c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The library would've cheered me up, most days. I loved the heavy oaken tables, the high walls stacked with books to the ceiling, the musty smell of old pages and the heavy brass fixtures that had gone dark with age and wear.
— Claudia Gray, Afterlife
Steadily, the room shrank, till the book thief could touch the shelves within a few small steps. She ran the back of her hand along the first shelf, listening to the shuffle of her fingernails gliding across the spinal cord of each book. It sounded like an instrument, or the notes of running feet. She used both hands. She raced them. One shelf against the other. And she laughed. Her voice was sprawled out, high in her throat, and when she eventually stopped and stood in the middle of the room, she spent many minutes looking from the shelves to her fingers and back again. How many books had she touched? How many had she felt? She walked over and did it again, this time much slower, with her hand facing forward, allowing the dough of her palm to feel the small hurdle of each book. It felt like magic, like beauty, as bright lines of light shone down from a chandelier. Several times, she almost pulled a title from its place but didn't dare disturb them. They were too perfect.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Should he give free reign to his desires, the bibliomaniac can ruin his life along with the lives of his loved ones. He'll often take better care of his books than of his own health; he'll spend more on fiction than he does on food; he'll be more interested in his library than in his relationships, and, since few people are prepared to live in a place where every available surface is covered with piles of books, he'll often find himself alone, perhaps in the company of a neglected and malnourished cat. When he dies, all but forgotten, his body might fester for days before a curious neighbor grows concerned about the smell.
— Mikita Brottman
With a book he was regardless of time.
— Jane Austen
I have no particular plan in life - and that's something I rather like. Most things that people do seem to me to be rather dull and silly. In my ideal life I'd be left alone to read
— Elizabeth Knox, Dreamhunter
What we have in life that we can count on is who we are and where we come from, she thought absently. For better or worse, that is what we have to sustain us in our endevors, to buttress us in our darker moments, and to remind us of our identity. Without those things, we are adrift.
— Terry Brooks, A Knight of the Word
I decided long ago that life's absurd. If you don't develop a sense of humor, it will drive you mad.
— James Maxey, Dragonforge
The paper landed on the table, but the news was stapled to his chest. A tattoo.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
They were perfectly suited. They would speak of books the livelong day and night and bore everyone else but themselves to distraction.
— Loretta Chase, Viscount Vagabond
Amanda took the torn page from Maniac. To her, it was the broken wing of a bird, a pet out in the rain.
— Jerry Spinelli, Maniac Magee
Our clients' faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
What should I get from books?” Alcide asked in French.That you are not alone — even along this broken tractor road. You need to know nothing else,” my father answered in French.
— David Adams Richards, Mercy Among the Children
Surprise!-FitzChivalry
— Robin Hobb, Royal Assassin
You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.
— Arthur Conan Doyle
There were adventure stories supplied with cloths for mopping your brow, thrillers containing pressed leaves of soothing valerian to be sniffed when the suspense became too great, and books with stout locks sealed by the Atlantean censorship authorities ("Sale permitted, reading prohibited!"). One shop sold nothing but 'half' works that broke off in the middle because their author had died while writing them; another specialised in novels whose protagonists were insects. I also saw a Wolperting shop that sold nothing but books on chess and another patronised exclusively by dwarfs with blond beards, all of whom wore eye-shades.
— Walter Moers, The City of Dreaming Books
As many as six out of ten American adults have never read a book of any kind, and the bulletins from the nation’s educational frontiers read like the casualty reports from a lost war.
— Lewis H. Lapham, Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy
You're like, both like, Alexander the Great.'We can't both be Alexander.'Well sometimes I think you're two side of the same coin, and I'm the metal in between.
— Orson Scott Card
The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.
— Mark Twain
A favorite song or tune may stay on your mind for hours. A good book will stay on your mind until you find another.
— F. Haywood Glenn
If you have feelings about reading, you feel the rhythm of prose or of a poem like music. It awakens something in your soul and then of course you study, read, you grow up and you begin to understand the message and that is the first step towards understanding life.
— María Kodama
Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate.
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
I followed her into the library. The pale light from our chamber below dissipated in the room, but I could still make out – my heart leapt at the sight – row after row, shelf above shelf, floor to ceiling, a city of books. Speck turned to me and asked, Now, what shall we read first?
— Keith Donohue
Whenever Monsieur Perdu looked at a book, he did not see it purely in terms of a story, retail price and an essential balm for the soul; he saw freedom on wings of paper.
— Nina George, The Little Paris Bookshop
I often carry things to read so that I will not have to look at the people.
— Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems
Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers
And what do you like to do, little man?" "I like-books," James had said. While standing in the bookshop, with a parcel of books under his arm. The lady had given him a pitying look. "I read-erm-rather a lot," James went on, dreary master of the obvious. King of the obvious. Emperor of the obvious.
— Cassandra Clare, Nothing but Shadows
This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if he do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers.
— P.G. Wodehouse, Something New
If your friend wishes to read your 'Plutarch's Lives,' 'Shakespeare,' or 'The Federalist Papers,' tell him gently but firmly, to buy a copy. You will lend him your car or your coat - but your books are as much a part of you as your head or your heart.
— Mortimer J. Adler
Can you tell me what happened?"Her lips thinned as she shook her head. "'Tis not a happy tale.""You have me reading a book about a girl who tries to kill an entire town. Anything else at this point would be a pick me up.
— Jenny B. Jones, There You'll Find Me
When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books
As with men, it has always seemed to me that books have their own peculiar destinies. They go towards the people who are waiting for them and reach them at the right moment. They are made of living material and continue to cast light through the darkness long after the death of their authors.
— Miguel Serrano, C.G. Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Book of Two Friendships
When you learn to read you will be born again...and you will never be quite so alone again.
— Rumer Godden
One bright day in the last week of February, I was walking in the park, enjoying the threefold luxury of solitude, a book, and pleasant weather.
— Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey
Who wants a library full of books you've already read?
— Harlan Ellison, Angry Candy
Often the adult book is not for you, not yet, or will only be for you when you're ready. But sometimes you will read it anyway, and you will take from it whatever you can. Then, perhaps, you will come back to it when you're older, and you will find the book has changed because you have changed as well, and the book is wiser, or more foolish, because you are wiser or more foolish than you were as a child.
— Neil Gaiman
I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.
— Anita Brookner
She liked getting hold of some book... and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her thoughts with any one, or having to decide whether the book was a good one or a bad one.
— Virginia Woolf, Night and Day
We rely upon the poets, the philosophers, and the playwrights to articulate what most of us can only feel, in joy or sorrow. They illuminate the thoughts for which we only grope; they give us the strength and balm we cannot find in ourselves. Whenever I feel my courage wavering, I rush to them. They give me the wisdom of acceptance, the will and resiliance to push on.
— Helen Hayes
Reality doesn’t always give us the life that we desire, but we can always find what we desire between the pages of books.
— Adelise M. Cullens, Dead Bunnies Make All Eight Of Me Cry
I have lots of favourites. That's the trouble with books. You can never choose your favorite. It changes depending on your mood.
— Veronica Henry, How to Find Love in a Bookshop
So go back to the books. They will comfort you and cheer you. If you earnestly work with them, neither sorrow nor anxiety nor distress nor suffering need trouble your mind any more, no, not evermore.
— Walter Wangerin Jr., Paul
Don't be afraid of books, even the most dissident, seemingly 'immoral' ones. Culture is a sure bet in life, whether high, low, eclectic, pop, ancient or modern. And I am convinced that reading is one of the most important tools of liberation that any human being, and a contemporary Arab woman in particular, can exploit. I am not saying it is the ONLY tool, especially with all the new alternative - more visual, interactive and hasty - ways of knowledge, learning and growth. But how could I not be convinced of literature's power, when it has been my original emancipator?
— Joumana Haddad, I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman
... a book indeed sometimes debauched me from my work....
— Benjamin Franklin
For centuries, no one was concerned that books weren’t girl-friendly, because no one really cared if girls read; but even so, we persisted for long enough that literature has slowly come to accommodate us. Modern boys, by contrast, are not trying to read in a culture of opposition. Nobody is telling them reading doesn’t matter, that boys don’t need to read and that actually, no prospective wife looks for literacy in a husband. Quite the opposite! Male literary culture thrives, both teachers and parents are throwing books at their sons, and the fact that the books aren’t sticking isn’t, as the nature of the complaint makes clear, because boys don’t like reading – no. The accusation is that boys don’t like reading about girls, which is a totally different matter.Because constantly, consistently, our supposedly equal society penalises boys who express an interest in anything feminine. The only time boys are discouraged from books all together is in contexts where, for whatever reason, they’ve been given the message that reading itself is girly – which is a wider extrapolation of the same problem.
— Foz Meadows
You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don't say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that indiscreetly outshouts the message that the book itself must communicate directly, that you must extract from the book, however much or little it may be. Of course, this circling of the book, too, this reading around it before reading inside it, is a part of the pleasure in a new book, but like all preliminary pleasures, it has its optimal duration if you want it to serve as a thrust toward the more substantial pleasure of the consummation of the act, namely the reading of the book.
— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.
— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
To tell you the truth, I used to consider it a disgrace to be found ignorant by other people. But now, I find that I am not ashamed of knowing less than others, and I'm less inclined to force myself to read books. In short, I have grown old and decrepit.
— Sōseki Natsume, Kokoro
There are treasures in books that all the money in the world cannot buy, but the poorest laborer can have for nothing.
— Robert G. Ingersoll
For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner,Let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying out for mercy, Let there be no surcease to his agony till he sink in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the worm that dieth not.When at last he goeth to his final punishment, Let the flames of Hell consume him forever.[attributed to the Monastery of San Pedro in Barcelona, Spain]
— Nicholas A. Basbanes, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books
Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.
— Edward Gibbon
In a second-hand bookshop head to the back, find the old books with dust undisturbed and worn off covers for these clothe true treasures.
— Rachel Hall
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book, and a tired man who wants a book to read.
— G.K. Chesterton
The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den.
— Phillip Adams
One sheds ones sickness in books- repeats and presents again ones emotions, to be master of them.
— D.H. Lawrence
Every new book we read in our brief and busy lives means that a classic is left unread.
— B.R. Myers
Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp.
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
A general cry of "What book? What book? Let us see this famous book!
— Diana Gabaldon, An Echo in the Bone
[Books] were devices as crassly practical for storing or transmitting language, as the latest Silicon Valley miracles. But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our mind and souls, in a spiritual adventure.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Timequake
. . . she read with undifferentiated glee . . .
— Sebastian Faulks, A Week in December
As with companions so with books. We may choose those which will make us better, more intelligent, more appreciative of the good and the beautiful in the world, or we may choose the trashy, the vulgar, the obscene, which will make us feel as though we've been 'wallowing in the mire.
— David O. McKay
Over there!" "Where?" Enna asked in mock panic "Do you see something?
— Shannon Hale
But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.
— Vladimir Nabokov
I have known men to hazard their fortunes, go long journeys halfway about the world, forget friendships, even lie, cheat, and steal, all for the gain of a book.
— A.S.W. Rosenbach
He says he knows someone isn't from the same race as he when that person looks at his library and asks, 'Have you read all of these?' A true book lover knows that, no, he hasn't read them all. It's about the process, it's about when the right reference comes up, you have the right book to go to; it's about never being without something to occupy your eyes and mind.
— Jamie S. Rich, The Everlasting
Make careful choice of the books which you read: let the holy Scriptures ever have the preeminence. Let Scripture be first and most in your hearts and hands and other books be used as subservient to it. While reading ask yourself: 1. Could I spend this time no better? 2. Are there better books that would edify me more? 3. Are the lovers of such a book as this the greatest  lovers of the Book of God and of a holy life? 4. Does this book increase my love to the Word of God,  kill my sin, and prepare me for the life to come? "The words of the wise are like goads, their collected  sayings like firmly embedded nails—given by one Shepherd. Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them. Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body." Ecclesiastes 12:11-12
— Richard Baxter
And Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book.
— Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
What is more important to a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it ex
— Archibald MacLeish
Perhaps that is the best way to say it: printed books are magical, and real bookshops keep that magic alive.
— Jen Campbell, The Bookshop Book
A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one.
— Carl Sandburg
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. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books.
— Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman
We read in slow, long motions, as if drifting in space, weightless. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling gaps, mending faults. And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder... as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us--the recognition of something we never knew was there...
— Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
A book is the only immortality
— Rufus Choate
We have to report this." Kai sighed deeply in relief. "I was afraid you were going to say that we had to investigate it ourselves.""Don't be ridiculous," Irene said briskly. "We may collect fiction, but we are not required to imitate the stupider parts of it.
— Genevieve Cogman, The Invisible Library
Literature simply becomes richer after you've been fired, rejected, stranded, or had to change a few midnight diapers.
— Christian Bauman
No one stepping for the first time into a room made of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror--at the cluster or the vastness, the stillness, the mocking reminder of everything one doesn't know, the surveillance--and some of that overwhelming feeling may cling on, even after the rituals and conventions are learned, the geography mapped, and the natives found friendly.
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
There's a book for everyone, even if they don't think there is. A book that reaches in and grabs your soul.
— Veronica Henry, How to Find Love in a Bookshop
The summer passed quietly. I busied myself as best I could, reading a good deal.
— Michael Cox, The Meaning of Night
Its better to hold a book between your Fingers than to Hold a Cigarette.
— Bista Nirooj
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.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
There's nothing so heavy as books, sir--unless it's bricks.
— Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear
It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
It must be that people who read go on more macrocosmic and microcosmic trips – biblical god trips, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake trips. Non-readers, what do they get? (They get the munchies.)
— Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book
Books have long been instruments of the divinatory arts. 
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
The waltz held the feeling you get when you finish a well-loved book. It left me longing for something I couldn't name.
— Louise  Miller, The City Baker's Guide to Country Living
The spirits of the brain are directly connected to the testicles. This is why men who weary their imagination in books are less suitable for procreative functions...
— Louis de la Forge
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
Most books are so well written they barely have any effect on the reader’s senses
— Steve Aylett, Toxicology
....her life would be a giddy crossword, working down from some clues and across from others.
— Leif Enger
Do you love tragedies and everything that breaks the heart?
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Filmmaker John Waters has said, “Nothing is more important than an unread library.
— Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
[A]s Agatha Swanburne once said, 'To be kept waiting is unfortunate, but to be kept waiting with nothing interesting to read is a tragedy of Greek proportions.
— Maryrose Wood, The Hidden Gallery
But Neve, you can’t start a book and leave it halfway through,’ he’d said implacably. ‘It’s almost as bad as turning down the corner of the page, instead of using a bookmark.
— Sarra Manning, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me
Until recently, I was an ebook sceptic, see; one of those people who harrumphs about the “physical pleasure of turning actual pages” and how ebook will “never replace the real thing”. Then I was given a Kindle as a present. That shut me up. Stock complaints about the inherent pleasure of ye olde format are bandied about whenever some new upstart invention comes along. Each moan is nothing more than a little foetus of nostalgia jerking in your gut. First they said CDs were no match for vinyl. Then they said MP3s were no match for CDs. Now they say streaming music services are no match for MP3s. They’re only happy looking in the rear-view mirror.
— Charlie Brooker
Books were my passion and my escape from madness.
— Dorothea Benton Frank, The Christmas Pearl
Ereaders were a great convenience, but nothing could beat the smell of a library and old books.
— Kate Evangelista, Taste
There is much you can learn from books and scrolls. These books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life.
— Christopher Paolini, Eragon
I realise people exist who don't read. But it's like I knew there were people who didn't breathe or eat: I can't imagine a life like that.
— Sarah Rees Brennan
If a book did nothing else for you, other than to save you from the company of other people; if all it did was to deliver you from their gossip, and their dull affairs, and their appalling manners, and their rotten Arabic, and their stupid ideas, and their woefully misguided opinions, and above all, from the need to be polite to them; if a book did nothing more than that, it would still be the best friend you ever had.
— Andrew Killeen, The Khalifah's Mirror
She thought it must be a lonely life for a boy who hated books.
— Hilda van Stockum, The Borrowed House
I spend many hours in conversation with wonderful characters from fantastic books.
— Patti Roberts
A book is the cheapest ticket you will ever hold.
— Stefanos Livos
Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate.
— Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
Yes, we'll have to put a stop to this bookworming. No future in that.
— Molly Keane, Good Behaviour
I kiss her. I kiss her and kiss her. I try not to bite her lip. She tastes like vodkahoney.
— Lidia Yuknavitch, Dora: A Headcase
I've always loved joining clubs--although, in truth, they're usually book clubs." ~Robecca Steam
— Gitty Daneshvari, Monster High: Ghoulfriends Forever
I put the books I was returning on the appropriate desk, and I began looking at the shelves of new arrivals. Most of them were some permutation on self-help. Going by how popular these books were and how often they were checked out, everyone in Bon Temps should have become perfect by now.
— Charlaine Harris, From Dead to Worse
I doubt if ever one ceases to love, but one can cease to be in love as easily as one can outgrow an author one admired as a boy.
— Graham Greene, Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party
On a day like today,there's no friend like a book.
— Laura Purdie Salas, BookSpeak!: Poems about Books
There is something nice about a library, isn't there?" Mr. Curtis said. He nodded and took in the familiar scenery. "The scent of ink and worn, dusty pages.
— Ilana Waters, The Adventures of Stanley Delacourt
If the college you visit has a bookstore filled with t-shirts rather than books, find another college.
— R. Albert Mohler Jr.
If she were running through the rye, if she were headed towards the abyss, I would grab hold with every ounce of my strength, with every scared beat of my heart, with every thought that could only be for her. And if I were to be running the same way, I’d like to think she’d do the same. But maybe her hands would be busy holding the book. Maybe she wouldn’t see me, too intent on looking for Phoebe from the carousel. Or waiting for Holden to hold her, to wrap her in the pages of his arms, to say she was the only one who truly knew him, as I plunged past her, sad to be leaving, and a little happy to be away.
— David Levithan, The Realm of Possibility
God, he thought, her eyes are so bright, flashing, deep, full of promise, all those things eyes are in books but never are in life, and she was his.
— John Crowley, Little, Big
Bookish people, who are often maladroit people, persist in thinking they can master any subtlety so long as it's been shaped into acceptable expository prose.
— Carol Shields, Unless
I enjoy books. No room is fit for occupation without a lining of books.
— Martin Booth, A Very Private Gentleman
distringit librorum multitudo (the abundance of books is distraction)
— Seneca
Write from the heart. A book without a pulse is like a person without a spirit." Linda Radke, President of Five Star Publications
— Linda F. Radke
The written word is all that stands between memory and oblivion. Without books as our anchors, we are cast adrift, neither teaching nor learning. They are windows on the past, mirrors on the present, and prisms reflected all possible futures. Books are lighthouses erected on the dark sea of time.
— Greg Weisman
And as I surveyed the clutter of his study I was pleased to see that he was a man after my own heart. All of his money appeared to have been spent on either books or shelves to hold them.
— Ross King, Ex-Libris
Books are a bad family - there are those you love, and those you are indifferent to; idiots and mad cousins who you would banish except others enjoy their company; wrongheaded but fascinating eccentrics and dreamy geniuses; orphaned grandchildren; and endless brothers-in-law simply taking up space who you wish you could send straight to hell. Except you can't, for the most part. You must house them and make them comfortable and worry about them when they go on trips and there is never enough room.
— Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House
Suddenly the full long wail of a ship's horn surged through the open window and flooded the dim room - a cry of boundless, dark, demanding grief; pitch-black and glabrous as a whale's back and burdened with all the passions of the tides, the memory of voyages beyond counting, the joys, the humiliations: the sea was screaming. Full of the glitter and the frenzy of night, the horn thundered in, conveying from the distant offing, from the dead center of the sea, a thirst for the dark nectar in the little room.
— Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?
— John Irving, The World According to Garp
Library books were, I suddenly realized, promiscuous, ready to lie down in the arms of anyone who asked. Not like bookstore books, which married their purchasers, or were brokered for marriages to others.
— Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House
We are thickly layered, page lying upon page, behind simple covers. And love - it is not the book itself, but the binding.
— Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart
He wanted nothing, for the time being, except to understand .... Without advice, assistance or plan, he began reading an incongruous assortment of books; he would find some passage which he could not understand in one book, and he would get another on that subject .... There was no order in his reading; but there was order in what remained of it in his mind.
— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it. As long as they are allowed to read the books 'any old time they have a mind to,' libraries will remain the nurseries of heresy and independence of thought. They will, in fact, preserve that freedom which is a far more important part of our lives than any ideology or orthodoxy, the freedom that dissolves orthodoxies and inspires solutions to the ever-changing challenges of the future. I hope that your library and mine will continue in this way to be dangerous for many years to come.
— Edmund S. Morgan, American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America
It’s been a tough couple of years for condescending nerds. And if bookstores fall, Jon, America will be inundated with a wandering, snarky underclass of unemployable purveyors of useless and arcane esoterica.
— John Hodgman
As one tends to the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. I clean them, do minor repairs, keep them in good order. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so, for it must be very lonely being dead.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
One act presses upon another, on a path we have no choice but to follow, and each time there are reasons. We do what we must, we do what we are told, we do what is easiest. What else can we do but solve one sordid problem at a time? Then we look up and find... this.
— Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings
Books are like people: fascinating, inspiring, thought-provoking, some laugh, some meditate, others ache with old age, but still have wisdom: some are disease-ridden, some deceitful; but others are a delight to behold, and many travel to foreign lands; some cry, some teach, others are lots of fun, they are excellent companions and all have individuality - Books are friends. What person has too many friends?
— Gladys M. Hunt
That's my point: if you own thirty or more books, or you are reading any book at this moment, you may protest all you want, but you were born on the wrong continent.
— Thomas Geoghegan, Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life
I guess a bit part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.
— David Foster Wallace
I write books, bitch!
— Junnita Jackson
Loving Sarah was like reading a particularly good book. That pressing and overwhelming need to just devour it as fast as possible is matched only by the need to savour it slowly and completely, lest all come to an end too soon. The all-consuming emotions are so many and varied that it is almost impossible to pick out one for a few minutes attention. They mainly stay jumbled and unattended, and for the most part not entirely understood or satisfied. But then, maybe it is in the understanding of our love for someone that the love itself disappears altogether. If so, then I don't want to understand, and I remain content to simply experience her. Somehow, the more I learn about Sarah, the better I understand myself.And the more I fall in love.
— Nadine Rose Larter, Coffee at Little Angels
The thinnest thing in the world is the border between good and evil... my next The Opposite Of Magic.
— Ivan Stoikov
Novels are food for the leftover hours of life, the in-between times, the moments of waiting.
— Young-Ha Kim, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself
I think about stories and their logic and wonder if there can be any such thing as simply "there is a book.
— Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y
Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a 'good' book. A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error. 
— Christopher Morley
If I can get on to my sofa and occupy myself for four hours, at intervals through the day, scribbling my notes, and able to read the books that belong to me, in that they clarify the density, and shape the formless mass within, life seems inconceivably rich...
— Alice James
I look at the books on my library shelves. They certainly seem dormant. But what if the characters are quietly rearranging themselves? What if Emma Woodhouse doesn’t learn from her mistakes? What if Tom Jones descends into a sodden life of poaching and outlawry? What if Eve resists Satan, remembering God’s injunction and Adam’s loving advice? I imagine all the characters bustling to get back into their places as they feel me taking the book down from the shelf. “Hurry,” they say, “he’ll expect to find us exactly where he left us, never mind how much his life has changed in the meantime.
— Verlyn Klinkenborg
Good books are for consideration after, too.
— Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis
Suddenly the reader's eyes were filled with tears, and a loving voice whispered in his ear: -Why are you crying if everything in that book isn't true?- And the reader replied: -I know; but what I feel is real.
— Ángel González
A book is never finished it's abandoned. 
— Gene Fowler
And please return it. You may think this a strange request, but I find that although my friends are poor arithmeticians, they are nearly all of them good bookkeepers.
— Walter Scott
Reading is of course dry work, and further refreshment was called for and consumed.
— Diana Gabaldon, An Echo in the Bone
Fire is a speed reader, which is why the ignorant burn books: fire races through pages, takes care of all the knowledge, and never bores you with a summary.
— Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House
Just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it... a speelycaptor... at something doesn't collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words.
— Neal Stephenson, Anathem
Then it is not uncommon for a man to become lost in a single letter, or hear a voice rise up from the silent page.
— Howard Schwartz
His books commingled democratically, united under the all-inclusive flag of Literature. Some were vertical, some horizontal, and some actually placed behind others. Mine were balkanized by nationality and subject matter.
— Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
People shock me when they say they never read. When I was young, if people didn't read they would never admit it. Now, its quite acceptable to be anti-intellectual.
— Joan Vass
All that's needed now is a great novel that will capture the imagination of the public - move them, enrage them, thrill them, terrify them, scandalize them. A story that will seize them by the hand and lead them into the streets where they've never dared set foot, a tale that throws back the sheets from acts never shown and voices never heard. A tale that fearlessly points the finger at those who are to blame...
— Michael Farber
I knew books could see people around them, they ground their tiny teeth, tried to rattle like windows, stories to tell.
— Steve Aylett, Shamanspace
There are two kinds of books in the world--the boring kind they make you read in school and the interesting kind that they won't let you read in school because then they would have to talk about real stuff like sex and divorce and is there a God and if there isn't then what happens when you die, and how come the history books have so many lies in them.
— LouAnne Johnson
She was too tired to feel anything more, she wanted a book to do to her what books did: take away the world, slide it aside for a little bit, and let her please, please just be somewhere and somebody else
— Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land
I didn't go to bookshops to buy. That's a little bourgeois. I went because they were civilized places. It made me happy there were people who sat down and wrote and wrote and wrote and there were other people who devoted their lives to making those words into books. It was lovely. Like standing in the middle of civilization.
— Jerry Pinto, Em and The Big Hoom
Books have survived television, radio, talking pictures, circulars (early magazines), dailies (early newspapers), Punch and Judy shows, and Shakespeare's plays. They have survived World War II, the Hundred Years' War, the Black Death, and the fall of the Roman Empire. They even survived the Dark Ages, when almost no one could read and each book had to be copied by hand. They aren't going to be killed off by the Internet.
— Vicki Myron, Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World
We have no time to waste on insignificant books, hollow books, books that are there to please...We want books that cost their authors a great deal, books where you can feel the years of work, the backache, the writer's block, the author's panic at the thought that he might be lost: his discouragement, his courage, his anguish, his stubbornness, the risk of failure that he has taken.
— Laurence Cossé, A Novel Bookstore
She would go off in the morning with the punt full of books, and spend long glorious days away in the forest lying on the green springy carpet of whortleberries, reading. She would most diligently work at furnishing her empty mind. She would sternly endeavour to train it not to jump.
— Elizabeth von Arnim, The Pastor's Wife
Clothes were to Sylvia what books were to me: the only thing that really mattered.
— Kimberly McCreight, Reconstructing Amelia
Books open new worlds to me.
— Aya Ling, The Ugly Stepsister
Books bring alluring colors to our mundane black and white world.
— Caleb Reese
I had said that Le Guin's worlds were real because her people were so real, and he said yes, but the people were so real because they were the people the worlds would have produced. If you put Ged to grow up on Anarres or Shevek in Earthsea, they would be the same people, the backgrounds made the people, which of course you see all the time in mainstream fiction, but it's rare in SF.
— Jo Walton, Among Others
He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or a writer, it must also be demanded of a reader. Because we mustn’t deceive ourselves: on the journey of reading we often travel through difficult terrains that demand a capacity for intelligent emotion, a desire to understand the other, and to approach a language distinct from the one of our daily tyrannies… Writers fail readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it.
— Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque
The library made me feel safe, as if every question had an answer and there was nothing to be afraid of, as long as I could sort through another volume.
— Dee Williams
And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder, as if someone or something had 'walked over our grave,' as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us - the recognition of something we never knew was there, or of something we vaguely felt as a flicker or a shadow, whose ghostly form rises and passes back into us before we can see what it is, leaving us older and wiser.
— Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
What's the point of a houseful of books you've already read?
— Cory Doctorow, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
Rows and rows of books lined the shelves and I let my eyes linger on the sturdy spines, thinking how human books were, so full of ideas and images, worlds imagined, worlds perceived; full of fingerprints and sudden laughter and the sighs of readers, too. It was humbling to consider all these authors, struggling with this word or that phrase, recording their thoughts for people they'd never meet. In that same way, the detritus of the boxes was humbling - receipts, jotted notes, photos with no inscriptions, all of it once held together by the fabric of lives now finished, gone.
— Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams
When you're in my arms, I know you're mine. But your feet are so swift, so swift, they carry you as lightly as wings, I never know where, too fast, too fast away from me.
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
Currently, the Library of Congress houses eighteen million books. American publishers add another two hundred thousand titles to this stack each year. This means that at the current publishing rate, ten million new books will be added in the next fifty years. Add together the dusty LOC volumes with the shiny new and forthcoming books, and you get a bookshelf-warping total of twenty-eight million books available for an English reader in the next fifty years! But you can read only 2,600 - because you are a wildly ambitious book devourer. ... For every one book that you choose to read, you must ignore ten thousand other books simply because you don't have the time (or money!).
— Tony Reinke, Lit!: A Christian Guide to Reading Books
All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
All good things are powerful stimulants to life, even a good book written against life.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
Books are more precious than jewels. She truly believed this. What did a diamond bring you? A momentary flash of brilliance. A diamond scintillated for second a book could scintillate forever. 
— Veronica Henry, How to Find Love in a Bookshop
Love the great narcotic was the revealer in the alchemist's bottle rendering visible the most untraceable substances. Love the great narcotic was the agent provocateur exposing all the secret selves to daylight.
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
I'd much rather fall to my death than admit my weakness to you.""The captain of the Royal Guard wants to impress a lowly handmaiden?""A clumsy young man wants to impress a beautiful young woman.
— Renee Ahdieh, The Moth & the Flame
People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to l
— Michael Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road
Do I dare ask him for what I want,As if I knew it,Could find it on some pageIn some chapterIn some book?
— Stasia Ward Kehoe, Audition
Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.)
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.
— Lewis Buzbee, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, a History
I always say, 'Books beat boredom,' said Amanda wisely.
— Mo Willems, Hooray for Amanda & Her Alligator!
The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older.
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
A library card is the start of a lifelong adventure.
— Lilian Jackson Braun
I wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A–Z.But this was diff
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Some of the most relaxing weekends I have ever enjoyed were those I spent quietly with a sense of all work to date completed, and an absorbing mystery.
— Aung San Suu Kyi, Letters from Burma
A doctor is advertised by the bodies he cures. My business is advertised by the minds I stimulate. And let me tell you that the book business is different from other trades. People don't know they want books. I can see just by looking at you that your mind is ill for lack of books but you are blissfully unaware of it!
— Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop
School did give me one of the greatest gifts of my life, though. I learned how to read, and for that I remain thankful. I would have died otherwise. As soon as I was able, I read, alone. Under the covers with a flashlight or in my corner of the attic—I sought solace in books. It was from books that I started to get an inkling of the kinds of assholes I was dealing with. I found allies too, in books, characters my age who were going through or had triumphed against the same bullshit.
— Craig Ferguson, American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot
There is no greater feeling of accomplishment than to create a world that solely exists in your imagination and be able to pull someone into this hidden place inside of my thoughts. To make someone care for a person that has manifested from my dreams, to make them hate me for putting them in danger, and for them to ask to be taken on another journey with me when it is all said and done is why I write.
— Teresa Mummert
I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I’m certainly not the dumbest. I mean, I’ve read books like "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Love in the Time of Cholera", and I think I’ve understood them. They’re about girls, right? Just kidding. But I have to say my all-time favorite book is Johnny Cash’s autobiography "Cash" by Johnny Cash.
— Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
Just give me a thousand words and you may make your own pictures.
— Erica Goros
People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.
— Barbara Kingsolver
A great book increases my heartbeat as if I’m prey, melts my insides in anticipation of a first kiss, immerses me in its depths.
— Carmen DeSousa