c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Surely it is better, thought Domenica, that forty-five should buy the book and actually read it, than should many thousands, indeed millions, buy it and put it on their shelves, like...Professor Hawking's Brief History of Time. That was a book that had been bought by millions, but had been demonstrated to have been read by only a minute proportion of those who had acquired it. For do we not all have a copy of that on our shelves, and who amongst us can claim to have read beyond the first page, in spite of the pellucid prose of its author and his evident desire to share with us his knowledge of...of whatever it is that the book is about?
— Alexander McCall Smith, The World According to Bertie
Now that his children had grown into their lives, their own children too, there was no one who needed more than the idea of him, and he thought maybe that was why he had this nagging feeling, this sense that there were things he had to know for himself, only for himself. He knew, of course he knew, that a life wasn't anything like one of those novels Jenny read, that it stumbled along, bouncing off one thing, then another, until it just stopped, nothing wrapped up neatly. He remembered his children's distress at different times, failing an exam or losing a race, a girlfriend. Knowing that they couldn't believe him but still trying to tell them that it would pass, that they would be amazed, looking back, to think it had mattered at all. He thought of himself, thought of things that had seemed so important, so full of meaning when he was twenty, or forty, and he thought maybe it was like Jenny's books after all. Red herrings and misdirection, all the characters and observations that seemed so central, so significant while the story was unfolding. But then at the end you realized that the crucial thing was really something else. Something buried in a conversation, a description - you realized that all along it had been a different answer, another person glimpsed but passed over, who was the key to everything. Whatever everything was. And if you went back, as Jenny sometimes did, they were there, the clues you'd missed while you were reading, caught up in the need to move forward. All quietly there.
— Mary Swan
We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price and staked everything on it.
— Allen Lane
You might have noticed that I have been sending you used books. I have done this not to save money, but to make a point which is that a used book, unlike a used car, hasn't lost any of its initial value. A good story rolls of the lot into the hands of its new reader as smoothly as the day it was written. And there's another reason for these used paperbacks that never cost much even when new; I like the idea of holding a book that someone else has held, of eyes running over lines that have already seen the light of other eyes. That, in one image, is the community of readers, is the communion of literature.
— Yann Martel, What is Stephen Harper Reading?: Yann Martel's Recommended Reading for a Prime Minister and Book Lovers of All Stripes
What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?
— Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room
I could hardly wait for following chapters, which arrived in dribs and drabs, and I began to feel for all the world like the young T.B. Macaulay walking from London to meet the Cambridge coach bearing the next installment of Waverley novels.
— Vernon Sproxton
The flickering candlelight conspired with the silence, and we only interrupted each other’s reading to share a casual delight.
— Keith Donohue
London, December 1915. In the master bedroom (never was the estate agent's epithet more appropriate) of Flat 21, Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, the distinguished author is dying - slowly, but surely. In Flanders, less than two hundred miles away, other men are dying more quickly, more painfully, more pitifully - young men, mostly, with their lives still before them, blank pages that will never be filled. The author is seventy-two. He has had an interesting and varied life, written many books, travelled widely, enjoyed the arts, moved in society (one winter he dined out 107 times), and owns a charming old house in Rye as well as the lease of this spacious London flat with its fine view of the Thames. He has had deeply rewarding friendships with both men and women. If he has never experienced sexual intercourse, that was by his own choice, unlike the many young men in Flanders who died virgins either for lack of opportunity or because they hoped to marry and were keeping themselves chaste on principle.
— David Lodge, Author, Author
It began to falter not when the book publishers who loved books gave way to those who preferred profits to reading. It happened when publishers and editors cut back on their drinking. If there is one national flower in book publishing, it is the martini.
— Al Silverman
The books I would like to print are the books I love to read and keep.
— William Morris
Even the names of the books gave me food for thought.
— Virginia Woolf
Shelby watched the books burn. She wonders if words are pouring down on other people's houses,sad words, like beast and mourn and sorrow and mother.
— Alice Hoffman, Faithful
There were the people who read and there were the others. Whether you were a reader or a nonreader--it was quickly noted. There was no greater distinction between people. People were amazed when he asserted that and many shook their head at such crankiness. But that's how it was.
— Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon
For books are not absolutely dead things, but... do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet on the other hand unless warriors be used, as good almost kill a Man a good Book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills Reason itself, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.John MiltonAreopagitica
— John Milton, Areopagitica
Its emptiness is more than the lack of living, breathing beings. It is the unread pages of the many books that reside on the shelves throughout the room I should hot have thought one could tell when books have gone unread, but after the company of Birchwood's well-loved library it is as if I can hear these books whispering, their pages grasping and reaching for an audience.
— Michelle Zink, Prophecy of the Sisters
Much later, Alice would wonder what might have happened if she had gone to bed when she was supposed to.
— Django Wexler, The Forbidden Library
A town without a book shop was a town without a heart
— Veronica Henry, How to Find Love in a Bookshop
Books can change the world. They represent a second chance for those that want to change their life and can’t.
— Robin Sacredfire
Boredom is not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.
— Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
If he let one day pass without glancing at a single page, habit led him to feel a vague sense of decay. Therefore, in the face of most intrusions, he tried to arrange it so that he could stay in touch with the printed word. There were moments when he felt that books constituted his only legitimate province.
— Sōseki Natsume, And Then
Altogether, if I had to pick one place to hang out anywhere, from New York to Cape Town and Australia to Hong Kong, a bookstore would be it.
— Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road
I perceived quite early that I was a reader, and most of the people I came into contact with were not. It made a barrier. What they wanted to talk about were things they had eaten, touched, or done. What I wanted to talk about was what I had read.
— Frederik Pohl, The Way the Future Was: A Memoir
When my phone chimes with a text message on Monday morning, I'm still in that dreamy state between sleep and awake where you can pretty much convince yourself of anything. Like that a teen Mick Jagger is waiting in your driveway to take you to school. Or that your favorite book series ended with an actual satisfying conclusion, instead of what the author tried to pass off as a satisfying conclusion.
— Jessica Brody, A Week of Mondays
I found it hard to think of leaving my books. They had been my elevators out of the midden, and to whom could I entrust such close friends?
— Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name
When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud of dust I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the denouement. 
— Henry James, Watch and Ward
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces on the edges of print.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
The Allatians believe that they have a writing system superior to all others. Unlike books written in alphabets, syllabaries, or logograms, an Allatian book captures not only words, but also the writer’s tone, voice, inflection, emphasis, intonation, rhythm. It is simultaneously a score and a recording. A speech sounds like a speech, a lament a lament, and a story re-creates perfectly the teller’s breathless excitement. For the Allatians, reading is literally hearing the voice of the past.But there is a cost to the beauty of the Allatian book. Because the act of reading requires physical contact with the soft, malleable surface, each time a text is read, it is also damaged and some aspects of the original irretrievably lost. Copies made of more durable materials inevitably fail to capture all the subtleties of the writer’s voice, and are thus shunned.In order to preserve their literary heritage, the Allatians have to lock away their most precious manuscripts in forbidding libraries where few are granted access. Ironically, the most important and beautiful works of Allatian writers are rarely read, but are known only through interpretations made by scribes who attempt to reconstruct the original in new books after hearing the source read at special ceremonies.
— Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
Still, when I think of early friendships, I think not of people but of books. Books were my friends, and more often than not, the characters in the books were my imaginary friends, who stepped out of the pages and walked wth me to school or sat in bed with me, talking when I was meant to be asleep. What I mean is reading was my friends. And also I mean that I learned about friendship - patience, slowness, listening, care - from reading and from reading about friendship between people.
— Erin Wunker, Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life
There are books showing men how to succeed in everything they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books. 
— G.K. Chesterton, All Things Considered
She's always loved writers, even more than the books I think. They're like personal friends to her.
— Josephine Hart, The truth about love
[P]art of the pleasure of engaging with a writer is unraveling some allusions and admitting defeat by others.
— Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature
The art of not reading is a very important one. [. . .] [Y]ou should remember that he who writes for fools always find a large public. – A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: For life is short.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
Every true reader could, even if not one new book were published, spend decades and centuries studying on, fighting on, continuing to rejoice in the treasure of those already at hand.
— Hermann Hesse
What's the book like?""Well, some of it's twaddle, but mostly it's just piffle. Cheers!
— David Mitchell, Ghostwritten
Henry did not want to be fixed, was somehow convinced that the fix would be a lie, something that would lessen him.
— Stephen King, Dreamcatcher
Great readers (are) those who know early that there is never going to be time to read all there is to read, but do their darnedest anyway.
— Larry McMurtry, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond
To be honest I wrote it mainly from the reason and wanting something more than a life something which could explore my life at deeper level. Probably I have done it... probably I haven't done it... what I know is that I won't be for this Century like somebody famous... I will be still average, I can't go on the amazon and starting selling my works... I don't feel comfortable being in that state.
— Deyth Banger, The Life Of One Kid
It was a fruit we had never seen before, larger than an apple, about the size of a grapefruit. It was round and yellow like the leaves of a neglected book.
— Mai Al-Nakib, The Hidden Light of Objects
He stood there for a moment looking around the silent room, shaking his head slowly. All these books, he thought, the residue of a planet's intellect, the scrapings of futile minds, the leftovers, the potpourri of artifacts that had no power to save men from perishing.
— Richard Matheson, I Am Legend
Every lover could be brought to trial as the murderer of his own love. When something hurts you, saddens you, I rush to avoid it, to alter it, to feel as you do, but you turn away with a gesture of impatience and say: "I don't understand
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
The fascination exerted by one human being over another is not what he emits of his personality at the present instant of encounter but a summation of his entire being which gives off this powerful drug capturing the fancy and attachment.
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
Her presence had awakened in him a man suddenly whipped by his earlier ideals, whose lost manhood wanted to assert itself in action.
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
They had reached a perfect moment of human love. They had created a moment of perfect understanding and accord. This highest moment would now remain as point of comparison to torment them later on when all natural imperfections would disintegrate it.
— Anaïs Nin
It is intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody else's.
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
These rituals Rango could not sustain, for he could not maintain the effort to arrive on time since his lifelong habit had created the opposite habit: to elude, to avoid, to disappoint every expectation of others, every commitment, every promise, every crystallization.
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
Paul, Paul, this is the claim you never made, the fervor you never showed. You were so cool and light, so elusive, and I never felt you encircling me and claiming possession. Rango is saying all the words I wanted to hear you say. You never came close to me, even while taking me. You took me as men take foreign women in distant countries whose language they cannot speak. You took me in silence and strangeness.
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
Ali Baba protects the lovers! Gives them the luck of bandits, and no guilt, for love fills certain people and expands them beyond all laws; there is no time, no place for regrets, hesitations, cowardices. Love runs free and reckless, and all the gentle trickeries perpetrated to protect others from its burns-those who are not the lovers but who might be the victims of this love's expansion.
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
Now, his hair is white and he no longer understands anyone's need to love, for he has lost everything, not to love, but to his games of love; and when you love as a game, you lose everything, as he lost his home and wife, and now he clings to me, afraid of loss, afraid of solitude.
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
Hello" and "good-bye" were a pair of bookends, propping up a vast library of blank volumes, void almanacs, novels full of sentiment I couldn't apprehend
— Lauren Collins, When in French: Love in a Second Language
I am sure you would not understand if I told you my father is delightfully clear and selfish, tender and lying, formal and incurable. He exhausts all the loves given to him. If I did not leave his house at night to warm myself in Rango's burning hands I would die at my task, arid and barren, sapless, while my father monologues about his past, and I yawn yawn yawn...
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
No moment of charm without long roots in the past, no moment of charm is born on bare soil, a careless accident of beauty, but is the sum of great sorrows, growths, and efforts.
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
But love, the great narcotic, was the hothouse in which all the selves burst into their fullest bloom...
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
We" - this "we" is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through - don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one.
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision - the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention.
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Men from the mountains always dream of the sea, and above all things I love to travel.
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
No privacy left. No manners.
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
I loved your breaking down that door, repeated Djuna. Through Rango she had breathed some other realm she had never attained before. She had touched through his act some climate of violence she had never known before.
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
Out of worship and out of love he would let no one light the stove for her either, as if he would be the warmth and the fire to dry and warm her feet.
— Anaïs Nin
Although I was so big, and so rough in many ways, loved hunting, fighting, horseback riding, I loved the piano above everything else...The mountain man's obsession is to get a glimpse of the sea.
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead.
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo's martyrdom to a mere instance.
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
He failed to see that it contained at once all of Djuna's wishes which had been denied, and these wishes had flown from all directions to meet at this intersection and to plead once more for understanding.
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
Of course, you'll defend Jay," says Rango, He was a part of your former life, of your former values. I will never be able to alter that. I want you to think as I do.""But Rango, you couldn't respect someone who surrendered an opinion merely to please you . It would be hypocrisy.
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
What can I say Rango? What can I do to prove to you that I belong to you?
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation - a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed. Something to be refused. Something that makes one feel powerless.
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
He had appointed her not only guardian angel, but a member of his ideals.
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
One can feel obliged to look at phototgraphs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show. Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience.
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
You have no cause to grumble boy. You made your choice and all this is a consequence of your choice. Whatever now ensues is what you yourself have chosen.
— Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence.
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged and always disappointed.
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Francine looked up and mouthed, "Thank you." "any titme," I lied.
— Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake
Well, everything's a lesson, isn't it? Learning all the time, as you could say.
— Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
The intention to act violently is accompanied by strong feelings of physical distress.
— Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
And now, talking of praying, I realise sadly that there will be little point in praying for you. You are passing now to a region where you will be beyond the reach of the power of prayer.
— Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
The real proof that I have tried to love and that people have tried to love me back was never going to fit in a kitchen drawer.
— Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake
It's so clear to me now: the memorizing of a fake prayer, the symbolization of objects, the struggle to relate to the invisible - I needed a religion. I was lost.
— Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake
Perhaps if I'd had God in my life growing up I would have been able to understand the total and complete unfairness of the universe rewarding mean girls
— Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake
There is a point in most abusive relationships when it occurs to the beaten party that they are guilty of putting their face in the way of someone else's fist.
— Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake
So natural and universal is a child's curiosity about sex and so long are we conscious of it before we do it, that our original impressions of it leave an indelible mark.
— Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake
Why do people always want to put their hands on vulnerability? I sped up.
— Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake
I have never pictured my own wedding. I do want to get married. It's a nice idea. Though I think husbands are like tattoos - you should wait until you come across something you want on your body for the rest of your life.
— Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake
It seemed that having girlfriends was a sign of innocence and a boundless capacity to care about other women. The hearts in that photograph and multiple strings attached to multiple other hearts. Everything was less about cliché and more about camaraderie. We weren't out for ourselves, we were out for each other. When had I forgotten that? When had I cut the pink wire?
— Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake
The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence - the act of love, for instance; music, for instance. You must take your chance, boy. The choice has been all yours.
— Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
Weddings are friendship deal breakers if the friendship is weak. There are too many favors, too many tasks, too much required devotion and Aqua Net for imposters like me. I tried to make eye contact with Francine, to give her a knowing good-bye smile like a ghost of a loved one in a movie. It was no usue, I decided to cut my final pink wire. There would be no more yearly "happy birthdays" and certainly no more bonding with the girl in the duct tape dress. That ship had sailed.
— Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake
love is not boastful. But hate? Apparently hate has a big mouth.
— Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake
I thought of the past and how one should have respect for it, like the elderly.
— Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake
It should be noted that my mother has a long history of being disturbingly unperturbed by what normal people deem perturbing. Certain things simply don't strike her as worthy of a sit-down.
— Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake
Teddy bears are best because they understand it's nice to be alone.
— Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake
Even a person like this makes mistakes, can't always hold on to everything they'd like to,can't always force the world to spin in the direction of their choosing. You'll hug him longer than necessary and tell him to keep in touch. And you'll know, finally, that it had nothing to do with you.
— Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake
In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, through the medium of photography - other people's pain.
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local.
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it - say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken - or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.
— Susan Sontag
When we're healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea.
— Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
And yet, in a sense, in choosing to be deprived of the ability to make an ethical choice, you have in a sense really chosen the good.
— Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize.
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to "care" more.
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Often something looks, or is felt to look, "better" in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things. (Hence, one is always disappointed by a photograph that is not flattering.)
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
A place is not really a place without a bookstore.
— Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
This allowed her two glorious hours sitting quietly by herself in a cozy corner, devouring one book after another. When she had read every single children's book in the place, she started wandering round in search of something else.
— Roald Dahl, Matilda
A professional headshot in front of a bookshelf says you're an intellectual. A professional headshot peeking though a bookshelf says you're probably under a restraining order.
— Ryan Lilly
Never before had I felt trapped, so seduced and caught up in a story,' Clara explained, 'the way I did with that book. Until then, reading was just a duty, a sort of fine one had to pay teachers and tutors without quite knowing why. I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel. This is a world of shadows, Daniel, and magic is a rare asset. That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn't matter to anyone, changed my life.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Every time you open a book for the first time, there is something akin to safe-breaking about it. Yes, that's exactly it: the frantic reader is like a burglar who has spent hours digging a tunnel to enter the strongroom of a bank. He emerges face to face with hundreds of strongboxes, all identical, and opens them one by one. And each time a box is opened, it loses its anonymity and becomes unique: one is filled with paintings, another with a bundle of banknotes, a third with jewels or letters tied in ribbon, engravings, objects of no value at all, silverware, photos, gold sovereigns, dried flowers, files of paper, crystal glasses, or children’s toys--and so on. There is something intoxicating about opening a new one, finding its contents and feeling overjoyed that in a trice one is no longer in front of a set of boxes, but in the presence of the riches and wretched banalities that make up human existence.
— Jacques Bonnet, Phantoms on the Bookshelves
The book that simply demands to be read, for no good reason, is asking us to change our lives by putting aside what we usually think of as good reasons. It's asking us to stop calculating. It's asking us to do something for the plain old delight and interest of it, not because we can justify its place on the mental spreadsheet or accounting ledger (like the one Benjamin Franklin kept) by which we tote up the value of our actions.
— Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
Let this little book be thy friend, if, owing to fortune or through thine own fault, thou canst not find a dearer companion.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
So much is yet to come. Soon will be blankets and pillows, and books by the bed to make the stuff of dreams. And then tomorrows.
— Jim McCann, Return of the Dapper Men
You are what you eat and read.
— Maya Corrigan
Somewhere between 'not enough' and 'not at all.' I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it - to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once. But they never gave that to me. Never, not once.
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lyingas in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.
— Thomas Carlyle
What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
— Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
My fingers burn behind the keys of my typewriter, the lettering fading with every thoughtful strike. The many words I write I dare not stall; my mind perpetually alert for my magnum opus call.
— A.K. Kuykendall
Who can know anybody?' said the bookshop owner. 'Every person is like thousands of books. New, reprinting, in stock, out of stock, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, rubbish. The lot. Different every day. One's lucky to be able to put his hand on the one that's wanted, let alone know it.
— Russell Hoban, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz
Books are the only things worth stealing.
— Sully Tarnish, The Dragon and the Apprentice: A Wizard's Wager
You can viddy that everything in this wicked world counts. You can pony that one thing always leads to another. Right right right.
— Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
The thrill of theft, of violence, the urge to live easy - is it worth it when we have undeniable proof, yes, yes, incontrovertible evidence that hell exists?
— Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
A book is no mere book anymore than man can be mere man. A book was like an individual man, unmatched and with no cause of existence beyond himself.
— Marcel Proust
I still love the book-ness of books, the smell of books: I am a book fetishist—books to me are the coolest and sexiest and most wonderful things there are.
— Neil Gaiman
I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there wil always be a place for them.
— Neil Gaiman
Choosing a new book was like looking for treasure.
— Kit Pearson, Awake and Dreaming
There is no mistaking a good book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
I am no novel-reader -- I seldom look into novels -- Do not imagine that I often read novels -- It is really very well for a novel." Such is the common cant. "And what are you reading, Miss -- ?" "Oh! It is only a novel!" replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda"; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.
— Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
No, but I do read a lot. I love to read. I could read for days and never stop. I use to be such a bookworm. I would barely look up to notice much of anything.
— Jennifer Loren, The Devil's Eyes
Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.
— Anthony Powell
There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on--a more reliable world in so far as it does not hide that its premise is illusion.
— Graham Swift, Ever After
Life without books, chocolate & coffee is just useless.
— Nadun Lokuliyanage
Katey's the hottest bookworm you'll ever meet. If you took all the books that she's read and piled them in a stack, you could climb to the Milky Way.
— Amor Towles, Rules of Civility
But eating was the last thing on my mind. And I didn't see how Miss Wilcox could eat, or teach, or sleep or ever find any reason to leave this room. Not with all these books in it, just begging to be read.
— Jennifer Donnelly, A Northern Light
I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.
— Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree
More than at any other time, when I hold a beloved book in my hand my limitations fall from me, my spirit is free.
— Helen Keller, Midstream: My Later Life
Jesus, Mary …”She said it out loud, the words distributed into a room that was full of cold air and books. Books everywhere! Each wall was armed with overcrowded yet immaculate shelving. It was barely possible to see the paintwork. There were all different styles and sizes of lettering on the spines of the black, the red, the gray, the every-colored books. It was one of the most beautiful things Liesel Meminger had ever seen.With wonder, she smiled.That such a room existed!Even when she tried to wipe the smile away with her forearm, she realized instantly that it was a pointless exercise. She could feel the eyes of the woman traveling her body, and when she looked at her, they had rested on her face.There was more silence than she ever thought possible. It extended like an elastic, dying to break. The girl broke it.“Can I?”The two words stood among acres and acres of vacant, wooden-floored land. The books were miles away.The woman nodded.Yes, you can
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
I hate it when everyone is so noble and good in a story that you can't imagine it being true at all.
— Patricia Finney, Feud
Gro Rollag was no beauty, but she was a strong capable young woman with a long face, prominent cheekbones, high forehead, and a kindly intelligent look in her rather narrow eyes. According to family lore, she was not the most conscientious housekeeper because she preferred reading to housework. A love of books and reading ran in the family. Of all the possessions they were forced to sell or leave behind in Norway, what the Rollags remembered with deepest regret was the library they inherited from an eighteenth-century ancestor - lovely old books sold to pay for their passage to America.
— David Laskin, The Children's Blizzard
Dr. Manning said he'd thought at first it might be sleeping sickness, or even narcolepsy, whatever that was, but - no, Pete was healthy enough physically. Manoel growled that the boy was bone-lazy, spending his time fishing and reading. Reading! No good could come of such things.'In a way you're right, Manoel,' Dr. Manning said hesitantly. 'It's natural for a boy to day-dream now and then, but I think Pedro does it too much. I've let him use my library whenever he wanted, but it seems... h'm... it seems he reads the wrong things. Fairy tales are very charming, but they don't help a boy to cope with real life.''Com certeza,' Manoel agreed. 'You mean he has crazy ideas in the head.''Oh, they're rather nice ideas,' Dr. Manning said. 'But they're only fairy tales, and they're beginning to seem true to Pete. You see, Manoel, there are really two worlds, the real one, and the one you make up inside your mind. Sometimes a boy - or even a man - gets to like his dream world so much he just forgets about the real one and lives in the one he's made up.''I know,' Manoel said. 'I have seen some who do that. It is a bad thing.''It would be bad for Pete. He's a very sensitive boy. If you live too much in dreams, you can't face real life squarely.'("Before I Wake...")
— Henry Kuttner, Masters of Horror
Maelyn smiled. If books could have litters, she'd be just as happy.
— Anita Valle, Maelyn
I suppose if I had to give a one-word answer to the question of why I read, that word would be pleasure. The kind of pleasure you can get from reading is like no other in the world.
— Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books
Books are like ice cream there is a flavor for everyone! 
— K. Lamb
The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.
— Ross Macdonald
Only a few days earlier he had explained to her that he did not merely read books but traveled with them, that they took him to other countries and unfamiliar continents, and that with their help he was always getting to know new people, many of whom even became his friends.
— Jan-Philipp Sendker, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats
While art thrives on the blazing colours of scandal, literature blossoms on the dark soil of tragedy.
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
Learning to decipher words had only added to the pleasures of holding spines and turning pages, measuring the journey to the end with a thumb-riffle, poring over frontispieces. Books! Opening with a crackle of old glue, releasing perfume; closing with a solid thump.
— John Crowley, Little, Big
The most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves is that we were not important, we musn't be pedants; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world. We're nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Everything comes to him who waits, except a loaned book.
— Kin Hubbard
[T]he only luxury he allows himself is buying books, paperback books, mostly novels, American novels, British novels, foreign novels in translation, but in the end books are not luxuries so much as necessities, and reading is an addiction he has no wish to be cured of.
— Paul Auster, Sunset Park
Library. It's where we lock up all those books before they start giving kids ideas," I said solemnly. "Very dangerous place to be.
— Scott Tracey, Demon Eyes
There's no such thing as 'no market'. Some books are just niche orientated that's all.
— Jo Linsdell
Archbishop. Why do I never read the lesson?” “I beg your pardon, ma’am?” “In church. Everybody else gets to read and one never does. It’s not laid down, is it? It’s not off-limits?” “Not that I’m aware, ma’am.”“Good. Well in that case I’m going to start. Leviticus, here I come. Goodnight.” The archbishop shook his head and went back to Strictly Come Dancing.
— Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
What we find in books is like the fire in our hearths. We fetch it from our neighbors, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.
— Voltaire, Le Fanatisme Ou Mahomet Le Prophète: Tragédie
...that once were urgent and necessary for an orderly world and now were buried away, gathering dust and of no use to anyone.
— Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn
Seeking for salvation within covers with pages of printed letters
— D.Kadie
Aryami Bose's home had been closed up for years, inhabited only by books and paintings, but the spectre of thousands of memories imprisoned between its walls still permeated the house.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Midnight Palace
In books I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I foresee things to come; in books warlike affairs are set forth; from books come forth the laws of peace.All things are corrupted and decay in time; Saturn ceases not to devour the children that he generates; all the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.
— Richard de Bury
Isabel is looking at several collections of research journals. 'She would understand the issues if she chose to open one of the volumes, but she knew that there were conversations within which she would never have the time to participate in. And that, of course, was the problem with any large collection of books, whether in a library or a bookshop: one might feel intimidated by the fact that there was simply too many to read and not know where to start.
— Alexander McCall Smith, The Lost Art of Gratitude
If I show up at your house ten years from now and find nothing in your living room but The Readers Digest, nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel, and nothing in your bathroom but Jokes for the John, I’ll chase you down to the end of your driveway and back, screaming ‘Where are your books? You graduated college ten years ago, so how come there are no damn books in your house? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese?
— Stephen King
Bookshop Customer: 'Who wrote the bible?'Customer's friend: 'Jesus.
— Jen Campbell, Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops
Wherever they went the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries and tied to their waists as signs of triumph, just as Irish heroes had once tied to their waists their enemies' heads. Where they went they brought their love of learning and their skills in bookmaking. In the bays and valleys of their exile, they reestablished literacy and breathed new life into the exhausted literary culture of Europe.And that is how the Irish saved civilization.
— Thomas Cahill
In my contact with people, I find that, as a rule, it is only the little, narrow people who live for themselves, who never read good books, who do not travel, who never open up their souls in a way to permit them to come into contact with other souls – with the great outside world.
— Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery
And I came to understand, in a way I never had before, that books are truly the stuff of miracles. I even dared to dream that someday, somehow, I might surround myself with books from many times and many tongues...
— T.A. Barron, The Lost Years
Being ill when you are a child or growing up is such an enchanted interlude! The outside world, the world of free time in the yard or the garden or on the street, is only a distant murmmur in the sickroom. Inside, a whole world of characters and stories proliferate out of the books you read. The fever that weakens your perception as it sharpens your imagination turns the sickroom into something new, both familiar and strange; monsters come grinning out of the patterns on the curtains and the carpet, and chairs, tables, bookcases and wardrobes burst out of their normal shapes and become mountains and buildings and ships you can almost touch although they're far away. Through the long hours of the night you have the Church clock for company and the rumble of the occasional passing car that throws it's headlights across the walls and ceilings. These are hours without sleep, which is not to say they're sleepless, because on the contrary, they're not about lack of anything, they are rich and full. Desires, memories, fears, passions form labryinths in which we lose and find then lose ourselves again. They are hours where anything is possible, good or bad.
— Bernhard Schlink, The Reader
The more we have known of the really good things, the more insipid the thin lemonade of later literature becomes, sometimes almost to the point of making us sick. Do you know a work of literature written in the last, say, fifteen years that you think has any lasting quality? I don't. It is partly idle chatter, partly propaganda, partly self-pitying sentimentality, but there is no insight, no ideas, no clarity, no substance and almost always the language is bad and constrained. On this subject I am quite consciously a laudator temporis acti.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
Vanity's contribution to Fiction in general was an abundance of cheap labour and the occasional blockbuster, which was accepted into Fiction with an apologetic 'gosh, don't know how that happened'.
— Jasper Fforde, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing
Inconveniently, books are all the pages in them, not just the ones you choose to read.
— Don Paterson, The Book of Shadows
His reading suggested a man swimming in the sea among the wreckage of his ship, and trying to save his life by greedily clutching first at one spar and then at another.
— Anton Chekhov
Books do not per­ish like hu­mankind. Of course we com­mon­ly see them bro­ken in the hab­er­dash­er's shop when on­ly a few months be­fore they lay bound on the sta­tion­er's stall; these are not true works, but mere trash and new­fan­gle­ness for the vul­gar. There are thou­sands of such gew­gaws and toys which peo­ple have in their cham­bers, or which they keep up­on their shelves, be­liev­ing that they are pre­cious things, when they are the mere pass­ing fol­lies of the pass­ing time and of no more val­ue than pa­pers gath­ered up from some dunghill or raked by chance out of the ken­nel. True books are filled with the pow­er of the un­der­stand­ing which is the in­her­itance of the ages: you may take up a book in time, but you read it in eter­ni­ty.
— Peter Ackroyd, The House of Doctor Dee
God be thanked for books! they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.
— w.e. channing
more to be a human being with
— Gary D. Schmidt