moment I was distracted. Books always did that to me... I liked the creamy pages, the smell of ink, all the secrets locked inside.
— Elizabeth C. Bunce, StarCrossed
Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.
— Jeanette Winterson
One glance at (a book) and you hear the voice of another person - perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millenia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time.
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head.
— Orhan Pamuk, The New Life
Every night, I have to read a book, so that my mind will stop thinking about things that I stress about.
— Britney Spears
Books are the most wonderful friends in the world. When you meet them and pick them up, they are always ready to give you a few ideas. When you put them down, they never get mad; when you take them up again, they seem to enrich you all the more.
— Fulton J. Sheen, Life Is Worth Living
Reading is reading - no matter what the material.
— Giovanna Fletcher, Billy and Me
What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.
— John Updike
Some like to believe it's the book that chooses the person.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Tis the good reader that makes the good book.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library,'The medicines of the soul.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
There was another reason [she] took her books whenever they went away. They were her home when she was somewhere strange. They were familiar voices, friends that never quarreled with her, clever, powerful friends -- daring and knowledgeable, tried and tested adventurers who had traveled far and wide. Her books cheered her up when she was sad and kept her from being bored.
— Cornelia Funke, Inkheart
Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever read. If you are offended it is your problem, and frankly lots of things offend lots of people.I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it. To read a 600-page novel and then say that it has deeply offended you: well, you have done a lot of work to be offended.
— Salman Rushdie
I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructed, a feeling there is something more than the mundane, and a reason for our plodding.
— Donald Miller, To Own a Dragon: Reflections on Growing Up Without a Father
If you love books enough, books will love you back.
— Jo Walton, Among Others
When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.
— Christopher Morley
A motion picture, or music, or television, they have to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience. Other forms of mass media cost too much to produce a risk reaching only a limited audience. Only one person. But a book. . . . A book is cheap to print and bind. A book is as private and consensual as sex. A book takes time and effort to consume - something that gives a reader every chance to walk away. Actually, so few people make the effort to read that it's difficult to call books a "mass medium." No one really gives a damn about books. No one has bothered to ban a book in decades.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted
I hate when people ask what a book is about. People who read for plot, people who suck out the story like the cream filling in an Oreo, should stick to comic strips and soap operas. . . . Every book worth a damn is about emotions and love and death and pain. It's about words. It's about a man dealing with life. Okay?
— J.R. Moehringer
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
— Helen Keller, The Story of My Life
Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.
— Michael Crichton
I only want power so I can get books.
— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms
Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.
— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Yes, when I get big and have my own home, no plush chairs and lace curtains for me. And no rubber plants. I'll have a desk like this in my parlor and white walls and a clean green blotter every Saturday night and a row of shining yellow pencils always sharpened for writing and a golden-brown bowl with a flower or some leaves or berries always in it and books . . . books . . . books. . . .
— Betty  Smith
He liked women with little butts and big tits? Someone had played with one too many barbie dolls as a kid.
— Kelley Armstrong, Stolen
Human sympathy has its limits.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Leisure without books is death, and burial of a man alive.
— Seneca
I have gone to [this bookshop] for years, always finding the one book I wanted - and then three more I hadn’t known I wanted.
— Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Maybe Heaven will be a library. Then I will be able to finish my to-read list.
— Kellie Elmore
An hour spent reading is one stolen from paradise.
— Thomas Wharton
Censoring books that deal with difficult, adolescent issues does not protect anybody. Quite the opposite. It leaves kids in the darkness and makes them vulnerable. Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance. Our children cannot afford to have the truth of the world withheld from them
— Laurie Halse Anderson
My youngest brother had a wonderful schtick from some time in high school, through to graduating medicine. He had a card in his wallet that read, ‘If I am found with amnesia, please give me the following books to read …’ And it listed half a dozen books where he longed to recapture that first glorious sense of needing to find out ‘what happens next’ … the feeling that keeps you up half the night. The feeling that comes before the plot’s been learned.
— Guy Gavriel Kay
How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.
— Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life
She'd always been a little excitable, a little more passionate about books than your average person, but she was supposed to be -- she was a librarian, after all.
— Sarah Beth Durst
When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.
— Clifton Fadiman, Any Number Can Play
A book is as private and consensual as sex.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted
In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have never been able to resist a book about books.
— Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
I plan to learn enough to read you like a book.
— Sylvia Brownrigg, Pages for You
The book smelled dusty and old but also carried a sweet tang, a hint of something inviting. She opened to the first page and started to read, pronouncing the words in a reverent whisper.
— Shannon Hale
Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.
— Douglas Adams
Get books, sit yourself down anywhere, and go to reading them yourself.
— Abraham Lincoln
Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.
— Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy
I hate to lend a book I love…it never seems quite the same when it comes back to me…
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Windy Poplars
We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reach, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles--a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are.
— Alberto Manguel
...writers are a savage breed, Mr. Strike. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.
— Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm
A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.
— Andrei Tarkovsky
There are essentially two things that will make you wise -- the books you read and the people you meet.
— Jack Canfield
I had found a new friend. The surprising thing is where I’d found him – not up a tree or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the hill streams, but in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend. Or that you could slip inside the skin of another. Or travel to another place with marshes, and where, to our ears, the bad people spoke like pirates. 
— Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
— E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy
I've decided that it's possible to love someone for entirely selfless reasons, for all of their flaws and weaknesses, and still not succeed in having them love you back. It's sad, perhaps, but not tragic, unless you dwell forever in the pursuit of their elusive affections.
— Cammie McGovern, Say What You Will
For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
Too many books. Too few centuries.
— Jay Kristoff, Nevernight
I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints....I think that, as you age, you tend to gravitate towards the classics, but those aren't the books that give you the same sort of hope for the world that a cherished book does.
— Douglas Coupland
How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
I listened as the words became sentences and the sentences became pages and the pages became feelings and voices and places and people.
— Jennifer Donnelly, A Northern Light
As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one's soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule.
— Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.
— The Economist
You could write a book about things that you can't find on-line.
— Maggie Stiefvater, Linger
The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep; for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter.
— Paxton Hood
This is the most important thing about me--I'm a card-carrying reader. All I really want to do is sit and read or lie down and read or eat and read or shit and read. I'm a trained reader. I want a job where I get paid for reading books. And I don't have to make reports on what I read or to apply what I read.
— Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book
There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?
— Marina Tsvetaeva
No book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep, it's meant to make you jump out of your bed in your underwear and run and beat the author's brains out.
— Bohumil Hrabal, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age
There were valuable first editions of books in the enormous library, most of them had been scribbled in by some idiot named Will H.
— Cassandra Clare, Lord of Shadows
I’d volunteer to go to prison, as long as there are books. Because with books I am free.
— Mohammad Hatta
Allowing yourself to stop reading a book - at page 25, 50, or even, less frequently, a few chapters from the end - is a rite of passage in a reader's life, the literary equivalent of a bar mitzvah or a communion, the moment at which you look at yourself and announce: Today I am an adult. I can make my own decisions.
— Sara Nelson, So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading
I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them.
— Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
Any book which inspires us to lead a better life is a good book.
— Fulton J. Sheen, The Quotable Fulton Sheen: A Topical Compilation of the Wit, Wisdom, and Satire of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
The library is like a candy store where everything is free.
— Jamie Ford, Songs of Willow Frost
We lusty bibliophiles know that reading, unlike just about anything else, is both good for you and loads of fun.
— Kevin Smokler, Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times: A Collection of All Original Essays from Today's (and Tomorrow's) Young Authors on the State of the Art --and the Art of the Hustle--in the Age of Information Overload
To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is pleasure beyond compare.
— Yoshida Kenkō, Essays in Idleness - The Tsurezuregusa of Kenko
Authors do not choose a story to write, the story chooses us.
— Richard P. Denney
What is reading but silent conversation.
— Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversations
Before he had lost his sight, the maester had loved books as much as Samwell Tarly did. He understood the way that you could sometimes fall right into them, as if each page was a hole into another world.
— George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher.
Reading is probably another way of being in a place.
— José Saramago, El hombre duplicado
For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas
There’s nothing as cozy as a piece of candy and a book.
— Betty MacDonald, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Magic
Few pleasures, for the true reader, rival the pleasure of browsing unhurriedly among books: old books, new books, library books, other people's books, one's own books - it does not matter whose or where. Simply to be among books, glancing at one here, reading a page from one over there, enjoying them all as objects to be touched, looked at, even smelt, is a deep satisfaction. And often, very often, while browsing haphazardly, looking for nothing in particular, you pick up a volume that suddenly excites you, and you know that this one of all the others you must read. Those are great moments - and the books we come across like that are often the most memorable.
— Aidan Chambers
I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books.
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was locatedwill betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them,and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what wereally desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols,breaking the hearts of their worshippers.For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
— C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
I think it is good that books still exist, but they do make me sleepy.
— Frank Zappa
All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been; it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
— Thomas Carlyle
The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes them want to live in other ways they can never really be.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
I think it’s the books that you read when you’re young that live with you forever.
— J.K. Rowling
Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.
— Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
I am not afraid of giving bad reviews. If I don't like a book, I don't like it. Period. I don't do promotion
— Bookvergent
I have all the books I could need, and what more could I need than books?
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland - For a Little While
Teenagers read millions of books every year. They read for entertainment and for education. They read because of school assignments and pop culture fads.
— Sherman Alexie
I don't remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books.
— Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book -- it makes a very poor doorstop.
— Alfred Hitchcock
But maybe they understood more about life than I did. From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn't waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing, I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
Dismissed like a dog. Damon groped for his jacket behind him, found it, and wished that his groping for his sense of humor could be as successful. The faces around him were all the same. They could have been carved in stone.But not stone as hard as that that was coming together again around his soul. That rock was remarkably quick to mend—and an extra layer was added, like the layering of a pearl, but not covering anything nearly so pretty.
— L.J. Smith
It would be inappropiate, undignified, at 38, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour or intensity of a 22 year old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry? Crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photobooths? Taking a whole day to make a compilation tape? Asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or TS Eliot or, god forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them? Ridiculous, at 38, to expect a song or book or film to change your life.
— David Nicholls, One Day
Of all the inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books are the nearest to us for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to the truth, and our persistent leanings to error. But most of all they resemble us in their precious hold on life.
— Joseph Conrad
A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.
— Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book
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
— Andy Andrews
Books are the most tolerant of friends.
— Richard Paul Evans
Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.
— Anthony Doerr
I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
No one knows as well as I how much nonsense is printed in books.
— Julia Quinn, Romancing Mister Bridgerton
She did not care very much for other little girls, but if she had plenty of books she could console herself.
— Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess
It looked like the sort of book described in library catalogues as 'slightly foxed', although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.
— Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic
Overall, the library held a hushed exultation, as though the cherished volumes were all singing soundlessly within their covers.
— Diana Gabaldon, Outlander
To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.
— Claude Adrien Helvétius
Reading is important.Books are important.Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.)
— Neil Gaiman
Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our
— William Hazlitt, Essays of William Hazlitt: Selected and Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Frank Carr
How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
— Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
Silver knives! Painful and sometimes deadly to all paranormals!''Tasey!' I counterd 'Hot pink and sparkly!
— Kiersten White
My books are friends that never fai
— Thomas Carlyle
It [the book] was spinning a magic spell around her heart, sticky as a spider's web and enchantingly beautiful..
— Cornelia Funke, Inkheart
I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages... and fell into it as into a pool during dry season.
— Janet Fitch, White Oleander
I do, I’m afraid, understand books far more readily than I understand people. Books are so easy to get along with.
— Katherine Rundell, Rooftoppers
Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?" asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends," says I, "how much you used the dictionary before you read it.
— Alexander Theroux, Darconville’s Cat
The ultimate luxury is to reread: to revisit a book to see how time has treated it, how memory has distorted it, or how my own passing years have cast a new light on it.
— Michael Upchurch
A book has but one voice, but it does not instruct everyone alike.
— Thomas à Kempis
She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. She read books as one would breathe ether, to sink in and die.
— Annie Dillard, The Living
Remember, the past need not become our future as well.
— Brandon Sanderson, Elantris
And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. I would not change it.
— William Shakespeare, As You Like It
To live is to have worries and uncertainties. Keep them inside, and they will destroy you for certain--leaving behind a person so callused that emotion can find no root in his heart.
— Brandon Sanderson, Elantris
Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again.
— Louisa May Alcott
The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions-there we have none.
— Virginia Woolf, The Second Common Reader
Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
One of the disadvantages of almost universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one's favorite writers. It gave one a curious feeling it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one's dressing gown.
— Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm
Should it matter what genre it is if the book is good?
— Colleen Hoover, Hopeless
Sidda can't help herself. She just loves books. Loves the way they feel, the way they smell, loves the black letters marching across the white pages...
— Rebecca Wells, Little Altars Everywhere
Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.
— Virginia Woolf, The Second Common Reader
The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that don't, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like, and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a test paper.
— Polly Horvath, My One Hundred Adventures
One little Indian left all alone, he went out and hanged himself and then there were none.
— Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None
Books--oh! no. I am sure we never read the same, or not with the samefeelings.""I am sorry you think so; but if that be the case, there can at least beno want of subject. We may compare our different opinions.
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
A war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising range, and mount the most powerful guns.
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
— Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in.
— Naomi Shihab Nye, I'll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK?: Tales of Driving and Being Driven
What I will be remembered for are the Foundation Trilogy and the Three Laws of Robotics. What I want to be remembered for is no one book, or no dozen books. Any single thing I have written can be paralleled or even surpassed by something someone else has done. However, my total corpus for quantity, quality and variety can be duplicated by no one else. That is what I want to be remembered for.
— Isaac Asimov
And when I was young, did I ever tell you, I always wanted to get insidea book and never come out again? I loved reading so much I wantedto be a part of it, and there were some books I could have stayed infor ever.
— Peter Ackroyd, First Light
There are books, that one has for twenty years without reading them, that one always keeps at hand, that one takes along from city to city, from country to country, carefully packed, even when there is very little room, and perhaps one leafs through them while removing them from a trunk; yet one carefully refrains from reading even a complete sentence. Then after twenty years, there comes a moment when suddenly, as though under a high compulsion, one cannot help taking in such a book from beginning to end, at one sitting: it is like a revelation. Now one knows why one made such a fuss about it. It had to be with one for a long time; it had to travel; it had to occupy space; it had to be a burden; and now it has reached the goal of its voyage, now it reveals itself, now it illuminates the twenty bygone years it mutely lived with one. It could not say so much if it had not been there mutely the whole time, and what idiot would dare to assert that the same things had always been in it.
— Elias Canetti, The Human Province
I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.
— Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
I love that books allow us to experience other lives without us ever having to change where we live or who we are.
— Cat Winters, The Cure for Dreaming
The world is dark, and light is precious.Come closer, dear reader.You must trust me.I am telling you a story.
— Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux
The greatest gift is the passion for reading.It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites,it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind.It is a moral illumination.
— Elizabeth Hardwick
I think books are like people, in the sense that they'll turn up in your life when you most need them.
— Emma Thompson
You can never, never have too many books
— Drew Barrymore
When we read, we decide when, where, how long, and about what. One of the few places on earth that it is still possible to experience an instant sense of freedom and privacy is anywhere you open up a good book and begin to read. When we read silently, we are alone with our own thoughts and one other voice. We can take our time, consider, evaluate, and digest what we read—with no commercial interruptions, no emotional music or special effects manipulation. And in spite of the advances in electronic information exchange, the book is still the most important medium for presenting ideas of substance and value, still the only real home of literature.
— Andrew Clements
The book thief has struck for the first time – the beginning of an illustrious career.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Nothing was truly unbearable if you had something to read.
— Jincy Willett, The Writing Class
All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.
— Katherine Paterson
What is the quality you most like in a man? The ability to return books.
— David Bowie
A novel is not an allegory.... It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.
— Azar Nafisi
Books are love letters (or apologies) passed between us, adding a layer of conversation beyond our spoken words.
— Donalyn Miller, The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child
Yet if women are so flighty, fickle, changeable, susceptible, and inconstant (as some clerks would have us believe), why is it that their suitors have to resort to such trickery to have their way with them? And why don't women quickly succumb to them, without the need for all this skill and ingenuity in conquering them? For there is no need to go to war for a castle that is already captured.
— Christine de Pizan, Der Sendbrief vom Liebesgott / The Letter of the God of Love
I wanted a library like this...[] A cave of words that I'd made myself.
— Maggie Stiefvater, Forever
Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.
— Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting
I remember the hours I had spent in Father's library, drugging myself with books so I could forget my doom for an hour..
— Rosamund Hodge, Cruel Beauty
Men, I thought, were more trouble than they were worth. Really, one should stick to books where one sees the hero coming a mile off.
— Eva Rice, The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets
The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books.
— Stéphane Mallarmé