c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. 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
I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost.
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
The best books...The best books of men are soon exhausted--they are cisterns, and not springing fountains.You enjoy them very much at the first acquaintance,and you think you could hear them a hundred times over-but you could not- you soon find them wearisome.Very speedily a man eats too much honey:even children at length are cloyed with sweets.All human books grow stale after a time-but with the Word of God the desire to study it increases,while the more you know of it the less you think you know.The Book grows upon you: as you dive into its depthsyou have a fuller perception of the infinity which remainsto be explored. You are still sighing to enjoy more of thatwhich it is your bliss to taste.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Woe be to him that reads but one book.
— George Herbert
Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself.
— Harlan Ellison
Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm.
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Do you think she is?" Her voice trembled. Her heart throbbed as she waited for him to answer. "You think they've killed her?"Every moment wrapped around Scarlet's neck, strangling her, until the only possiblbe word from Wolf's mouth had to be yes. Yes, she was dead. Yes, she was gone. They'd murdered her. These monsters had murdered her.Scarlet pressed her palms into the crate, trying to push through the plastic. "Say it.""No," he murmured, shoulder sinking, "No, I don't think they've killed her. Not yet."Scarlet shivered with relief. She covered her face with both hands, dizzy with the hurricane of emotions. "Thank the stars," she whispered. "Thank you.
— Marissa Meyer, Scarlet
Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.
— Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book
Remember, when you don’t know what to do, it never hurts to play Scrabble. It’s like reading the I Ching or tea leaves.
— Kelly Link
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it. 
— Tom Wolfe
In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
The books we love, they love us back. And just as we mark our places in the pages, those pages leave their marks on us.
— Jay Kristoff, Nevernight
A good book is always on tap; it may be decanted and drunk a hundred times, and it is still there for further imbibement. 
— Holbrook Jackson
For all the books in his possession, he still failed to read the stories written plain as day in the faces of the people around him.
— Emma Donoghue, Slammerkin
Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine.
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
Books remember all the things you cannot contain.
— Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House
The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.
— Anatole France
However much you study, you cannot know without action. A donkey laden with books is neither an intellectual nor a wise man. Empty of essence, what learning has he whether upon him is firewood or book?
— Saadi
People have often told me that one of their strongest childhood memories is the scent of their grandmother's house. I never knew my grandmothers, but I could always count of the Bookmobile.
— Adriana Trigiani, Big Stone Gap
Literature is the real life of imaginary people.
— Stefanos Livos
No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.
— Stanisław Lem
Far be it from me to keep a woman from her book. That could become dangerous.
— Elizabeth   Hunter, A Hidden Fire
Associate with noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty. But learn to be happy alone.  Rely upon your own energies, and so not wait for, or depend on other people.
— Thomas Davidson
I regained my soul through literature after those times I'd lost it to wild-eyed gypsy girls on the European streets.
— Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy
The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library.
— Michel Foucault
I could read the great books but the great books don't interest me.
— Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems
Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal.
— Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Dear and most respected bookcase! I welcome your existence, which has for over one hundred years been devoted to the radiant ideals of goodness and justice.
— Anton Chekhov
Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.
— Jean Rhys, Quartet
A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity.
— Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop
The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes connot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog. Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality... in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad of eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
— C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism
The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking. 
— Christopher Morley
I think I’m always so much more happy with books and movies and stuff. I think I get more excited about well-done representations of life than life itself.- Celine
— Richard Linklater, Before Sunrise & Before Sunset: Two Screenplays
Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book.
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Remind me not to piss you off Red. You might aim for the heart and shoot me in the balls.
— Nora Roberts, Morrigan's Cross
In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.
— Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
I wanted to pull down a book, open it proper, and gobble up page after page
— Laurie Halse Anderson, Chains
As I walked in the dark through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness. I couldn't help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This is to me is a miracle.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage
Klaus sighed, and opened a book, and as at so many other times when the middle Baudelaire child did not want to think about his circumstances, he began to read.
— Lemony Snicket, The Reptile Room
Books. People have no idea how beautiful books are. How they taste on your fingers. How bright everything is when you light it with words.
— Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story
When you lose yourself in a book the hours grow wings and fly.
— Chloe Thurlow, The Fifty Shades of Grey Phenomena
Books are all the dreams we would most like to have and like dreams they have the power to change consciousness. 
— Victor Nell, Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure
So I kept reading, just to stay alive. In fact, I'd read two or three books at the same time, so I wouldn't finish one without being in the middle of another -- anything to stop me from falling into the big, gaping void. You see, books fill the empty spaces. If I'm waiting for a bus, or am eating alone, I can always rely on a book to keep me company. Sometimes I think I like them even more than people. People will let you down in life. They'll disappoint you and hurt you and betray you. But not books. They're better than life.
— Marc Acito, How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater
And how could anyone consent to give up the smell of open books, old or new?
— Elizabeth Kostova, The Swan Thieves
I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn't be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children's books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires.
— Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
How can you be nervous? Don't you see? We're in a library.
— Eilis O'Neal, The False Princess
Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. 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.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?
— Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
Who was it who said, "I hold the buying of more books than one can peradventure read, as nothing less than the soul's reaching towards infinity; which is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish?" Whoever it was, I agree with him.
— A. Edward Newton, A Magnificent Farce And Other Diversions Of A Book Collector
He wanted to tell her she'd have more room if she'd just get rid of her books, but he supposed that in her case, it would be like telling a mother she'd have more room if she threw out her children.
— Cynthia Hand, My Lady Jane
And what would they be scared of? There's nothing to fear in a perfect world, is there?
— Catherine Fisher
And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?
— Dylan Thomas, A Child's Christmas in Wales
This isn't a book. This isn't a paranormal fantasy or whatever the hell it is you read. There is no set plot or clear idea of where any of this is going. The enemies aren't obvious. There are no guaranteed happy endings.
— Jennifer L. Armentrout, Opal
If the self-help books worked, it would be a shrinking industry not a growing one.
— Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
And while we're on the subject of ducks, which we plainly are, the story, 'The Ugly Duckling' ought be banned as the central character wasn't a duckling or he wouldn't have grown up into a swan. He was a cygnet.
— Russell Brand, My Booky Wook
Helen's books were her friends, "the kind you invite for dinner in the middle of winter," she'd told him, " and spend all night talking and never go to bed.
— Emma Clayton, The Roar
Books are both our luxuries and our daily bread.
— Henry Stevens
A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let's not kid ourselves - all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
You is getting nosier than a parker.
— Roald Dahl, The BFG
There are a large number of people in the room, but one is unaware of them. They are in the books. At times they move among the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
What a blessing it is to love books. Everybody must love something, and I know of no objects of love that give such substantial and unfailing returns as books and a garden.
— Elizabeth von Arnim, The Solitary Summer
It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed.
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
Don’t just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.
— Epictetus, The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness and Effectiveness
Have you ever found your heart's desire and then lost it? I had seen myself, a portrait of myself as a reader. My childhood: days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew, forbidden books read secretively late at night. Teenage years reading -trying to read- books I'd heard were important, Naked Lunch, and The Fountainhead, Ulysses and Women in Love... It was as though I had dreamt the perfect lover, who vanished as I woke, leaving me pining and surly.
— Audrey Niffenegger, The Night Bookmobile
Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
— Boris Pasternak
The best morals kids get from any book is just the capacity to empathize with other people, to care about the characters and their feelings. So you don't have to write a preachy book to do that. You just have to make it a fun book with characters they care about, and they will become better people as a result.
— Louis Sachar
I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days.
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.
— Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop
One of my heroes, G.K. Chesterton, said, "The old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal." Discovering that the modern world can still contain the wonder and strangeness of a fairy tale is part of what my novels are about.
— Regina Doman
I need someone who can be invisible, who can become a ghost. Do you think you can do that?"I'm already a ghost, she thought. I died in the hold of a slaver ship."i think so.
— Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows
Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark—readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge.
— A.S. Byatt, Possession
It did occur to me that the effect of good literature may be as dizzying as that of alcohol.
— Pamela Dean
Jake went in, aware that he had, for the first time in three weeks, opened a door without hoping madly to find another world on the other side. A bell jingled overhead. The mild, spicy smell of old books hit him, and the smell was somehow like coming home.
— Stephen King, The Waste Lands
One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries. 
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.
— C.S. Lewis
Certain bookworms eat books. Eat them, swear in them, spill things on them.
— Tara Bray Smith
A great book is a homing deviceFor navigating paradise.A good book somehow makes you careAbout the comfort of a chair.A bad book owes to many treesA forest of apologies.
— J. Patrick Lewis
We note our place with bookmarkersThat measure what we've lost.
— Paul Simon, Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits
I read to be alone. I read so as not to be alone.
— Bich Minh Nguyen, Stealing Buddha's Dinner
In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond. 
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
...a book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. If for a hundred and a hundred years everyone had been able freely to handle our codices, the majority of them would no longer exist. So the librarian protects them not only against mankind but also against nature, and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion, the enemy of truth.
— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
But what struck me was the book-madness of the place--books lay scattered across the unmade bed and the top of a battered-looking desk, books stood in knee-high piles on the floor, books were crammed sideways and right side up in a narrow bookcase that rose higher than my head and leaned dangerously from the wall, books sat in stacks on top of a dingy dresser. The closet door was propped open by a pile of books, and from beneath the bed a book stuck out beside the toe of a maroon slipper.
— Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter
There is, of course, this to be said for the Omnibus Book in general and this one in particular. When you buy it, you have got something. The bulk of this volume makes it almost the ideal paper-weight. The number of its pages assures its posessor of plenty of shaving paper on his vacation. Place upon the waistline and jerked up and down each morning, it will reduce embonpoint and strengthen the abdominal muscles. And those still at their public school will find that between, say, Caesar's Commentaries in limp cloth and this Jeeves book there is no comparison as a missile in an inter-study brawl.
— P.G. Wodehouse, The World of Jeeves
We human beings build houses because we're alive but we write books because we're mortal. We live in groups because we're sociable but we read because we know we're alone. Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one's place but that no one can replace either. It offers no definitive explanation of our destiny but links us inextricably to life. Its tiny secret links remind us of how paradoxically happy we are to be alive while illuminating how tragically absurd life is.
— Daniel Pennac
I thought... that we could at least talk about books.
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince
Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they'll wait for you forever pay attention to them and they always love you back.
— John Green, An Abundance of Katherines
I love the book. I love the feel of a book in my hands, the compactness of it, the shape, the size. I love the feel of paper. The sound it makes when I turn a page. I love the beauty of print on paper, the patterns, the shapes, the fonts. I am astonished by the versatility and practicality of The Book. It is so simple. It is so fit for its purpose. It may give me mere content, but no e-reader will ever give me that sort of added pleasure.
— Susan Hill, Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home
These stories were very old, as old as people, and they had survived because they were very powerful indeed. They were the tales that echoed in the head long after the books that contained them were cast aside. They were both an escape from reality and an alternative reality themselves. They were so old, and so strange, that they had found a kind of existence independent of the pages they occupied. The world of the old tales existed parallel to ours, but sometimes the walls separating the two became so thing and brittle that the two worlds started to blend into each other. That was when the trouble started. That was when the bad things came. That was when the Crooked Man began to appear to David.
— John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things
My fingers positively itched to drift at length along their spines, to arrive at one whose lure I could not pass, to pluck it down, to inch it open, then to close my eyes and inhale the soul-sparking scent of old and literate dust.
— Kate Morton, The Distant Hours
The prefect evening...lying down on the couch beside the bookcase and reading himself sleepy...Jim lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other's presence.
— Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man
Paradise will be a kind of library
— Jorge Luis Borges
A big book is like a serious relationship; it requires a commitment. Not only that, but there's no guarantee that you will enjoy it, or that it will have a happy ending. Kind of like going out with a girl, having to spend time every day with her - with absolutely no guarantee of nailing her in the end. No thanks.
— Mick Foley
She reads a lot of books. Good things, books.
— Thorne Smith
So Mo began filling the silence with words. He lured them out of the pages as if they had only been waiting for his voice, words long and short, words sharp and soft, cooing, purring words. They danced through the room, painting stained glass pictures, tickling the skin. Even when Meggie nodded off she could still hear them, although Mo had closed the book long ago. Words that explained the world to her, its dark side and its light side, words that built a wall to keep out bad dreams. And not a single bad dream came over that wall for the rest of the night.
— Cornelia Funke, Inkheart
The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else’s life. And when we do that, we learn to sympathize with other people. But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own lives, that somehow we hadn’t been able to see before.
— Katherine Paterson
the depth of a person's character is not measured by his or her physical strength, but by the depth of his or her nobility.
— Frank E. Peretti
...I tell myself it does not matter what one reads--favorite authors, particular themes--as long as we read something. It is not even important to own the books.
— Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.
— Anonymous, Holy Bible: New International Version
Not being the sort to throw a book, she pounded her fist on her cushion.
— Ellen Kushner
Know yourself and go in swinging, if it hurts when you hit, it might be real, too.
— Patrick Ness, More Than This
Soon enough his head would be swimming with tales of derring-do and high adventure, tales of beautiful maidens kissed, of evildoers shot with pistols or fought with swords, of bags of gold, of diamonds as big as the tip of your thumb, of lost cities and of vast mountains, of steam-trains and clipper ships, of pampas, oceans, deserts, tundra.
— Neil Gaiman
But I think the most important thing those books gave me was a kind of faith. My books promised me that life wasn’t just made up of workaday tasks and prosaic things. The world is bigger and more colorful and more important than that.
— Laura Amy Schlitz, The Hired Girl
I love books, they're in my blood.
— Karen Marie Moning, Shadowfever
How do you explain to a nonreader that books aren't just things but treasured friends? Companions?
— Laura Jensen Walker, Daring Chloe
The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?
— Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room
To all my librarian friends, champions of books, true magicians in the House of Life. Without you, this writer would be lost in the Dust.
— Rick Riordan, The Red Pyramid
We are so overwhelmed with quantities of books, that we hardly realize any more that a book can be valuable, valuable like a jewel, or a lovely picture, into which you can look deeper and deeper and get a more profound experience very time. It is far, far better to read one book six times, at intervals, than to read six several books.
— D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse
While we are looking for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, that is, the 'new', which can only be found by plunging deep into the Unknown, we have to go on exploring sex, books, and travel, although we know that they lead us to the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place where the antidote can be found.
— Roberto Bolaño
The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral port
— Anatole Broyard
The world exists to end up in a book.
— Stéphane Mallarmé
In your hands winteris a book with cloud pagesthat snow pearls of love.
— Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
Sir,’ said Stephen, ‘I read novels with the utmost pertinacity. I look upon them--I look upon good novels--as a very valuable part of literature, conveying more exact and finely-distinguished knowledge of the human heart and mind than almost any other, with greater breadth and depth and fewer constraints.
— Patrick O'Brian, The Nutmeg of Consolation
Books turn people into isolated individuals, and once that's happened, the road only grows rockier. Books wire you to want to be Steve McQueen, but the world wants you to be SMcQ23667bot@hotmail.com.
— Douglas Coupland, Generation A
Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.
— Dan Simmons, The Terror
If time heals all wounds, and a book can hold a person's entire life, then you can speed up the process with a pulp time warp.
— Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart
The books we read help to shape who we are. Reading offers us, as children, our first independence- allowing us to travel far beyond the confines of our immediate world. Books introduce us to great figures in history, narratives that stir our spirit, fictions that tug us out of ourselves and into the lives of a thousand others, and visions of every era through which human beings have lived. And in the process of stretching who we are, books also connect us to all others- of our own or previous times- who have read what we've read. In the community of readers, we instantly become linked to those who share our love for specific characters or passages.A well-composed book,' says Caroline Gordon, 'is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.
— Ben Jacobs, The Quotable Book Lover
There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed.
— Lawrence Clark Powell
Some of us find our lives abridged even before the paperback comes out. 
— Berkeley Breathed
The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer's ink is the greater explosive: it will win.
— Christopher Morley
Oh well, maybe the only beauty left in cities is in the oil slicks on the road and maybe there isn't any beauty left in the people who live in these places.
— Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle
Shelving books incorrectly is as good as stealing them. It's almost worse.
— Paul Acampora, I Kill the Mockingbird
We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too.
— Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree
The function of a book is to provide a reading experience.
— Douglas Rushkoff
I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.
— Franz Kafka
I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.
— Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road
Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with books, I felt myself relax and was suddenly at peace.
— Helene Hanff, Q's Legacy: A Delightful Account of a Lifelong Love Affair with Books
There are good books which are only for adults.There are no good books which are only for children.
— W.H. Auden
The world belongs to those who read.
— Rick Holland
When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.
— Paula Fox
Libraries are not made; they grow. Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.
— Augustine Birrell
But the penciled sheets did not seem like nor smell like the library book so she had given it up, consoling herself with the vow that when she grew up, she would work hard, save money and buy every single book that she liked.
— Betty  Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
-- that books were mirrors, reflective in sometimes unpredictable ways.
— Wally Lamb, I Know This Much Is True
We were never organized readers who would see a book through to its end in any sory of logical order. We weave in and out of words like tourists on a hop-on, hop-off bus tour. Put a book down in the kitchen to go to the bathroom and you might return to find it gone, replaced by another of equal interest. We are indiscriminate.
— Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters
I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.
— Helen Keller, The Story of My Life
There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one’s mind and alter one’s whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later:
— George Orwell, A Collection of Essays
Ordinarily my mom just sunk deeper into her corner of the couch and ignored it. She had succesfully ignored a quarter of a century of entropy and decay, had sat peacefully crunching popcorn and drinking soda while the house fell down around us. If I had to guess the number of books she read during that time, I would place the number at somewhere in the neighborhood of forty thousand.
— Haven Kimmel
The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one.
— James Goldsmith
We keep quiet about what we read. Our enjoyment of a book remains a jealously guarded secret. Perhaps because there`s no need to talk, or because it takes time to distill what we've read before we can say anything. Silence is our guarantee of intimacy. We might have finished reading but we`re still livingthe book.
— Daniel Pennac
-You're pretty hard-boiled, Tinker Bell.-Call me that name again and you'll be wondering how your bollocks wound up lodged in your windpipe--from below. Just because we don't get to your side of things much anymore doesn't mean we don't know anything. 'If you believe in fairies, clap your hands!' If you believe in fairies, kiss my rosy pink arse is more like it. Now are you going to shut your gob or not?
— Tad Williams, The War of the Flowers
And so I'm me again, Leo. Thanks to the example of a five-year-old. I'm hoping you wouldn't want it any other way. Not that you weren't flattered, right? I mean, to have a girl two thousand miles away going to pieces over you, weeping at the mere memory of you, losing her appetite, losing herself and self-respect - well, that's trophy enough for any guy's ego, huh?
— Jerry Spinelli
Epics are never written about libraries. They exist on whim it depends on if the conquering army likes to read.
— Patricia A. McKillip
If nothing else, a house is a place to keep books in.
— Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead
The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes; and though they know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or twenty centuries for us,—some of them,—and are eager to give us a sign and unbosom themselves, it is the law of their limbo that they must not speak until spoken to; and as the enchanter has dressed them, like battalions of infantry, in coat and jacket of one cut, by the thousand and ten thousand, your chance of hitting on the right one is to be computed by the arithmetical rule of Permutation and Combination,—not a choice out of three caskets, but out of half a million caskets, all alike.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
With thought, patience, and discrimination, book passion becomes the signature of a person's character. 
— Nicholas A. Basbanes, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes and the Eternal Passion for Books
I had spent the dayfriendless, lonely and sad,a stranger to myself.After drowning the dayon the sea shore,I walked backto my empty houseon the deserted street.The momentI opened the door,the book on my tableflipped its pagesand said:"Friend,Where were youfor so long?
— Gulzar
A book with the genuine power to stir and comfort its readers.
— Mitch Albom
To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions—there we have none.
— Virginia Woolf, The Second Common Reader
The shame that tormented me was all the more corrosive for having no very clear origin: I didn't know why I felt so tainted, and worthless, and wrong-only that I did, and whenever I looked up from my books I was swamped by slimy waters rushing in from all sides.
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Betsy returned to her chair, took off her coat and hat, opened her book and forgot the world again.
— Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown
Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.
— C.S. Lewis
Life happened because I turned the pages.
— Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design.""You say this as if you envied him.""There are worse prisons than words.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.
— Pat Conroy, My Reading Life
He kissed me for a long moment, holding my shoulders, perhaps to keep me from pressing my whole body against his. Then he tried to lift my bag."My God," he said. "What happened?""I found out one may check out twenty books at a time from the school library.
— Laura Whitcomb, A Certain Slant of Light
What are books but tangible dreams? What is reading if it is not dreaming? The best books cause us to dream the rest are not worth reading.
— Rikki Ducornet, The Fan-Maker's Inquisition: A Novel of the Marquis de Sade
A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.
— Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest.
— Romain Rolland
The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.
— Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World, Or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher, Residing in London, to His Friends in the Country, by Dr. Goldsmith
The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
— Samuel Butler
I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.
— Eudora Welty
Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.
— Gary Shteyngart
The perception of beauty is a moral test.
— Henry David Thoreau
I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed.
— Umberto Eco
Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.
— Milan Kundera
If you've ever read one of those articles that asks notable people to list their favorite books, you may have been impressed or daunted to see them pick Proust or Thomas Mann or James Joyce. You might even feel sheepish about the fact that you reread Pride and Prejudice or The Lord of the Rings, or The Catcher in the Rye or Gone With the Wind every couple of years with some much pleasure. Perhaps, like me, you're even a little suspicious of their claims, because we all know that the books we've loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly - or the ones we'd most like other people to think we read over and over again.
— Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
She liked books more than anything else, and was, in fact, always inventing stories of beautiful things and telling them to herself.
— Frances Hodgson Burnett
A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts.
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
For me, reading is so much more. Books teach you how other people think, and what they're feeling, and how they change from ordinary beings to extraordinary ones. Often they are so appealing and intelligent, you'd rather spend time reading about them than doing anything else.
— Jennifer Kaufman
He began to read at haphazard. He entered upon each system with a little thrill of excitement, expecting to find in each some guide by which he could rule his conduct; he felt himself like a traveller in unknown countries and as he pushed forward the enterprise fascinated him; he read emotionally, as other men read pure literature, and his heart leaped as he discovered in noble words what himself had obscurely felt.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
The library knows that it is a temporary fix. We have a stamp for the inside front cover: BROKEN SPINE NOTED. It is like a bracelet worn by a diabetic. When you return the book with this message stamped inside, we know you're not the one responsible for this horrible thing. It was some other bastard before you. The book has a preexisting condition.
— Don Borchert
I might love my e-reader, but I'd never pass up the chance to browse real books.
— Nichole Chase, Suddenly Royal
All good and true book-lovers practice the pleasing and improving avocation of reading in bed ... No book can be appreciated until it has been slept with and dreamed over.
— Eugene Field, The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac
There are worse prisons than words.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
She never managed to find herself in these books no matter how hard she tried, exhuming traits from between the pages and donning them for an hour, a day, a week. We think in some ways, we have all done this our whole lives, searching for the book that will give us the keys to ourselves, let us into a wholly formed personality as though it were a furnished room to let. As though we could walk in and look around and say to the gray-haired landlady behind us, "We'll take it.
— Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters
In a word, literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. The things I have learned and the things I have been taught seem of ridiculously little importance compared with their "large loves and heavenly charities.
— Helen Keller, The Story of My Life
A book had always been a door to another world... a world much more interesting and fantastical than reality. But she had finally discovered that life could be even more wonderful than fantasy.And that love could fill the real world with magic.
— Lisa Kleypas, Scandal in Spring
Some people claim that it is okay to read trashy novels because sometimes you can find something valuable in them. You can also find a crust of bread in a garbage can, if you search long enough, but there is a better way.
— Jim Rohn
I enjoy books as misers enjoy treasures, because I know I can enjoy them whenever I please.
— Michel de Montaigne
A long time ago, I opened a book, and this is what I found inside: a whole new world. It isn't the world I live in, although sometimes it looks a lot like it. Sometimes, though, it feels closest to my world when it doesn't look like it at all. That world is enormous, yet it all fits inside an everyday object. I don't have to keep everything I find there, but what I choose to take with me is more precious than anything I own, and there is always more where that came from. The world I found was inside a book, and then that world turned out to be made of even more books, each of which led to yet another world. It goes on forever and ever. At nine I thought I must get to Narnia or die. It would be a long time before I understood that I was already there.
— Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
I think that pretty much every form of fiction (I’d include fantasy, obviously) can actually be a real escape from places where you feel bad, and from bad places. It can be a safe place you go, like going on holiday, and it can be somewhere that, while you’ve escaped, actually teaches you things you need to know when you go back, that gives you knowledge and armour and tools to change the bad place you were in.So no, they’re not escapist. They’re escape.
— Neil Gaiman