c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
We are what we love to read, and when we admit to loving a book, we admit that the book represents some aspect of ourselves truly, whether it is that we are suckers for romance or pining for adventure or secretly fascinated by crime.
— Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading
You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.
— John Lothrop Motley
There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.
— Matt Haig, The Humans
Among the many worlds which man did not receive as a gift of nature, but which he created with his own mind, the world of books is the greatest. Every child, scrawling his first letters on his slate and attempting to read for the first time, in so doing, enters an artificial and complicated world; to know the laws and rules of this world completely and to practice them perfectly, no single human life is long enough. Without words, without writing, and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. And if anyone wants to try to enclose in a small space in a single house or single room, the history of the human spirit and to make it his own, he can only do this in the form of a collection of books.
— Hermann Hesse, My Belief
I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time.
— Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman
Tell me I didn't imagine it, Leo. Tell me that even though our bodies were in seperate states, our star selves shared an enchanted place. Tell me that right around noon today (eastern time) you had the strangest sensation: a tiny chill on your shoulder...a flutter in the heart...a shadow of strawberry-banana crossing your tongue...tell me you whispered my name.
— Jerry Spinelli
It had filled my time - given me quiet, steadfast company with those characters, who did not exist and never would, but somehow made me feel less ... alone.
— Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury
I should rather have you than a heap of gold, even if it were very comfortable to sleep on.
— Naomi Novik, His Majesty's Dragon
Books can ignite fires in your mind, because they carry ideas for kindling, and art for matches.
— Gary D. Schmidt, Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy
In my fool hardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamt of becoming a librarian. 
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
Books were a safe place, a world apart from my own. No matter what had happened that day, that year, there was always a story in which someone overcame their darkest hour. I wasn't alone.
— Kiera Cass, The Siren
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims (The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer)
If books are not good company, where shall I find it?
— Mark Twain
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.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
Books are like friends to me. Words come alive on the page.
— Beverly  Lewis
Books do furnish a room.
— Anthony Powell, Dance to the Music of Time
Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Without story books is like a person with no soul.
— Stephen King
Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain — the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed — then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature
But the not-very-highbrow truth of the matter was that the reading was how I got my ya-yas out.For the sake of my bookish reputation I upgraded to Tolstoy and Steinbeck before I understood them, but my dark secret was that really, I preferred the junk. The Dragonriders of Pern, Flowers in the Attic, The Clan of the Cave Bear. This stuff was like my stash of Playboys under the mattress.
— Julie Powell, Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen: How One Girl Risked Her Marriage, Her Job, and Her Sanity to Master the Art of Living
Who wants to be used? I love to read, so books are my main friends. They're always available, always friendly, and always interesting, and they never make me choose sides.
— Lurlene McDaniel
The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it
— James Bryce
When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective consciousness enjoyed by fully alert men, with all its builded sentiments and consecrated ideals, has as much to be called real as the drowsy chaos, and more.
— C.S. Lewis
... just as food is necessary to the life of the body, so good reading is necessary to the life of the soul.
— Pope John XXIII
The truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.
— Gabriel Zaid, So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance
Responding to a moderator at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2008 (video), about the Spanish words in his book:When all of us are communicating and talking when we’re out in the world, we’ll be lucky if we can understand 20 percent of what people say to us. A whole range of clues, of words, of languages escape us. I mean we’re not perfect, we’re not gods. But on top of that people mis-speak, sometimes you mis-hear, sometimes you don’t have attention, sometimes people use words you don’t know. Sometimes people use languages you don’t know. On a daily basis, human beings are very comfortable with a large component of communication, which is incomprehensibility, incomprehension. We tend to be comfortable with it. But for an immigrant, it becomes very different. What most of us consider normative comprehension an immigrant fears that they’re not getting it because of their lack of mastery in the language.And what’s a normal component in communication, incomprehension, in some ways for an immigrant becomes a source of deep anxiety because you’re not sure if it’s just incomprehension or your own failures. My sense of writing a book where there is an enormous amount of language that perhaps everyone doesn’t have access to was less to communicate the experience of the immigrant than to communicate the experience that for an immigrant causes much discomfort but that is normative for people. which is that we tend to not understand, not grasp a large part of the language around us. What’s funny is, will Ramona accept incomprehension in our everyday lives and will greet that in a book with enormous fury. In other words what we’re comfortable with out in the outside world, we do not want to encounter in our books.So I’m constantly, people have come to me and asked me… is this, are you trying to lock out your non-Dominican reader, you know? And I’m like, no? I assume any gaps in a story and words people don’t understand, whether it’s the nerdish stuff, whether it’s the Elvish, whether it’s the character going on about Dungeons and Dragons, whether it’s the Dominican Spanish, whether it’s the sort of high level graduate language, I assume if people don’t get it that this is not an attempt for the writer to be aggressive. This is an attempt for the writer to encourage the reader to build community, to go out and ask somebody else. For me, words that you can’t understand in a book aren’t there to torture or remind people that they don’t know. I always felt they were to remind people that part of the experience of reading has always been collective. You learn to read with someone else. Yeah you may currently practice it in a solitary fashion, but reading is a collective enterprise. And what the unintelligible in a book does is to remind you how our whole, lives we’ve always needed someone else to help us with reading.
— Junot Díaz
That's one of the amazing things great books like this do - they don't just get you to see the world differently, they get you to look at people, the people all around you, differently.
— Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club
Oh for a book and a shady nook,Either indoors or out,with the green leaves whispering overhead,or the street cries all about.Where I may read at all my easeboth of the new and old,For a jolly good book whereon to lookis better to me than gold
— John          Wilson
Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.
— Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.
— Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer
Only the nonreader fears books. 
— Richard Peck
Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.
— George Bernard Shaw
All good books are about everything, abbreviated.
— Andrew  Smith, Grasshopper Jungle
Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted ...but to weigh and consider.
— Francis Bacon
I care more about the people in books than the people I see every day.
— Jo Walton, Among Others
If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it's probably because at some level you find 'reality' a bit of a disappointment.
— Joe Queenan, One for the Books
My grandfather says that's what books are for," Ashoke said, using the opportunity to open the volume in his hands. "To travel without moving an inch.
— Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice... and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.
— Gilbert Highet, The Immortal Profession
Well, I don't like the first bit and I don't know the last bit. So I'm really hoping the middle bit is exceptional.
— Eoin Colfer
Sometimes they would sit in the parlor together, both reading – in entirely separate worlds, to be sure, but joined somehow. When this happened, other people in the family couldn't bring themselves to disturb them. All that could be heard in the parlor was the sound of pages, turning.
— Alice Hoffman, Blackbird House
I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.
— Voltaire
Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard covered book to a friend and when he doesn’t return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five cent books are different.
— John Steinbeck
So many FREAKS and not enough CIRCUSES!
— Rachel Renée Russell, Nikkis (nicht ganz so) fabelhafte Welt
The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.
— Ross Macdonald
I go to books and to nature as the bee goes to a flower, for a nectar that I can make into my own honey.
— John Burroughs, The Summit of the Years
My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices.
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life.
— Jesse Lee Bennett
Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.
— William Shakespeare
Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end.
— George R.R. Martin
Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.
— Samuel R. Delany
I love bookshelves, and stacks of books, spines, typography, and the feel of pages between my fingertips. I love bookmarks, and old bindings, and stars in margins next to beautiful passages. I love exuberant underlinings that recall to me a swoon of language-love from a long-ago reading, something I hoped to remember. I love book plates, and inscriptions in gifts from loved ones, I love author signatures, and I love books sitting around reminding me of them, being present in my life, being. I love books. Not just for what they contain. I love them as objects too, as ever-present reminders of what they contain, and because they are beautiful. They are one of my favorite things in life, really at the tiptop of the list, easily my favorite inanimate things in existence, and ... I am just not cottoning on to this idea of making them ... not exist anymore. Making them cease to take up space in the world, in my life? No, please do not take away the physical reality of my books.
— Laini Taylor
We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.
— Eugene O'Neill
Reading is my passion and my escape since I was 5 years old. Overall, children don't realize the magic that can live inside their own heads. Better even then any movie.
— Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.
— Gertrude Stein
But her grandmother had never suggested she could think the same of Scarlet. You'll be fine, she always said, after a skinned knee, after a broken arm, after her first youthfull heartbreak. You'll be fine, because you're strong, like me.
— Marissa Meyer, Scarlet
This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.
— Elbert Hubbard
Before she came ill, David's mother would often tell him that stories were alive. They weren't alive in the way that people were alive, or even dogs or cats. (...) Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by torch light beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world. (...) They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read, David's mother would whisper. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.
— John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things
Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them
— Lemony Snicket, Horseradish
I wanted to know what it was like to be a drug addict, and have an eating disorder, and have a loved one die, and fall in love. I saw my friends going through these things, I saw the world going through these things, and I needed to understand them. I needed to make sense of them. Books didn’t make me wallow in darkness, darkness made me wallow in books, and it was books that showed me there is light at the end of the tunnel.
— Jackson Pearce
Yo soy carne muerta. Translation: I am dead meat.
— Kiersten White, Paranormalcy
Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.
— Yann Martel, Beatrice and Virgil
Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.
— Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know
Don't you ever mind," she asked suddenly, "not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?
— Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
When I want to read a novel, I write one.
— Benjamin Disraeli
My last refuge, my books: simple pleasures, like finding wild onions by the side of a road, or requited love.
— Tracy Letts, August: Osage County
The library was a little old shabby place. Francie thought it was beautiful. The feeling she had about it was as good as the feeling she had about church. She pushed open the door and went in. She liked the combined smell of worn leather bindings, library past and freshly inked stamping pads better than she liked the smell of burning incense at high mass.
— Betty  Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
The wise man reads both books and life itself.
— Lin Yutang
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
— Richard Steele
Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.
— Isaac Asimov
Computers don't kill books people do.
— Douglas Rushkoff
One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.
— P.G. Wodehouse
A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.
— Daniel J. Boorstin
I've forgotten most of what I've read and, frankly, it never seemed very important to me or to the world.
— Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers
Do you arrange your books alphabetically? (I hope not.)
— Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane from the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Life is too short to waste time on books that end badly
— Jayne Ann Krentz, Running Hot
It was like walking into a treasure trove of books, hoarded by pirate librarians.
— Pseudonymous Bosch, The Name of This Book Is Secret
Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book. . . . an intertextual being: a book cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg.
— Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y
Worst of all, the inner vault is guarded by a live dragon, attended by fifty naked women armed with poisoned spears, each of them sworn to die in Requin's service. All redheads.-You're just making that up, Jean.
— Scott Lynch, Red Seas Under Red Skies
What I saw next stopped me dead in my tracks. Books. Not just one or two dozen, but hundreds of them. In crates. In piles on the floor. In bookcases that stretched from floor to ceiling and lined the entire room. I turned around and around in a slow circle, feeling as if I'd just stumbled into Ali Baba's cave. I was breathless, close to tears, and positively dizzy with greed.
— Jennifer Donnelly, A Northern Light
It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.
— Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
But you love books, then,” Aunt Queen was saying. I had to listen.“Oh, yes,” Lestat said. “Sometimes they are the only thing that keeps me alive.”“What a strange thing to say at your age,” she laughed.“No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don’t you think? The young are eternally desperate,” he said frankly. “And books, they offer one hope —- that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that new universe, one is saved.
— Anne Rice, Blackwood Farm
As we expand our knowledge of good books, we shrink the circle of men whose company we appreciate.
— Ludwig Feuerbach
He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say.
— Alice Hoffman, Blackbird House
It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.
— Penelope Lively
In other words, it's one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of "This is me!
— Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree
When was the last time you read a book? The truth now. And picture books don't count-I mean something with print in it.
— William Goldman, The Princess Bride
Reading is the royal road to intellectual eminence...Truly good books are more than mines to those who can understand them. They are the breathings of the great souls of past times. Genius is not embalmed in them, but lives in them perpetually.
— William Ellery Channing
This must be what an addict feels like, I think, trying to fight the pull of one last, quick read. My fingers itch toward the binding, and finally, with a sigh of regret, I just grab the book and open it, hungrily reading the story.
— Jodi Picoult, Between the Lines
In a few minutes I heard the books' voices: a low, steady, unsupressible hum. I'd heard it many times before. I've always had a finely tuned ear for a library's accumulations of echo and desire. Libraries are anything but hushed.
— Martha Cooley, The Archivist
Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.
— Annie Dillard
Cakes are like books: There are new ones you want to read and old favorites you want to reread.
— Ellen Rose
Did you ever hear anyone say, 'That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me'?
— Joseph Henry Jackson
I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, or how lonely the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland
— Arthur Conan Doyle, Through The Magic Door
For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidised flat, books are like flowers. He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicoloured rows: he watches over each of them with an old-fashioned gardener's delight, holds them like fragile objects in his thin, bloodless hands.
— Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl
[W]hat I like best is staying home and reading. Being rich is not about how many homes you own. It’s the freedom to pick up any book you want without looking at the price and wondering whether you can afford it.
— John Waters
I read because one life isn't enough, and in the page of a book I can be anybody.
— R. Peck
And of course I'm in the press all the time. So many books have been written about me; Into thin air, up in the air,Gone with the wind-
— Rick Riordan, The Lost Hero
We are made wholeBy books, as by great spaces and the stars
— Mary Carolyn Davies
Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.
— Edwin Percy Whipple
Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity... We cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access reassurance.
— A.E. Newton
It's too late to apologize for I have already forgiven you." -FitzChivalry Farseer
— Robin Hobb
Books are like truth serum-- if you don't read, you can't figure out what's real.
— Rodman Philbrick, Freak the Mighty
The feel of them (books) and the smell of them. A bookshop was like an Aladdin's cave for me. Entire worlds and lives can be found just behind that glossy cover. All you had to do was look." Claire (Watermelon)
— Marian Keyes, Watermelon
Weren’t all books ultimately related? After all, the same letters filled them, just arranged in a different order. Which meant that, in a certain way, every book was contained in every other!
— Cornelia Funke, Inkdeath
From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood.
— Betty  Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
The public library is where place and possibility meet.
— Stuart Dybek
I don't want anyone writing in to point out that I spend too much money on books, many of which I will never read. I know that already. I certainly intend to read all of them, more or less. My intentions are good. Anyway, it's my money. And I'll bet you do it too.
— Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree
Nothing ever invented provides such sustenance, such infinite reward for time spent, as a good book.
— David McCullough
I truly believe that if you have more friends than books, you have too many friends. Or not enough books. Probably both.
— Zoë Marriott
A censor is an expert in cutting remarks. A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.
— Laurence J. Peter
When I began writing The Night Bookmobile, it was a story about a woman's secret life as a reader. As I worked it also became a story about the claims that books place on their readers, the imbalance between our inner and outer lives, a cautionary tale of the seductions of the written word. It became a vision of the afterlife as a library, of heaven as a funky old camper filled with everything you've ever read. What is this heaven? What is it we desire from the hours, weeks, lifetimes we devote to books? What would you sacrifice to sit in that comfy chair with perfect light for an afternoon in eternity, reading the perfect book, forever?
— Audrey Niffenegger, The Night Bookmobile
The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves.
— Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935-1950
Our private tastes in books showed a hint of our secret selves.
— Nova Ren Suma, The Walls Around Us
It is time to browse through the precious books that have meant the most to you that you may rediscover illuminating phrases and sentences to light your pathway to the future...
— Wilferd Peterson
I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.
— Nick Hornby, Housekeeping vs. the Dirt
Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes!
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
When I was in my twenties and broke, I'd buy books before food. A meal will sustain you for a few hours, a good book will sustain you for life.
— Gabrielle Zevin
Always buy pornographic books in hardback because they're easier to hold with one hand.
— Robert Clark
I love to lose myself in other men's minds.... Books think for me.
— Charles Lamb
The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me--I have no others.
— Thomas Bernhard, Concrete
I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them. 
— Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room
Before you sleep, read something that is exquisite, and worth remembering.
— Erasmus
Keep good company, read good books, love good things and cultivate soul and body as faithfully as you can
— Louisa May Alcott, Rose in Bloom
Prometheus, thief of light, giver of light, bound by the gods, must have been a book.
— Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
There are many horrible sights in the multiverse. Somehow, though, to a soul attuned to the subtle rhythms of a library, there are few worse sights than a hole where a book ought to be.Someone had stolen a book.
— Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books.
— Karl Lagerfeld
I hate books they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau
As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other you will find what is needful for you in a book.
— George MacDonald, The Marquis of Lossie
I know, you've been here a year, you think these people are normal. Well, they're not. WE'RE not. I look in the library, I call up books on my desk. Old ones, because they won't let us have anything new, but I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares. Children aren't in armies, they aren't COMMANDERS, they don't rule over forty other kids, it's more than anybody can take and not get crazy.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
The books were legends and tales, stories from all over the Realm. These she had devoured voraciously – so voraciously, in fact, that she started to become fatigued by them. It was possible to have too much of a good thing, she reflected.	“They’re all the same,” she complained to Fleet one night. “The soldier rescues the maiden and they fall in love. The fool outwits the wicked king. There are always three brothers or sisters, and it’s always the youngest who succeeds after the first two fail. Always be kind to beggars, for they always have a secret; never trust a unicorn. If you answer somebody’s riddle they always either kill themselves or have to do what you say. They’re all the same, and they’re all ridiculous! That isn’t what life is like!”	Fleet had nodded sagely and puffed on his hookah. “Well, of course that’s not what life is like. Except the bit about unicorns – they’ll eat your guts as soon as look at you. those things in there” – he tapped the book she was carrying – “they’re simple stories. Real life is a story, too, only much more complicated. It’s still got a beginning, a middle, and an end. Everyone follows the same rules, you know. . . It’s just that there are more of them. Everyone has chapters and cliffhangers. Everyone has their journey to make. Some go far and wide and come back empty-handed; some don’t go anywhere and their journey makes them richest of all. Some tales have a moral and some don’t make any sense. Some will make you laugh, others make you cry. The world is a library, young Poison, and you’ll never get to read the same book twice.
— Chris Wooding, Poison
When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn't control what came through it.
— Nicole Krauss, Great House
Only five books tonight, Mommy," she says.No, Olivia, just one."How about four?"Two."Three."Oh, all right, three. But that's it!
— Ian Falconer, Olivia
A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.
— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Write it down, boy. If you come across a passage in your reading that you’d like to remember, write it down in your little book; then you can read it again, memorize it, and have it whenever you wish.
— Keith Donohue
There was something appealing in thinking of a character with a secret life that her author knew nothing about. Slipping off while the author's back was turned, to find love in her own way. Showing up just in time to deliver the next bit of dialogue with an innocent face.
— Karen Joy Fowler
Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
Unpacking books is a revelatory activity. 
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
I am a part of all I have read.
— John Kieran
I hate most people. And I don’t want to, it’s an awful way to be. But the human race gives me no comfort. I find myself turning to books and films for comfort still. It’s repulsive, because one’s life consists of people, not things.
— Morrissey
Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.
— Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity...
— A. Edward Newton
A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall. Books perfume and give weight to a room. A bookcase is as good as a view, as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms, fogs, zephyrs. I read about a family whose apartment consists of a series of spaces so strictly planned that they are obliged to give away their books as soon as they've read them. I think they have misunderstood the way books work.  Reading a book is only the first step in the relationship. After you've finished it, the book enters on its real career. It stand there as a badge, a blackmailer, a monument, a scar. It's both a flaw in the room, like a crack in the plaster, and a decoration. The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral port
— Anatole Broyard
Success is no proof of virtue. In the case of a book, quick acclaim is presumptive evidence of a lack of substance and originality.
— Walter Kaufmann
Have books ‘happened’ to you? Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk to you
— Haruki Murakami
I love staring at my books for hours just trying to decide which book to read next. Doing that is almost as fun as actually reading them.
— Love The Stacks Bookstore
Books can truly change our lives: the lives of those who read them, the lives of those who write them. Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew about the world and about themselves.
— Lloyd Alexander, Time Cat
Books are like oxygen to a deep-sea diver," she had once said. "Take them away and you might as well begin counting the bubbles.
— Alan Bradley, I Am Half-Sick of Shadows
Books fall open, you fall in
— David T.W. McCord
...Something we once loved, and love now, in the shape of a book. Maybe eBooks are going to take over, one day, but not until those whizzkids in Silicon Valley invent a way to bend the corners, fold the spine, yellow the pages, add a coffee ring or two and allow the plastic tablet to fall open at a favorite page.
— Russell T. Davies, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
— Susan Sontag
Learning became her. She loved the smell of the book from the shelves, the type on the pages, the sense that the world was an infinite but knowable place. Every fact she learned seemed to open another question, and for every question there was another book.
— Robert Goolrick, A Reliable Wife
Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.
— Laurie  Anderson
That's what this country needs -- more books!
— Christopher Morley
If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them – peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.
— Winston S. Churchill, Painting as a Pastime
There's no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature.
— Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.
— Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch
anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.
— Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room
A book is a wonderful present. Though it may grow worn, it will never grow old.
— Jane Yolen, Girl in a Cage
Anything can become a children's book if you give it to a child...Children are actually the best (and worst) audience for literature because they have no patience with pretence.
— Orson Scott Card
I smiled at the stacks, inhaling again. Hundreds of thousands of pages that had never been turned, waiting for me. The shelves were a warm, blond wood, piled with spines of every color. Staff picks were arranged on tables, glossy covers reflecting the light back at me. Behind the little cubby where the cashier sat, ignoring us, stairs covered with rich burgundy carpet led up to the worlds unknown. 'I could just live here,' I said.
— Maggie Stiefvater, Shiver
The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.
— Walt Whitman
If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
The act of true reading is in its very essence democratic. Consider the nature of what happens when we read a book - and I mean, of course, a work of literature, not an instruction manual or a textbook - in private, unsupervised, un-spied-on, alone. It isn't like a lecture: it's like a conversation. There's a back-and-forthness about it. The book proposes, the reader questions, the book responds, the reader considers. We bring our own preconceptions and expectations, our own intellectual qualities, and our limitations, too, our own previous experiences of reading, our own temperament, our own hopes and fears, our own personality to the encounter.
— Philip Pullman
All his life, Klaus had believed that if you read enough books, you could solve any problem, but now he wasn't so sure.
— Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning
But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence. 
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book.
— Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess
Revenge. Justice. Love. They are the three stories that all other stories are made up of. It's the trifecta.
— April Genevieve Tucholke, Wink Poppy Midnight
He had no money and no home; he lived entirely on the road of the racing circuit, sleeping in empty stalls, carrying with him only a saddle, his rosary, and his books....The books were the closest thing he had to furniture, and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.
— Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit: An American Legend
Books have souls. Or so romantics like me tend to think.
— Douglas Rushkoff
…books are always good company if you have the right sort. Let me pick out some for you.' And Mrs. Jo made a bee-line to the well-laden shelves, which were the joy of her heart and the comfort of her life.
— Louisa May Alcott, Jo's Boys
Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of emotion and observation, multilayered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers. Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language. It will not get us anything that enters not just the conscious mind but the unconscious. It will not allow the book to burrow down into our memory and become part of ourselves, the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom and vicarious experience which helps to form us as complete human beings. It will not develop our awareness or add to the sum of our knowledge and intelligence. Read parts of a newspaper quickly or an encyclopaedia entry, or a fast-food thriller, but do not insult yourself or a book which has been created with its author's painstakingly acquired skill and effort, by seeing how fast you can dispose of it.
— Susan Hill, Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home
...I will not allow books to prove any thing.""But how shall we prove any thing?""We never shall.
— Jane Austen, Persuasion
Books must be treated with respect, we feel that in our bones, because words have power. Bring enough words together they can bend space and time.
— Terry Pratchett
We become the books we read.
— Matthew Kelly
She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain
— Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience
CUSTOMER: If I were to, say... meet the love of my life in this bookshop, what section do you think they would be standing in?
— Jen Campbell, Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops
You're either reading a book or you're not.
— Jonathan Franzen
All books are either dreams or swords,You can cut, or you can drug, with words. 
— Amy Lowell, Selected Poems
great books are the ones we need
— Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems
Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading -- once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive -- is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
There were two sets of double doors leading out of the antechamber, one marked STACKS and the other TOMES. Not knowing the difference between the two, I headed to the ones labeled STACKS. That was what I wanted. Stacks of books. Great heaps of books. Shelf after endless shelf of books.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
Who made you Queen of Literacy? Go sit in your car!
— Jackson Pearce
A Book “Now” - said a good book unto me -“Open my pages and you shall seeJewels of wisdom and treasures fine,Gold and silver in every line,And you may claim them if you but willOpen my pages and take your fill.“Open my pages and run them o’er,Take what you choose of my golden store.Be you greedy, I shall not care -All that you seize I shall gladly spare;There is never a lock on my treasure doors,Come - here are my jewels, make them yours!“I am just a book on your mantel shelf,But I can be part of your living self;If only you’ll travel my pages through,Then I will travel the world with you.As two wines blended make better wine,Blend your mind with these truths of mine.“I’ll make you fitter to talk with men,I’ll touch with silver the lines you pen,I’ll lead you nearer the truth you seek,I’ll strengthen you when your faith grows weak -This place on your shelf is a prison cell,Let me come into your mind to dwell!
— Edgar A. Guest, Collected Verse
And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun. 
— Nick Hornby, Housekeeping vs. the Dirt
A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
With no reason to hide these words I feel, and no reason to talk about the books I read, but still, I do.
— Morrissey
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
— Salman Rushdie
There isn’t any particular relationship between the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
The Bookshop has a thousand books,All colors, hues, and tinges,And every cover is a doorThat turns on magic hinges.
— Nancy Byrd Turner
Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers. 
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
He fed his spirit with the bread of books
— Edwin Markham
That's the thing about a great book. Every time you read it, it's different, because you're different. You've changed since the last time you picked it up, things have happened to you.
— Jessica Zafra, Twisted 9
But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.’ Most of us can’t rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
For the last several days I've had the sudden and general urge to buy a new book. I've stopped off at a few bookstores around the city, and while I've looked at hundreds and hundreds of books in that time, I have not found the one book that will satisfy my urge. It's not as if I don't have anything to read; there's a tower of perfectly good unread books next to my bed, not to mention the shelves of books in the living room I've been meaning to reread. I find myself, maddeningly, hungry for the next one, as yet unknown. I no longer try to analyze this hunger; I capitulated long ago to the book lust that's afflicted me most of my life. I know enough about the course of the disease to know I'll discover something soon.
— Lewis Buzbee, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, a History
I took to the Bodleian library as to a lover and ... would sit long hours in Bodley's arms to emerge, blinking and dazed with the smell and feel of all those books.
— Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice
Maybe Heaven will be a library and then I might get to finish my ‘to-read’ list.
— Kellie Elmore, Magic in the Backyard
Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.
— Jane Austen, Persuasion
Sometimes I think books are the only friends worth having.
— Susie Derkins