c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The books are to remind us what asses and fool we are. They're Caeser's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, "Remember, Caeser, thou art mortal." Most of us can't rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.
— Voltaire
A book is a gift you can open again and again.
— Garrison Keillor
In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.
— Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life
Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.
— Anne Herbert
How can you tell? That I like books, I mean.The look on your face when you walked in, somehow I doubted you were that impressed by me.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Bones
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.
— Franz Kafka
Books are a narcotic.
— Franz Kafka
Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.
— Voltaire, Candide
A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
— Robertson Davies
Honestly, I hate when in books, the guys changes the girl's life. Like, no. The girl needs to change her own life.
— Sasha Alsberg
It was good to walk into a library again it smelled like home.
— Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian
You cannot open a book without learning something.
— Confucius
My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn't have any excuse to be stupid.
— Joan Bauer, Rules of the Road
This book taught me, once and for all, how easily you can escape this world with the help of words! You can find friends between the pages of a book, wonderful friends.
— Cornelia Funke, Inkspell
All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
As the hours crept by, the afternoon sunlight bleached all the books on the shelves to pale, gilded versions of themselves and warmed the paper and ink inside the covers so that the smell of unread words hung in the air.
— Maggie Stiefvater, Shiver
I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books--whether it's strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking. Or a chance meeting with a stranger or friend who recommends a book we would never ordinarily reach for. Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives.
— Cecelia Ahern
Reading is my favourite occupation, when I have leisure for it and books to read.
— Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey
It's a good idea to have your own books with you in a strange place
— Cornelia Funke, Inkheart
The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.
— René Descartes
Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
If you cannot read all your books...fondle them---peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances.
— Winston S. Churchill
I love books, by the way, way more than movies. Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself.
— Karen Marie Moning, Darkfever
I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
My behavior is nonetheless, deplorable. Unfortunately, I'm quite prone to such bouts of deplorability--take for instance, my fondness for reading books at the dinner table.
— Brandon Sanderson, The Final Empire
All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.
— Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree
It wasn't until I started reading and found books they wouldn't let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else.
— John Waters
Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
— Francis Bacon, The Essays
Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own it's the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it.
— John Waters, Role Models
Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the 
— Patti Smith
I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.
— H.P. Lovecraft
A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people - people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a 
— E.B. White
Generally speaking, books don't cause much harm. Except when you read them, that is. Then they cause all kinds of problems.
— Pseudonymous Bosch, The Name of This Book Is Secret
Only the ship is made of books, its sails thousands of overlapping pages, and the sea it floats upon is dark black ink.
— Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
You know that feeling,” she said, “when you are reading a book, and you know that it is going to be a tragedy; you can feel the cold and darkness coming, see the net drawing tight around the characters who live and breathe on the pages. But you are tied to the story as if being dragged behind a carriage and you cannot let go or turn the course aside.
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess
Of course I loved books more than people.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.
— Heinrich Heine
Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.
— Amos Bronson Alcott, Tablets
Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
— Alain de Botton
You're never alone when you're reading a book.
— Susan Wiggs
When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.
— Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais
Thank God for books and music and things I can think about.
— Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
I have lived a thousand lives and I’ve loved a thousand loves. I’ve walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read.
— George R.R. Martin
Of all things, I liked books best.
— Nikola Tesla
Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
— Hermann Hesse
I suspect it may be like the difference between a drinker and an alcoholic; the one merely reads books, the other needs books to make it through the
— Gail Carriger
There are many, many types of books in the world, which makes good sense, because there are many, many types of people, and everybody wants to read something different.
— Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning
I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.
— Emily Dickinson
Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines -- it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.
— Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
Rule number one: Don't fuck with librarians.
— Neil Gaiman
Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait on line for Santa, or some such inconvenience.
— David Levithan, Dash & Lily's Book of Dares
The world must be all fucked up," he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.
— Gabriel García Márquez
As always, one of her books was next to her.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Where should I go?" -Alice. "That depends on where you want to end up." - The Cheshire Cat.
— Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
My arms are killing me. I didn't know words could be so heavy.
— Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger
If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.
— Anne Fadiman
In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which are frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you...And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. 
— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.
— Roger Zelazny, Nine Princes in Amber
My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children's rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent's rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says 'PRIVATE--GROWNUPS KEEP OUT': a child sprawled on the bed, reading.
— Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
[I] read books because I love them, not because I think I should read them.
— Simon Van Booy
Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.
— Günter Grass, The Tin Drum
When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so anti-life, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt. At one point, the old professor says, ‘It’s all in Plato’ — meaning that the physical world we see around us is the crude, shabby, imperfect, second-rate copy of something much better. I want to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritual or the afte
— Philip Pullman
One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.
— George W. Bush
I hadn’t been in proper school in three years. My parents were my two best friends. My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
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 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!
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?
— Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
I picked up one of the books and flipped through it. Don't get me wrong, I like reading. But some books should come with warning labels: Caution: contains characters and plots guaranteed to induce sleepiness. Do not attempt to operate heavy machinery after ingesting more than one chapter. Has been known to cause blindness, seizures and a terminal loathing of literature. Should only be taken under the supervision of a highly trained English teacher. Preferably one who grades on the curve.
— Laurie Halse Anderson, Twisted
I love walking into a bookstore. It's like all my friends are sitting on shelves, waving their pages at me.
— Tahereh Mafi
I am a product [...of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.
— C.S. Lewis
Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book...
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
No two persons ever read the same book.
— Edmund Wilson
Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
— Marcel Proust
I love the smell of book ink in the morning.
— Umberto Eco
At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.
— Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
I understood books. I did not understand boys—especially alien boys.
— Jennifer L. Armentrout, Onyx
There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime you have to draw the line somewhere.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
She was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells.
— Dean Koontz, Lightning
When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Timequake
Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.
— Bill Watterson, The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book
. . . I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Personally, I believe “Young Adult” to be an arbitrary title that means the book "Can be enjoyed by anyone/Has a main character who’s not quite an adult/Isn’t really boring.
— Shannon Hale
A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.
— Jorge Luis Borges
Even a book can be dangerous in the wrong hands, and when that happens, you blame the hands, but you also read the book.
— Erika Johansen, The Queen of the Tearling
There are few sights sadder than a ruined book.
— Lemony Snicket, The Wide Window
Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.
— Anatole France
Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
— P.J. O'Rourke
We're all strangers connected by what we reveal, what we share, what we take away--our stories. I guess that's what I love about books--they are thin strands of humanity that tether us to one another for a small bit of time, that make us feel less alone or even more comfortable with our aloneness, if need be.
— Libba Bray
Literature is my Utopia
— Helen Keller
I was burning through books every day - stories about people and places I'd never heard of. They were perhaps the only thing that kept me from teetering into utter despair.
— Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury
I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.
— E.M. Forster
The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.
— W. Somerset Maugham
I was with book, as a woman is with child.
— C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
No furniture is so charming as books.
— Sydney Smith, A memoir of the Rev. Sydney Smith
The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn't know how to read.
— Benjamin Franklin
When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarna
— Jorge Luis Borges
We owe it to each other to tell stories.
— Neil Gaiman
She remembered one of her boyfriends asking, offhandedly, how many books she read in a year. "A few hundred," she said."How do you have the time?" he asked, gobsmacked.She narrowed her eyes and considered the array of potential answers in front of her. Because I don't spend hours flipping through cable complaining there's nothing on? Because my entire Sunday is not eaten up with pre-game, in-game, and post-game talking heads? Because I do not spend every night drinking overpriced beer and engaging in dick-swinging contests with the other financirati? Because when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/staring into space/admiring myself in reflective surfaces? I am reading!"I don't know," she said, shrugging.
— Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters
Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
— Harold Bloom
Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.
— Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit
Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
— Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
His hands were weak and shaking from carrying far too many books from the bookshop. It was the best feeling.
— Joseph Gordon-Levitt, The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, Vol. 1
There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.
— Arthur Conan Doyle
Don't mark up the Library's copy, you fool! Librarians are Unprankable. They'll track you down! They have skills!
— Charles Ogden
After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this:A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.
— Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Over the Teacups
If you surround yourself with the good and righteous, they can only raise you up. If you surround yourself with the others, they will drag you down into the doldrums of mediocrity, and they will keep you there, but only as long as you permit it.
— Mark Glamack
We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books—some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails—we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today.
— Cory Doctorow
Books may look like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head.
— Jasper Fforde, The Well of Lost Plots
Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow. 
— Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red
Life is too short to read books that I'm not enjoying.
— Melissa Marr
If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.
— Benjamin Franklin
I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.
— Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Sometimes I reread my favorite books from back to front. I start with the last chapter and read backward until I get to the beginning. When you read this way, characters go from hope to despair, from self-knowledge to doubt. In love stories, couples start out as lovers and end as strangers. Coming-of-age books become stories of losing your way. Your favorite characters come back to life.
— Nicola Yoon, Everything, Everything
I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
It's a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids.
— Tracy Chevalier
Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time.
— Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair
That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything.
— Noam Chomsky
Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.
— Robertson Davies
When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be prod
— Salman Rushdie
I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
— Wisława Szymborska, Nonrequired Reading
What better place to kill time than a library?
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
Wear the old coat and buy the new book.
— Austin Phelps
Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.
— Alberto Manguel
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.
— Marcel Proust, Days of Reading
People don't read any more. It's a sad state of affairs. Reading's the only thing that allows you to use your imagination. When you watch films it's someone else's vision, isn'
— Lemmy Kilmister
As long as you have any floor space at all, you have room for books! Just make two stacks of books the same height, place them three or four feet apart, lay a board across them, and repeat. Viola! Bookshelves!
— Jan Karon
The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency -- the belief that the here and now is all there is.
— Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new 
— Ursula K. Le Guin
We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And someday we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddamn steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in it and cover it up.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.
— Agatha Christie, The Clocks
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in 
— Barbara W. Tuchman
Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.
— Ray Bradbury
You want to remember that while you're judging the book, the book is also judging you.
— Stephen King, Night Shift
The problem with books is that they end.
— Caroline Kepnes, You
Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks.
— Dr. Seuss
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Come with me,' Mom says.To the library. Books and summertimego together.
— Lisa Schroeder, I Heart You, You Haunt Me
Give yourself unto reading. The man who never reads will never be read; he who never quotes will never be quoted. He who will not use the thoughts of other men’s brains, proves that he has no brains of his own. You need to read.. . . We are quite persuaded that the very best way for you to be spending your leisure time, is to be either reading or praying. You may get much instruction from books which afterwards you may use as a true weapon in your Lord and Master’s service. Paul cries, “Bring the books” — join in the cry.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory... In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man's freedom.
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries. These libraries should be open to all—except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our li
— John F. Kennedy
A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation... A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.
— Henry Miller, The Books in My Life
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.
— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
A woman's destiny, they say, is not fulfilled until she holds in her arms her own little book.
— Caroline Mytinger, Headhunting In The Solomon Islands: Around The Coral Sea
I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music, and I’ll bolt the 
— J.D. Salinger
I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief... I'm not in the business of offending people. I find the books upholding certain values that I think are important, such as life is immensely valuable and this world is an extraordinarily beautiful place. We should do what we can to increase the amount of wisdom in the 
— Philip Pullman
Books... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.
— Dorothy L. Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.
— Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.
— John Milton, Areopagitica
She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.
— Joe Hill, NOS4A2
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
— C.S. Lewis
When you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.
— Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian
[I]t's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.
— Judy Blume
You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
You see, unlike in the movies, there is no THE END sign flashing at the end of books. When I've read a book, I don't feel like I've finished anything. So I start a new one.
— Elif Shafak, The Bastard of Istanbul
[Public] libraries should be open to all—except the c
— John F. Kennedy
One day I would have all the books in the world, shelves and shelves of them. I would live my life in a tower of books. I would read all day long and eat peaches. And if any young knights in armor dared to come calling on their white chargers and plead with me to let down my hair, I would pelt them with peach pits until they went home.
— Jacqueline Kelly, The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate
I mean, most people want to escape. Get out of their heads. Out of their lives. Stories are the easiest way to do that.
— Victoria Schwab, This Savage Song
Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers...
— Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life
She closed the book and put her cheek against it. There was still an odor of a library on it, of dust, leather, binding glue, and old paper, one book carrying the smell of hundreds.
— Shannon Hale, The Goose Girl
I love everything that is old; old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines.
— Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield
Never trust a man who reads only one book.
— Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Purity of Blood
Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.
— Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose
A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. He cheats them! Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it.
— Horace Mann, Life and Works of Horace Mann Volume 3
All books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hours, and the books of all Time.
— John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies
Books, the children of the brain.
— Jonathan Swift, A Tale Of A Tub And Other Writings
Libraries raised me.
— Ray Bradbury
You are a total stranger and you want to take my library book.
— Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian
Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
…only then did I wake out of the book.
— John McGahern
There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows... I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?
— Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
I even love the smell of books.
— Adriana Trigiani
Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.
— Mason Cooley
Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul.
— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
Reading is not an end to itself, but a means to an end.
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
I leapt eagerly into books. The characters’ lives were so much more interesting than the lonely heartbeat of my own.
— Ruta Sepetys, Out of the Easy
I can imagine no greater bliss than to lie about, reading novels all day.
— Julia Quinn, Ten Things I Love About You
Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity
— George Steiner
There is something wonderful about a book. We can pick it up. We can heft it. We can read it. We can set it down. We can think of what we have read. It does something for us. We can share great minds, great actions, and great undertakings in the pages of a book.
— Gordon B. Hinckley, Standing for Something: Ten Neglected Virtues That Will Heal Our Hearts and Homes
Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.
— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
— Gustave Flaubert
Experience is the best teacher.
— Penelope Douglas, Bully
Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today.
— Holbrook Jackson
We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
— Franz Kafka
A word to the unwise.Torch every book.Char every page.Burn every word to ash.Ideas are incombustible.And therein lies your real fear.
— Ellen Hopkins
If a book is well written, I always find it too short.
— Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.
— Andrew Carnegie
A stereotype becomes a stereotype when a significant percentage of the population appears to conform to it.
— Kelley Armstrong, Dime Store Magic
I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words
There weren't any curtains in the windows, and the books that didn't fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a bunch of intellectual refugees.
— Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
I wanted to live among books.
— Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
His habit of reading isolated him: it became such a need that after being in company for some time he grew tired and restless; he was vain of the wider knowledge he had acquired from the perusal of so many books, his mind was alert, and he had not the skill to hide his contempt for his companions' stupidity. They complained that he was conceited; and, since he excelled only in matters which to them were unimportant, they asked satirically what he had to be conceited about. He was developing a sense of humour, and found that he had a knack of saying bitter things, which caught people on the raw; he said them because they amused him, hardly realising how much they hurt, and was much offended when he found that his victims regarded him with active dislike. The humiliations he suffered when he first went to school had caused in him a shrinking from his fellows which he could never entirely overcome; he remained shy and silent. But though he did everything to alienate the sympathy of other boys he longed with all his heart for the popularity which to some was so easily accorded. These from his distance he admired extravagantly; and though he was inclined to be more sarcastic with them than with others, though he made little jokes at their expense, he would have given anything to change places with them.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book. People who are fond of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a moment. The temptation to be unreasonable and snappish is one not easy to manage."It makes me feel as if something had hit me," Sara had told Ermengarde once in confidence. "And as if I want to hit back. I have to remember things quickly to keep from saying something ill-tempered.
— Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess
Reading changes your life. Reading unlocks worlds unknown or forgotten, taking travelers around the world and through time. Reading helps you escape the confines of school and pursue your own education. Through characters – the saints and the sinners, real or imagined – reading shows you how to be a better human being.
— Donalyn Miller, The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.
— G.K. Chesterton
I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
I only read biographies, metaphysics and psychology. I can dream up my own fiction.
— Mae West
I'm pretty sure my addiction to reading has just reached a whole new level.
— Colleen Hoover, Hopeless
There never yet have been, nor are there now, too many good books.
— Martin Luther
I have a realistic grasp of my own strengths and weaknesses. My mind is my weapon. My brother has his sword, King Robert has his warhammer, and I have my mind… and a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge. That’s why I read so much, Jon Snow.
— George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
— Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
It's a strange grief… to die of nostalgia for something you you will never live.
— Alessandro Baricco, Silk
I spent the rest of the day in someone else's story. The rare moments that I put the book down, my own pain returned in burning stabs.
— Amy Plum, Die for Me
I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.
— Naomi Shihab Nye
I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours.
— Dorothy Parker, The Collected Dorothy Parker