c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level ‒ there weren't any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader's head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer's work and skill and the reader's imagination. Parents, of a sort.
— Jim Butcher, Small Favor
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?
— Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors
She was addicted to literature like some people were addicted to heroin.
— Allie Burke, Emerald Destiny
Stories are life," protested Pico. "Without them, books would be only paper and ink, with them they breathe, the reader is drawn in, the stories become him.
— Keith  Miller, The Book of Flying
...some people might think our lives dull and uneventful, but it does not seem so to us. ...it is not travel and adventure that make a full life. There are adventures of the spirit and one can travel in books and interest oneself in people and affairs. One need ever be dull as long as one has friends to help, gardens to enjoy and books in the long winter evenings.
— D.E. Stevenson, Listening Valley
He helped the Librarian up. There was a red glow in the ape's eyes. It had tried to steal his books. This was probably the best proof any wizard could require that the trolleys were brainless.
— Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
Certain unique books seem to be without forerunners or successors as far as their authors are concerned. Even though they may profoundly influence the work of other writers, for their creator they're complete, not leading anywhere.
— Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
We stopped to browse in the cases, and now that William - with his new glasses on his nose - could linger and read the books, at every title he discovered he let out exclamations of happiness, either because he knew the work, or because he had been seeking it for a long time, or finally because he had never heard it mentioned and was highly excited and titillated. In short, for him every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting in a strange land.
— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Books are boring," James said as he wrote."They line the walls like a thousand leather doorways to be opened into worlds unknown," I offered.
— Laura Whitcomb, A Certain Slant of Light
It doesn’t matter how long we’ve used something; all that matters is how awesome the thing replacing it is. MP3s and automobiles happen to be really, really awesome, whereas ebooks—at least so far—are fairly limited in their awesomeness.
— John Green
My mother was an avid reader...She loved books about romance. Books that took place in faraway places and times. Stories with costumes...
— Adriana Trigiani
What a glut of books! Who can read them?
— Robert  Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
This is what reading is like to me. It's finding a spring in the midst of a barren land. Just when I think I might up and die of thirst, I stumble onto this fresh, cold water, and I'm suddenly given this new life because I can-and do-drink to my heart's content.
— Beverly  Lewis
Books are a finer world within the world. (1863)
— Alexander  Smith
In reading, friendship is restored immediately to its original purity. With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: “What did they think of us?”—“Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?”—“Did they like us?”—nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else. All such agitating thoughts expire as we enter the pure and calm friendship of reading.
— Marcel Proust
We have everything we need to be happy but we aren't happy. Something is missing...It is not books you need, it's some of the things that are in books. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they area dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.
— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
One is never alone with a book nearby, don't you agree? Every page reminds us of a day that has passed and makes us relive the emotions that filled it. Happy hours underlined in red pencil, dark ones in black...
— Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Club Dumas
My parents would frisk me before family events. Before weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, and what have you. Because if they didn't, then the book would be hidden inside some pocket or other and as soon as whatever it was got under way I'd be found in a corner. That was who I was...that was what I did. I was the kid with the book.
— Neil Gaiman
When confronted with a birthday in a week I will remember that a book can be a really good present, too.
— Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, At Knit's End: Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much
To limit the press is to insult a nation to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves: such a prohibition ought to fill them with disdain.
— Claude Adrien Helvétius, Treatise on Man: His Intellectual Faculties and His Education V1
I shall keep my book on the table here, and read a little every morning as soon as I wake, for I know it will do me good, and help me through the day.
— Louisa May Alcott
We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don't live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the age.We know a dozen Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbo's lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there. Plus c'est la même chose, plus ça change.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea
It's important to read a book, but also to hold the book, to smell the book... it's perfume, it's incense, it's the dust of Egypt...
— Ray Bradbury
This place is a mystery. A sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it & the soul of those who read it & lived it & dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down it's pages, it's spirit grows & strengthens. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands, a new spirit...
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Home is where your books are.
— Kerstin Gier
Books are humanity in print.
— Barbara W. Tuchman
I certainly couldn't have survived my childhood without books. All that deprivation and pain--abuse, broken home, a runaway sister, a brother with cancer--the books allowed me to withstand. They sustained me. I read still, prolifically, with great passion, but never like I read in those days: in those days it was life or death.
— Junot Díaz
Free spirits have to soar." "True Religion
— Ziggy Marley, The Best of Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers
A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.
— Virginia Woolf
On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favourite book.
— Marcel Proust, Days of Reading
Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.
— Julian Barnes, A Life with Books
There is something fascinatingly awkward about an author photo. I'm drawn to those glossy shots in the back of books, mostly because the subjects never look happy to be there.
— Pamela Ribon
Geeks are not the world’s rowdiest people. We’re quiet and introspective, and usually more comfortable communing with our keyboards or a good book than each other. Our idea of how to paint theEmerald City red involves light liquor, heavy munchies, and marathon sessions of video games of the ‘giant robots shooting each other and everything else in sight’ variety. We debate competing lines of software or gaming consoles with passion, and dissect every movie, television show, and novel in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.With as many of us as there are in this town, people inevitably find ways to cater to us when we get in the mood to spend our hard-earned dollars. Downtown Seattle boasts grandiose geek magnets, like the Experience Music Project and the Experience Science Fiction museum, but it has much humbler and far more obscure attractions too, like the place we all went to for our ship party that evening: a hole-in-the-wall bar called the Electric Penguin on Capitol Hill. 
— Angela Korra'ti, Faerie Blood
I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Temeraire said, 'It is very nice how many books there are, indeed. And on so many subjects!
— Naomi Novik, His Majesty's Dragon
An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.
— Roger Ebert, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie
Last night I thought about all the kerosene I've used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before...It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I come along in two minutes and boom! it's all over.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
The young need discipline and a full bookcase.
— Vivienne Westwood
Instead, we'd do what we always did, the only thing we'd ever been dependably stellar at: we'd read.
— Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters
The only life worth living is the adventurous life. Of such a life the dominant characteristic is that it is unafraid. It is unafraid of what other people think...It does not adapt either its pace or its objectives to the pace and objectives of its neighbors. It thinks its own thoughts, it reads its own books. It develops its own hobbies, and it is governed by its own conscience. The herd may graze where it pleases or stampede where it pleases, but he who lives the adventurous life will remain unafraid when he finds himself alone.
— Raymond B. Fosdick
Books and movies, they are not mere entertainment. They sustain me and help me cope with my real life.
— Arlaina Tibensky
History proves there is no better advertisement for a book than to condemn it for obscenity.
— Holbrook Jackson
As I walked, I ran my fingers along the spines of hundreds of books. I let myself be imbued with the smell, with the light that filtered through the cracks or from the glass lanterns embedded in the wooden structure, floating among mirrors and shadows.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game
Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time.
— Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree
I was on a walking tour of Oxford colleges once with a group of bored and unimpressable tourists. They yawned at Balliol's quad, T.E. Lawrence's and Churchill's portraits, and the blackboard Einstein wrote his E=mc2 on. Then the tour guide said, 'And this is the Bridge of Sighs, where Lord Peter proposed (in Latin) to Harriet,' and everyone suddenly came to life and began snapping pictures. Such is the power of books.
— Connie Willis, The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories
Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.
— Harold Bloom
I would rather read a mediocre book than waste time sitting around with people making small talk.
— James D. Sass, Essays in Satanism
I enjoy sharing my books as I do my friends, asking only that you treat them well and see them safely home.
— Ernest Morgan
..........books are yours, Within whose silent chambers treasure lies Preserved from age to age; more precious far Than that accumulated store of gold And orient gems, which, for a day of need, The Sultan hides deep in ancestral tombs. These hoards of truth you can unlock at will:
— William Wordsworth
A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. You prime a pump with your own water, you work the handle with your own strength. You do this because you expect to get back more than you give.
— Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis
From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
No encounter occured that day, and I was glad of it; I took out of my pocket a little Homer I had not opened since leaving Marseilles, reread three lines of the Odyssey, learned them by heart; then, finding sufficient sustenance in their rhythm and reveling in them at leisure, I closed the book and remained, trembling, more alive than I had thought possible, my mind numb with happiness.
— André Gide, The Immoralist
But, how do you know if an ending is truly good for the characters unless you've traveled with them through every page?
— Shannon Hale, Midnight in Austenland
This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
The book's always better than the movie.
— Richelle Mead, Last Sacrifice
Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.
— Jorge Luis Borges
I recognized it instantly. It was a made-up story, a fantasy, the tale of four kids who went through a magic wardrobe and found themselves in a strange new world. I'd read it more times than I could remember, and although I sneered at the thought of a magical land with friendly, talking animals, there were times when I wished, in my most secret moments, that I could find a hidden door that would take us allout of this place.
— Julie Kagawa, The Immortal Rules
The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know — the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be…. The thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever.
— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth
What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks? Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet." (A Teller of Tales)
— W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore
Have you never picked up a book you've read before, and found it speaks to you in a new way?
— Django Wexler, The Forbidden Library
My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closest. Their selves were on their shelves.
— Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
Olly: jesus. is there a girl on this planet who doesn't love mr.darcyMadeline: All girls love Mr. Darcy?Olly: are you kidding? even my sister loves darcy and she doesn't love anybodyMadeline: She must love somebody. I'm sure she loves youOlly: what's so great about darcy?Madeline: That's not a serious questionOlly: he's a snobMadeline: But he overcomes it and eventually realizes that character matters more than class! He's a man open to learning life's lessons! Also, he's completely gorgeous and noble and brooding and poetic. Did I mention gorgeous? Also, he loves Elizabeth beyond all reason.
— Nicola Yoon, Everything, Everything
The venerable dead are waiting in my library to entertain me and relieve me from the nonsense of surviving mortals.
— Samuel Davies
What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever.
— Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary
More and more I lived in books, they were my comfort, refuge, addiction, compensation for the humiliations that attended contact with the world outside.
— Lorna Sage, Bad Blood
Reading a novel, War and Peace for example, is no Catnap. Because a novel is so long, reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody knows or cares about.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Bagombo Snuff Box
Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.
— Elizabeth von Arnim, The Solitary Summer
Take what interests and knowledge you can from books, but do not let them replace words and thoughts of your own.
— Pai Kit Fai, The Concubine's Daughter
I shake my head. "Not my kind of scene. I'd rather be home with my book boyfriend." "I'll never get what you book sluts get out of a fictional man…" He shakes his head. "Boys in books are better.
— Danielle Torella, Private Message
We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins!
In fiction, beauty was run-of-the-mill.
— Eileen Favorite, The Heroines
Authors: The only people you thank for leaving you emotionally devastated.
— Love The Stacks Bookstore
Even prisoners can escape if they have books.
— Michelle Moran, Rebel Queen
You'll never be alone if you’ve got a book.
— Al Pacino
She loved the smell of books, the feel of books, the look of them on the shelf.
— Barbara Michaels, Houses of Stone
. . . finally, I couldn't imagine how I could live without books, and I stopped dreaming about marrying that Chinese prince. . . .
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights
Books are meat and medicineand flame and flight and flowersteel, stitch, cloud and clout,and drumbeats on the air.
— Gwendolyn Brooks
And she is the readerwho browses the shelfand looks for new worldsbut finds herself.
— Laura Purdie Salas, BookSpeak!: Poems about Books
Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?
— Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
Madam Pince, our librarian, tells me that it is 'pawed about, dribbled on, and generally maltreated' nearly everyday - a high compliment for any book.
— J.K. Rowling, Quidditch Through the Ages
I couldn't get to sleep. The book lay nearby. A thin object on the divan. So strange. Between two cardboard covers were noises, doors, howls, horses, people. All side by side, pressed tightly against one another. Boiled down to little black marks. Hair, eyes, voices, nails, legs, knocks on doors, walls, blood, beards, the sound of horseshoes, shouts. All docile, blindly obedient to the little black marks. The letters run in mad haste, now here, now there. The a's, f's, y's, k's all run. They gather together to create a horse or a hailstorm. They run again. Now they create a dagger, a night, a murder. Then streets, slamming doors, silence. Running and running. Never stopping.
— Ismail Kadare, Chronicle in Stone
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
We'll always need printed books that don't mutate the way digital books do; we'll always need places to display books, auditoriums for book talks, circles for story time; we'll always need brick-and-mortar libraries.
— Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All
Before I had a chance to feel too sorry for myself, I turned toward the front of the cabin and found the bookcases carved right into the wall. Hundreds of leather-bound volumes rested in dim alcoves. I had no idea what stories or information they held. It didn’t matter. I wanted to absorb anything they had to say.
— Jodi Meadows, Incarnate
Poor Christopher-John had fallen into the hands of Miss. Daisy Crocker. I greatly sympathized him, but as in everything else, Christopher John tried to see the bright side in having to face such a shrew every morning. "Maybe she done changed," he said hopefully on the first day of school. However, when classes were over he was noticeably quiet. Well?" I asked him. He shrugged dejectedly and admitted, "She still the same.
— Mildred D. Taylor, Let the Circle Be Unbroken
In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
It is one of the strongest bonds, I think, that can spring up between people: sharing a passion for certain books and their authors.
— Alice Steinbach, Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman
This would be...a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted
One had a knife. But I had a staff and was trained to use it.
— Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice
Librarians are your very best friend. And don't ever think otherwise.
— Rett MacPherson
I believe my life has a value, and i don't want to waste it thinking about clothing.I don't want to think about what i will wear in the morning. Truly, can you imagine anything more boring than fashion?
— Michael Crichton
Note to self: don’t throw things at girls.
— Emlyn Chand, Farsighted
…the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea…. It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and thus compelling words to a shape….You have not finished with it because you have read it, any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up and alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered. So we look back upon essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm, knowing that, come September or May, we shall sit down with them and talk.
— Virginia Woolf
I don't understand your book. Isn't every book a book of words?
— Kristin Cashore, Bitterblue
Life is like writing with a pen. You can cross out your past but you can't erase it.
— E.B. White
Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes–characters even–caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
What we need now are heroes and heroines, about a million of them, one brave deed is worth a thousand books. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.
— Edward Abbey
Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.
— G.K. Chesterton
Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was, in a manner, a literary ghoul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature.
— Washington Irving, Tales of a Traveller
In the candle's flickering light, the library's thousands of books emerged from the shadows, and for a moment Nicholas could not help admiring them again. During free time he had almost never looked up from the pages he was reading, but now he saw the books anew, from without rather than from within, and was reminded of how beautiful they were simply as objects. The geometrical wonder of them all, each book on its own and all the books together, row upon row, the infinite patterns and possibilities they presented. They were truly lovely.
— Trenton Lee Stewart, The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict
Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.
— Lawrence Clark Powell
Because to the poor, books are not diversions. Book are siege weapons.
— Joe Queenan, One for the Books
The library had become her solace. Her refuge.Books did not question or judge. They made safe companions.
— Inglath Cooper, Truths and Roses: A Love Story
What is written beneath this heavy handsome book cover will count, so sayeth this cover…
— Anne Rice, Pandora
Each of those churches shows certain books, which they call revelation, or the Word of God. The Jews say that their Word of God was given by God to Moses face to face; the Christians say, that their Word of God came by divine inspiration; and the Turks say, that their Word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from heaven. Each of those churches accuses the other of unbelief; and, for my own part, I disbelieve them all.
— Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
On getting lost in a book. Set adriftA life unknownConnections formLove is sewn
— Patty Wiseman, An Unlikely Arrangement
The worst of it is that I am perpetually being punished for nothing; this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me. It's perfectly awful to let the mind grind itself away between the upper and nether millstones of regret and remorse without respite; with books my life would be livable -- any life.
— Oscar Wilde
Give up your thirst for books, so that you do not die a grouch.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world. 
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
Personally, I believe "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I'd rather use film cameras and vinyl records and cathode ray tubes than any sort of the digital technology available. Look around! The streets are full of people who would rather have their eyes on their cell phones than on the world around them! Scientists are researching technology to erase specific memories from people! Our thrown-away digital technology is showing up overseas in huge piles of toxic heavy metals and plastic! And yet there are still people who keep wanting technology and the future to keep going. They dream of flying cars, or humanoid robots, of populated cities on Mars. But do we really NEED this stuff? Maybe before we try to keep turning our world into an episode of The Jetsons, we should focus more on the problems that are surprisingly being overlooked now more than ever. Before we design another stupid cell phone or build a flying car, let's put a stop to racism, to sexism, to homophobia, to war. Let's stop buying all our "American" products from sweat shops overseas and let's end poverty in third-world countries. Let's let film photography never go obsolete, let's let print books continue to be printed. Let's stop domestic violence and child abuse and prostitution and this world's heavy reliance on prescription drugs. Let's stop terrorism, let's stop animal cruelty, , let's stop overpopulation and urbanization, let's stop the manufacture of nuclear weapons......I mean come on, we have all these problems to solve, but digital tech enthusiasts are more concerned that we don't have flying cars or robotic maids yet? That's pathetic.
— Rebecca McNutt
As readers, we have gone from learning a precious craft whose secret was held by a jealous few, to taking for granted a skin that has become subordinate to principles of mindless financial profit or mechanical efficiency, a skill for which governments care almost nothing.
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
I'm an open book. But some of the pages are stuck together.
— Kelli Jae Baeli, Crossing Paths
But preserve your mistrust of the page, for a book is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears.
— Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria
It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.
— John Muir
He loved books
—  books are cold but safe friends.
I guess that’s the beauty of books. When they finish they don’t really finish.
— Markus Zusak
‎He often envied people who hadn't read his favourite books. They had such happiness before them.
— Charles Finch, A Stranger in Mayfair
But I loved the library simply because it was a library. I love libraries. I like reading, but I love libraries. Being surrounded by books makes me feel safe, the way some people need trees or mountains around them to feel secure. Not me – nature’s not what I cling to. I cling to books.
— Emily Wing Smith, Back When You Were Easier to Love
But to her, libraries were like hotels: secret villages inhabited by passing strangers from a thousand different worlds brought together just for a few hours.
— Simon Sebag Montefiore
Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.
— Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas
We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.
— George Eliot, The Lifted Veil
I had always turned to books, to knowledge, to help me get through everything in my life—and,sometimes, to escape it. But grief was a journey through a forest of razor blades. I walked through everypainful inch of it—no shortcuts and no anesthesia.
— Michele Bardsley, Don't Talk Back To Your Vampire
A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men
Books smell and feel better. They have that wonderful thingness of turning the pages.
— Neil Gaiman
A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to peer out.
— E.M. Forster
A house without books must be sad. Even sadder a house of books without people.
— Manuel Rivas, Books Burn Badly
Reading stimulates the imagination and a good imagination can change the world in the most splendid of ways.
— Meredith Wood
A precious, mouldering pleasure 't isTo meet an antique bookIn just the dress his century wore;A privilege, I think,His venerable hand to take,And warming in our own,A passage back, or two, to makeTo times when he was young.His quaint opinions to inspect,His knowledge to unfoldOn what concerns our mutual mind,The literature of old...
— Emily Dickinson
I need words and print... I need print like an addict. I could live without it, perhaps. But I hope I never have to try.
— Margaret Drabble
Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.
— Clifton Fadiman, The New Lifetime Reading Plan: The Classic Guide to World Literature, Revised and Expanded
Then he got more books. He saved all the books.
— Dave Eggers, Zeitoun
There was nothing particularly special about her, except that she was good with numbers, and very good at lying, and she made her home in between the pages of books.
— Maggie Stiefvater, Linger
Many a man lives a burden to the Earth, but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.
— John Milton
The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder.
— Elizabeth McCracken
What worries me is that a load of shite has been talked about digitisation as being the new Gutenberg, but the fact is that Gutenberg led to books being put in shelves, and digitisation is taking books off shelves.If you start taking books off shelves then you are only going to find what you are looking for, which does not help those who do not know what they are looking for.
— Jeanette Winterson
I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?
— Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Ruined By Reading: A Life in Books
Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.
— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn't someone want to talk about it! We've started and won two atomic wars since 2022! Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are? I've heard rumors; the world is starving, but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much? I've heard the rumors about hate too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know why? I don't, that's sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes!
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
The more you read, the more you want to know, and so the more questions you have.
— Xinran, Miss Chopsticks
Every book is a great action and every great action is a book!
— Martin Luther
Adventure,' then, is what might otherwise be called hardship if it were attempted in a different spirit. Turning a difficult task or a perilous journey into an adventure is largely a matter of telling yourself the right story about it, which is one thing that Lewis's child characters have learned from reading, 'the right books.
— Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.American novels, answered Lord Henry.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings
I could almost hear the characters inside, murmuring and jostling, impatient for me to open the cover and let them out.
— Jennifer Donnelly, A Northern Light
For me the greatest joy is to be able to submerge myself for a few hours every day in a human time that otherwise would be alien to me. A lifetime is not enough.
— Carlos María Domínguez, The House of Paper
Books, like people, can't be reduced to the cost of the materials with which they were made. Books, like people, become unique and precious once you get to know them.
— Yann Martel, What is Stephen Harper Reading?: Yann Martel's Recommended Reading for a Prime Minister and Book Lovers of All Stripes
Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
— Lionel Trilling
[He] was always here to offer cups of good clear Walden Pond, or shout down the deep well of Shakespeare and listen, with satisfaction, for echoes. Here the lion and the hartebeest lay together, here the jackass became a unicorn.
— Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer
We read to under­stand our intu­ition of the world, to dis­cover that some­one a thou­sand miles and years away has put into words our most inti­mate desires and our most secret fears. Reading is a col­lab­o­ra­tive act.
— Alberto Manguel
I never minded the random scribblings of other readers, found them interesting in fact. It is a truth universally acknowledged that people write the darndest things in the margins of their books.
— Tara Bray Smith
A mind possessed by unmade books, unwritten lines on empty hooks.
— Michael Faudet
It turned out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.
— Anna Quindlen
For a bookworm like Mother, a Brontë novel sister was better than a biological one.
— Eileen Favorite, The Heroines
A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the 
— Victor Hugo
You only benefit from books if you can give something back to them. What I mean is, if you approach them in the spirit of a duel, so you can both wound and be wounded, so you are willing to argue, to overcome and be overcome, and grow richer by what you have learned, not only in the book, but in life, or by being able to make something of your work.
— Sándor Márai, La mujer justa
Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries,hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent.
— Stephen King
French Louis Seymour of the West Canada Creek, who knew how to survive all alone in a treacherous wilderness, and Mr. Alfred G. Vanderbilt of New York City and Raquette Lake, who was richer than God and traveled in his very own Pullman car, and Emmie Hubbard of the Uncas Road, who painted the most beautiful pictures when she was drunk and burned them in her woodstove when she was sober, were all ten times more interesting to me than Milton's devil or Austen's boy-crazy girls or that twitchy fool of Poe's who couldn't think of any place better to bury a body than under his own damn floor.
— Jennifer Donnelly, A Northern Light
The silence. End of all poetry, all romances. Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so light in the other, thinning toward the end. Still, you consoled yourself. You were not quite at the end of the story, at that terrible flyleaf, blank like a shuttered window: there were still a few pages under your thumb, still to be sought and treasured. Oh, was it possible to read more slowly? - No. The end approached, inexorable, at the same measured pace. The last page, the last of the shining words! And there - the end of the books. The hard cover which, when you turn it, gives you only this leather stamped with old roses and shields.Then the silence comes, like the absence of sound at the end of the world. You look up. It's a room in an old house. Or perhaps it's a seat in a garden, or even a square; perhaps you've been reading outside and you suddenly see the carriages going by. Life comes back, the shadows of leaves. Someone comes to ask what you will have for dinner, or two small boys run past you, wildly shouting; or else it's merely a breeze blowing a curtain, the white unfurling into a room, brushing the papers on a desk. It is the sound of the world. But to you, the reader, it is only a silence, untenanted and desolate.
— Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria
Unlike television, reading does not swallow the senses or dictate thought. Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination. Can you remember the wonder you felt when first reading The Jungle Book or Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn? Kipling’s world within a world; Twain’s slow river, the feel of freedom and sand on the secret island, and in the depths of the cave?
— Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder
Books are like flypaper, memories cling to the printed pages better than anything else.
— Cornelia Funke, Inkheart
Good books make you ask questions. Bad readers want everything answered.
— Scott Westerfeld
Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. Number one, as I said: quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Pleasing things: finding a large number of tales that one has not read before. Or acquiring the second volume of a tale whose first volume one has enjoyed. But often it is a disappointment.
— Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book
The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison.
— C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism
Your goodness must have some edge to it -- else it is none.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Culture, Behavior, Beauty, Books, Art, Eloquence, Power, Wealth, Illusions
There are adventures of the spirit and one can travel in books and interest oneself in people and affairs. One need never be dull as long as one has friends to help, gardens to enjoy and books in the long winter evenings.
— D.E. Stevenson, Listening Valley
I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way.
— Ernest Hemingway
It is often much harder to get rid of books than to acquire them. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witnesses to a moment in our lives we will never see again. While they are still there, it is part of us.
— Carlos María Domínguez, The House of Paper
It was also a room full of books and made of books. There was no actual furniture; this is to say, the desk and chairs were shaped out of books. It looked as though many of them were frequently referred to, because they lay open with other books used as bookmarks.
— Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
Books are ... companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.
— Barbara W. Tuchman
Libraries are the future of reading. When the economy is down, we need to make it easier for people to buy and read books for free, not harder. It is stupid to sacrifice tomorrow’s book buyers for today’s dollars, especially when it’s obvious that the source in question doesn’t have any more dollars to give you.
— Courtney Milan
People will perish, but books are immortal. (Pompeii)
— Robert   Harris
This is because white people need to show off the books that they have read. Just as hunters will mount the heads of their kills, white people need to let people know that they have made their way through hundreds or even thousands of books.
— Christian Lander, Stuff White People Like: A Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions
Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.
— Joan Didion
Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards–their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble–the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.
— Virginia Woolf
I always thought the joy of reading a book is not knowing what happens next. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)
— Christopher  Nolan
There’s a different flavor to children’s literature you read after you grow up than there was reading it as a child. Things that were sweet as a child become bitter once you grow up.
— Mizuki Nomura, Book Girl and the Wayfarer's Lamentation
Some things can be fixed. Some things are just too broken.
— Susan Vaught, Trigger
Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.
— Austin Phelps
I'm going to find whoever is responsible for me sleeping out side with outside without pillows and kick them in the shins!-Enna
— Shannon Hale
People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.
— Barbara Kingsolver
Criticism demands infinitely more culture than artistic creation.
— Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read