c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I inhaled the musty, leathery, old-papery scent and a shiver passed over me. If I had any idea of heaven, it was this: shelves and shelves of books, ten times as many as were upstairs, each with stories or pictures more exciting and beautiful than the next, and two overstuffed chairs big enough for me to sleep in.
— Clay Carmichael, Wild Things
Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
This is a book. It is a book I found in a box. I found the box in the attic. The box was in the attic, under the eaves. The attic was hot and still. The air was stale with dust. The dust was from old pictures and books. The dust in the air was made up of the book I found. I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it.
— P. Harding
A bran' new book is a beautiful thing, all promise and fresh pages, the neatly squared spine, the brisk sense of a journey beginning. But a well-worn book also has its pleasures, the soft caress and give of the paper's edges, the comfort, like an old shawl, of an oft-read story.
— Lewis Buzbee, The Haunting of Charles Dickens
Lacey-girl, books take you anywhere. Any place you want to go. You remember that always.
— Carol Lynch Williams, Miles from Ordinary
I was thinking, "So, I’m Emperor, am I? What nonsense! But at least I'll be able to make people read my books now.
— Robert Graves, I, Claudius
Leaving behind books is even more beautiful — there are far too many children.
— Marguerite Yourcenar
You're not allowed to say anything about books because they're books, and books are, you know, God.
— Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down
I spent much of my prison time reading. I must have read over 200 large books, mostly fictional stories about the American pioneers, the Vikings, Mafia, etc. As long as I was engrossed in a book, I was not in prison. Reading was my escape.
— Frazier Glenn Miller, A White Man Speaks Out
They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
Jack shook his head. 'Books. What is it with women and books? My sisters were the same. They were always buying books for boys they fancied.'Ellie bent down and picked up the stone and put it on the table. 'It's like sending a love letter without having to write it yourself,' she said softly.
— Hazel Osmond, Who's Afraid of Mr Wolfe?
There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction. As Police Commissioner it was my duty to deal with all kinds of squalid misery and hideous and unspeakable infamy, and I should have been worse than a coward if I had shrunk from doing what was necessary; but there would have been no use whatever in my reading novels detailing all this misery and squalor and crime, or at least in reading them as a steady thing. Now and then there is a powerful but sad story which really is interesting and which really does good; but normally the books which do good and the books which healthy people find interesting are those which are not in the least of the sugar-candy variety, but which, while portraying foulness and suffering when they must be portrayed, yet have a joyous as well as a noble side.
— Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt's Letters to His Children
She found herself longing for home-not just for the hotel but for New York and all the real novels that she could lose herself in there.
— Anna Godbersen, Envy
Do you know what it is?' [Toby] said thoughtfully. 'It's that they haven't had anything really awful happen to them. No wonder they seem so superficial and unfeeling.' It was certainly an interesting theory, ... [but] surely one didn't need to have suffered in order to possess empathy for those who had? All it required was a bit of imagination and a well-stocked library.
— Michelle   Cooper, The FitzOsbornes in Exile
Reading was not an escape for her, any more than it is for me. It was an aspect of direct experience. She distinguished, of course, between the fictional world and the real one, in which she had to prepare dinners and so on. Still, for us, the fictional world was an extension of the real, and in no way a substitute for it, or refuge from it. Any more than sleeping is a substitute for waking." (Jincy Willett)
— Jincy Willett, Winner of the National Book Award
In 1800s Paris, women were prohibited from studying the nude human form, because this would've ruined the wedding-night surprise. (Surprise! It's a penis.)
— Cracked.com, You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News
Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed.
— Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
Though my appetite for food grew frail, my hunger for books was constant.
— Diane Setterfield
Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.
— Annie Dillard, An American Childhood
Books are never harmless...they either strengthen us or they weaken us in our faith. Some of them do this even as they entertain us, others as they teach us. In an invisible way their teaching penetrates into our hearts and souls, to continue its work inside, and we inhale the spirit of these books as healing or poisonous vapors. They can bring the greatest benefits and the greatest ruin, for from their ideas that they spread come the deeds of the future.
— Peter Prange, The Philosopher's Kiss
Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist.
— Adam Gopnik
I go downstairs and the books blink at me from the shelves. Or stare. In a trick of the light, a row of them seems to shift very slightly, like a curtain blown by the breeze through an open window. Red is next to blue is next to cream is adjacent to beige. But when I look again, cream is next to green is next to black. A tall book shelters a small book, a huge Folio bullies a cowering line of Quartos. A child's nursery rhyme book does not have the language in which to speak to a Latin dictionary. Chaucer does not know the words in which Henry James communicates but here they are forced to live together, forever speechless.
— Susan Hill, Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home
Books appear to be the most immediate instruments of speculative delight.
— Richard de Bury, The Love of Books: The Philobiblion of Richard de Bury
I love vast libraries; yet there is a doubt,If one be better with them or without,Unless he use them wisely, and, indeed,Knows the high art of what and how to read.
— John Godfrey Saxe
This book (Jarod Kintz's book) is trash. I mean, I assume it is, because that's where I found it while scrounging for lunch. However, I must admit that I haven't read it. I would have, but I am homeless, mainly due to my illiteracy (though Big Government, Keynesian monetary policy, and my struggle with alcoholism certainly played a large role).
— Dora J. Arod
A book without words is a mind without thought.
— Catherine Forbes
I'd always admired writers. I'd always loved words on a page. Somehow, words seemed to bypass image and get straight to the heart of things. Somehow, words seemed big enough to contain pain, and sentences could pull broken bits together.
— Rosie O'Donnell, Find Me
Good characters make you feel like you have new friends, don’t they? You have to re-read the books just to visit with them again. Grace Awakening. Book one: Awakening Dreams
— Shawn L. Bird, Awakening Dreams
You are the same today that you are going to be five years from now except for two things: the people with whom you associate and the books you read.
— Charles Jones
[Books are] vital to learning. Half the population don't go to football matches but that doesn't make football any less important.
— John Sutherland
All books are either dreams or swords.
— Amy Lowell
The only things that erased my lonliness were written works
— Novala Takemoto
It's red hot, mate. I hate to think of this sort of book getting in the wrong hands. As soon as I've finished this, I shall recommend they ban it.
— Tony Hancock
Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature.
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double it would be cut down to two 20,000-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as ‘Master of Chaos’ and the New Testament as ‘The Thing With Three Souls.
— Terry Carr
If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children's books suddenly turn up very high on the list.
— Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
Dream up a book on Monday, publish it on Friday.
— Jill Novak
There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
To Senor Sempere, the best friend a book could ever have: you opened the doors to the world for me and showed me how to go through them.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game
...I am still librarian in your house, for I never was dismissed, and never gave up the office. Now I am librarian here as well.''But you have just told me you were sexton here!''So I am. It is much the same profession. Except you are a true sexton, books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!
— George MacDonald, Lilith
Almost I feel the pulsebeat of the ages, Now swift, now slow, beneath my fingertips.The heartthrobs of the prophets and the sagesBeat through these bindings; and my quick hand slipsOld books from dusty shelves, in eager seekingFor truths the flaming tongues of the ancients tell;For the words of wisdom that they still are speakingAs clearly as an echoing silver bell.Here is the melody that lies foreverAt the deep heart of living; here we keepThe accurate recorded discs that neverCan be quite silenced, though their makers sleepThe still deep sleep, so long as a seeker findsThe indelible imprint of their moving minds.
— Grace Noll Crowell
I would prefer to have one comfortable room well stocked with books to all you could give me in the way of decoration which the highest art could supply.
— John Bright
The book is man's best invention so far.
— Carolina Maria de Jesus
If you can read & write then the opportunities are endless, if you just believe in yourself then anything is possible, you can become anyone and do anything, what’s more is, you can take others with you!
— Philip L. Moore
It had a crisp paper jacket, unlike the paper-covered library books I was used to, and the way the pages parted, I could tell I was the first to open it ... I valued that half-dream state of being lost in a book so much that I limited the number of pages I let myself read each day in order to put off the inevitable end, my banishment from that world. I still do this. 
— Allison Hoover Bartlett, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession
Stories, A Portal to Anywhere but Here.
— Joshua Caleb
Book collecting is a full-time occupation, and one wouldn't get far if one took time off for frivolities like reading.
— A.N.L. Munby
Some men borrow books some men steal books and others beg presentation copies from the author. 
— James Jeffrey Roche
The worst book imaginable has a redeeming quality if it gets a young person to read.
— Tiffini Johnson, The Character
To live among such excellent helps as our libraries afford, to have so many silent wise companions whenever we please.
— Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor
A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never. 
— Henry Ward Beecher
The novel as a form is usually seen to be moral if its readers consider freedom, individuality, democracy, privacy, social connection, tolerance and hope to be morally good, but it is not considered moral if the highest values of a society are adherence to rules and traditional mores, the maintenance of hierarchical relationships, and absolute ideas of right and wrong. Any society based on the latter will find novels inherently immoral and subversive.
— Jane Smiley
You are that to me, an oasis. You drug me and at the same time you give me strength.
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
He had a little single-story house, three bedrooms, a full bathroom and a half bathroom, a combined kitchen-living room-dining room with windows that faced west, a small brick porch where there was a wooden bench worn by the wind that came down from the mountains and the sea, the wind from the north, the wind through the gaps, the wind that smelled like smoke and came from the south. He had books he'd kept for more than twenty-five years. Not many. All of them old. He had books he'd bought in the last ten years, books he didn't mind lending, books that could've been lost or stolen for all he cared. He had books that he sometimes received neatly packaged and with unfamiliar return addresses, books he didn't even open anymore. He had a yard perfect for growing grass and planting flowers, but he didn't know what flowers would do best there--flowers, as opposed to cacti or succulents. There would be time (so he thought) for gardening. He had a wooden gate that needed a coat of paint. He had a monthly salary.
— Roberto Bolaño, 2666
There were pools of light among the stacks, directly beneath the bulbs which Philip had switched on, but it was now with an unexpected fearfulness that he saw how the books stretched away into the darkness. They seemed to expand as soon as they reached the shadows, creating some dark world where there was no beginning and no end, no story, no meaning. And if you crossed the threshold into that world, you would be surrounded by words; you would crush them beneath your feet, you would knock against them with your head and arms, but if you tried to grasp them they would melt away. Philip did not dare turn his back upon these books. Not yet. It was almost, he thought, as if they had been speaking to each other while he slept.
— Peter Ackroyd
Of all books printed, probably not more than half are ever read. Many are embalmed in public libraries; many go into private quarters to fill spaces; many are glanced at and put away...scarcely opened until the fire needs kindling. The most ardent book-lovers are not always the greatest readers; indeed, the rabid bibliomaniac seldom reads at all. To him books are as ducats to the miser, something to be hoarded and not employed... So pleasant it is to buy book; so tiresome to utilize them.
— Flora Haines Loughead
Habent sua fata libelli. (Books have their own destinies.)
— Terentianus Maurus, De Syllabis
In this instant of danger they realized they were each other's reason for living, and into this instant they threw their whole being.
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books. It is our habit to think outdoors - walking, leaping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or near the sea where even the trails become thoughtful.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
So many broken promises, each day an aborted wish, a lost object, a misplaced unread book, cluttering the room like an attic with discarded possessions.
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
Every word spoken in the past accumulated forms and colors in the self. What flows through the veins besides blood is the distillation of every act committed, the sediment of all the visions, wishes, dreams and experiences. All the past emotions converge to tint the skin and flavor the lips, to regulate the pulse and produce crystals in the eyes.
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
I rode my bike home and did the one thing that always helped when things weren't going well. I read. Books were my refuge. Getting lost in a solid adventure story was the best way I knew of to turn off reality.
— D.J. MacHale, The Light
And it is that which draws me to you, too, for you are the tropics, you have the sun in you, and the softness and the clarity...
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
The magic beauty of simultaneity, to see the loved one rushing toward you at the same moment you are rushing toward him, the magic power of meeting, exactly at midnight to achieve union, the illusion of one common rhythm achieved by overcoming obstacles, deserting friends, breaking other bonds - all this was soon dissolved by his laziness, by his habit of missing every moment, of never keeping his word, of living perversely in a state of chaos, of swimming more naturally in a sea of failed intentions, broken promises, and aborted wishes
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
His entire body was pleading for reassurance, and if her whole love was not enough what else could she give him to cure his doubt?
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Books—all books—are complicated things, muttering at us in different contradictory voices, refusing to stay the same when we go back to them. Tying them down too much robs of them of the magic.
— Andrew Rilstone
No two readers can or will ever read the same book, because the reader builds the book in collaboration with the author.
— Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction
Any book is my kind of book that I can read with delight.
— A. Edward Newton, End Papers: Literary Recreations
No man and woman know what will be born in the darkness of their intermingling; so much besides children, so many invisible births, exchanges of soul and character, blossoming of unknown selves, liberation of hidden treasures, buried fantasies...
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
The potion drunk by lovers is prepared by no one but themselves. The potion is the sum of one's whole existence.
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.
— Aaron Swartz
Without a doubt,I must read,all the booksI've read about.See the artworkshung on hooks,that I have only,seen in books.
— Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure
I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I cannot live without reading.
— Aidan Chambers, This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn
In the end, what makes a book valuable is not the paper it’s printed on, but the thousands of hours of work by dozens of people who are dedicated to creating the best possible reading experience for you.
— John Green
The point is, Jenna, no one is normal or perfect like that house you see across the street. Everyone suffers from their own struggles, whether they’re big or small.
— E.L. Montes, Perfectly Damaged
Ten minutes of careful searching later, Maelyn faced the dismal truth - she was bookless.
— Anita Valle, Maelyn
There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don't really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping.
— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive
Have you ever looked at, say, a picture or a great building or read a paragraph in a book and felt the world suddenly expand and, in the same instant, contract and harden into a kernel of perfect purity? Do you know what I mean? Everything suddenly fits, everything's in its place.
— Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries
He who studies old books will always find in them something new, and he who reads new books will always find in them something old.
— Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race
Books require titles reading them doesn't 
— Alan Moore, Lost Girls
Usually, I set one foot in a library and I feel my own internal volume lower. A library is a physical equivalent of a sigh. It’s the silence, sure, but it’s also the certainty of all those books, the way they stand side by side with their still, calm conviction. It’s the reassurance of knowledge in the face of confusion.
— Deb Caletti, The Last Forever
They were waiting for me in the books and in stories, after all, hiding inside the twenty six characters and a handful of punctuation marks. These letters and words, when placed in the right order, would conjure all manner of exotic beasts and people from the shadows, would reveal the motives and minds of insects and of cats. They were spells, spelled with words to make worlds, waiting for me, in the pages of books.
— Neil Gaiman, Unnatural Creatures
Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.
— Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old.
— C.S. Lewis
Books are the salt of life; without them, there is no flavor.
— Cheryl Koevoet
Literature cannot be imposed it must be discovered. 
— Amy Joy
Reading makes me feel like I've lived a thousand lives in addition to my own.
— Arlaina Tibensky
I dusted my books off, placing each one—sorted alphabetically and by genre—on the shelves Dad installed. What some people might call “anal,” I’d call efficient. What good was it to have a book if you couldn’t find it when you wanted it?
— Aileen Erin, Becoming Alpha
No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book.
— Marcel Proust, Days of Reading
You got shook and shook till there was nothing left. You lost your name and your body and your self and you just didn't care.
— Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
I do not want to just read books I want to crawl inside them and live there. 
— Anonymous
The love I knew was from books..
— Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Hate will cause you to "catch a case". Release yourself from your own personal jail before you are put in the real one for life! It ain't worth it!!
— Anita R. Sneed-Carter
They were steaming out of the station before Maia asked, 'Was it books in the trunk?''It was books, admitted Miss Minton.And Maia said, 'Good.
— Eva Ibbotson, Journey to the River Sea
I just love the smell of an old book store and the feel of the crisp pages along my fingertips.
— Leah Spiegel, Foolish Games
She read all sorts of things: travels, and sermons, and old magazines. Nothing was so dull that she couldn't get through with it. Anything really interesting absorbed her so that she never knew what was going on about her. The little girls to whose houses she went visiting had found this out, and always hid away their story-books when she was expected to tea. If they didn't do this, she was sure to pick one up and plunge in, and then it was no use to call her, or tug at her dress, for she neither saw nor heard anything more, till it was time to go home.
— Susan Coolidge, What Katy Did
As soon as I got into the library I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I got a whiff of the leather on all the old books, a smell that got real strong if you picked one of them up and stuck your nose real close to it when you turned the pages. Then there was the the smell of the cloth that covered the brand-new books, books that made a splitting sound when you opened them. Then I could sniff the the paper, that soft, powdery, drowsy smell that comes off the page in little puffs when you're reading something or looking at some pictures, kind of hypnotizing smell.I think it's the smell that makes so many folks fall asleep in the library. You'll see someone turn a page and you can imagine a puff of page powder coming up real slow and easy until it starts piling on a person's eyelashes, weighing their eyes down so much they stay down a little longer after each blink and finally making them so heavy that they just don't come back up at all. Then their mouths open and their heads start bouncing up and down like they're bobbing in a big tub of of water for apples and before you know it... they're out cold and their face thunks smack-dab on the book.That's the part that makes librarians the maddest. They get real upset if folks start drooling in the books
— Christopher Paul Curtis, Bud, Not Buddy
DEAR DI­ARYYou are greater than the BibleAnd the Con­fer­ence of the BirdsAnd the Up­an­ishadsAll put to­geth­erYou are more se­vereThan the Scrip­turesAnd Ham­mura­bi’s CodeMore dan­ger­ous than Luther’s pa­perNailed to the Cathe­dral doorYou are sweet­erThan the Song of SongsMight­ier by farThan the Epic of Gil­gameshAnd braverThan the Sagas of Ice­landI bow my head in grat­itudeTo the ones who give their livesTo keep the se­cretThe dai­ly se­cretUn­der lock and keyDear Di­aryI mean no dis­re­spectBut you are more sub­limeThan any Sa­cred TextSome­times just a listOf my eventsIs holi­er than the Bill of RightsAnd more in­tense
— Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing
We can trace the communitarian fantasy that lies at the root of all humanism back to the model of a literary society, in which participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring messages. At the heart of humanism so understood we discover a cult or club fantasy: the dream of the portentous solidarity of those who have been chosen to be allowed to read. In the ancient world—indeed, until the dawn of the modern nation-states—the power of reading actually did mean something like membership of a secret elite; linguistic knowledge once counted in many places as the provenance of sorcery. In Middle English the word 'glamour' developed out of the word 'grammar'. The person who could read would be thought easily capable of other impossibilities.
— Peter Sloterdijk
There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest, “I want you to love her, too!” It is a jealous passion also. He feels a little indignant if he finds that any one else has discovered the book, too.
— Christopher Morley
And tell them all about the books you've read. Better still, buy some more books and read them. That's an order. You can never read too many books.
— P.B. Kerr, The Akhenaten Adventure
In a book, even the real bastards can't hurt you. And you can never loose a friend you make in a book. When you get to a sad part, no one's there to see you cry. Or wonder why you don't cry when you should.
— Dean Koontz, Chase
LibrariesAreNeccessaryGardens,UnsurpassedAtGrowingExcitement
— J. Patrick Lewis, Please Bury Me in the Library
Let me begin with a heartfelt confession.I admit it. I am a biblioholic, one who loves books and whose life would seem incomplete without them. I am an addict, with a compulsive need to stop by nearly any bookstore I pass in order to get my fix. Books are an essential part of my life, the place where I have spent many unforgettable moments. For me, reading is one of the most enjoyable ways to pass a rainy afternoon or a leisurely summer day. I crave the knowledge and insights that truly great books bring into my life and can spend transported hours scouring used book stores for volumes which "I simply must have". I love the smell and feel of well-loved books and the look of a bookcase full of books waiting to be taken down and read.
— Terry W. Glaspey, Book Lover's Guide to Great Reading: A Guided Tour of Classic & Contemporary Literature
Choose thy friends like thy books, few but choice
— Howell James
Reading's not a luxury, art's not a luxury. It's about your soul, and it's about yourself. And if reading is a luxury, being human is a luxury
— Jeanette Winterson
I do lend my books, but I have to be a bit selective because my marginalia are so incriminating.” --Alison Bechdel
— Leah Price, Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books
I've had many more thousands of books in my possession than my shelves at home would indicate. At one time, I tried to keep them all, but that quest soon became impossible; I now only keep the ones I'm sure I'm going to reread, the ones I'm definitely going to read before I die, and the ones I can't bear to part with because of an aesthetic or emotional attachment.
— Lewis Buzbee, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, a History
I look back now with amazement at the small accidents that put certain books before me.
— Vince Passaro
Myrna could spend happy hours browsing bookcases. She felt if she could just get a good look at a person’s bookcase and their grocery cart, she’d pretty much know who they were.
— Louise Penny, Still Life
Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.
— Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man
Real lives have no end. Real books have no end.
— Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio, The Book of Flights
Now, public libraries are most admirable institutions, but they have one irritating custom. They want their books back.
— Cecil B. DeMille, The Autobiography of Cecil B. Demille
Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.
— Roberto Bolaño, Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003
Fenworth owned a world-famous library. More rooms held books than beds. Pillows stuffed in niches and comfortable chairs scattered throughout each room offered abundant paces to curl up and read.
— Donita K. Paul, DragonQuest
Our library isn't very extensive," said Anne, "but every book in it is a friend. We've picked our books up through the years, here and there, never buying one until we had first read it and knew that it belonged to the race of Joseph.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne's House of Dreams
There were thousands of brown books in leather bindings, some chained to the book-shelves and others propped against each other as if they had had too much to drink and did not really trust themselves. These gave out a smell of must and solid brownness which was most secure.
— T.H. White, The Once and Future King
The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about.” Mallarmé repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said; “tout aboutit en un livre,” everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmé speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is the same; the idea that we are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights
So -- I confess I have been a rake at reading. I have read those things which I ought not to have read, and I have not read those things which I ought to have read, and there is no health in me -- if by health you mean an inclusive and coherent knowledge of any body of great literature. I can only protest, like all rakes in their shameful senescence, that I have had a good time.
— Robertson Davies, The Merry Heart: Reflections on Reading Writing & the World of Books
I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth a hundred 'great books' - and one brave deed is worth a thousand.
— Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.
— Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger's Child
Books?" Ridley looked disgusted. "Carry?
— Kami Garcia
But really it says everything that’s wrong about the publishing industry, that a quarter of a million people bought and read a sex and shopping novel that wasn’t even written by one of those footballer girlfriends, and yet most of the shortlisted titles on the Orange Prize, which is an award for women writers, don’t even sell ten thousand copies. It’s just not right.
— Sarra Manning, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me
In fact, when I finally shuffle off this mortalcoil, you will have to pry a book out of my cold, dead hands.
— Michael Cart
Books have always been among my most trusted of friends, Mr. Linden replied. The best of them allow the mind to wander wherever the author's musings lead.
— Walter Dean Myers
Use more caution the next time you make a reading selection. Books, you know, are a lot like people, and each and every one of us is ultimately judged by the company we keep
— Ethan Russell Erway, Aesop Revisited: Book 1
Everybody in the world ought to care for books, and if there are some who do not, why that is a perfectly convincing reason why books ought to be given to them, to be a rebuke to them and, perchance, to rescue them from the error of their ways.
— Willis Johnson
A self without a shelf remains cryptic a home without books naked. 
— Leah Price, Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books
The story was so thoroughly believed that a Springfield, Massachusetts, missionary society resolved to send missionaries to the moon to convert and civilize the bat-men, apparently unaware that bat-men have lost all faith since they saw their parents gunned down in that alleyway.
— Cracked.com, You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News
They were the sisterhood: their mothers at a younger age.
— Ann Brashares, The Second Summer of the Sisterhood
It must be a really great book because one can read it as a boy in one way, and then re-read it in middle life and get something very different out of it - and that to my mind is one of the best tests.
— C.S. Lewis
I don't know why we stopped reading together, but gradually we were not doing it regularly, and then without realizing it was happening we were reading different books, and gradually we came not to care about the book the other one was reading, because it was not the book we were reading, and we became bored and drifted off when the other one talked about his book. What we were doing, reading different books, was furnishing different rooms, constructing separate worlds almost, in which we could sit and be ourselves again. Of course those were rooms in which we each sat alone, and we gradually spent more and more time in them and less and less in the house we lived in together.
— Sam Savage, Glass
All told, she owned fourteen books, but she saw her story as being made up predominantly of ten of them. Of those ten, six were stolen, one showed up at the kitchen table, two were made for her by a hidden Jew, and one was delivered by a soft, yellow-dressed afternoon.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Materializations are often best produced in rooms where there are books. I cannot think of any time when materialization was in any way hampered by the presence of books.
— Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Please, no matter how we advance in technology please don't abandon the book-there is nothing in our material world more beautiful than a book.
— Patti Smith
There was a time in the ancient world - a very long time - in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books. Where to put them all? How to organize them on the groaning shelves? How to hold the profusion of knowledge in one's head? The loss of this plenitude would have been virtually inconceivable to anyone living in its midst. Then, not all at once but with the cumulative force of a mass extinction, the whole enterprise came to an end. What looked stable turned out to be fragile, and what had seemed for all time was only for the time being.
— Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
I was never very good with either my hands or feet. It always seemed to me they'd just been stuck on as an afterthought during my making. Dreams didn't translate through sports, or music, dancing, carpentry, plumbing. I was the bookish kid, more at home in the pages of a fantasy than in the room in the town on the planet.
— Steve Rasnic Tem, The Man on the Ceiling
Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar. You have to hold it, you have to read it.
— Ben Elton, Blind Faith
You could never be certain what you would find in a book that had spent time with someone else.
— Erica Bauermeister
And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.
— Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men
You'll grow devilish fat upon this paper-diet!
— William Congreve
Back then I could not understand one word of what I read.Reading did, however, give me heart. Even if you cannot understand what you are reading you can get something from books.
— Peter Høeg
Where's your common sense? None of those books agree with each other. You've been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived. Come on now!
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Some men," Flamel irresistibly added, "think of books merely as tools, others as tooling. I'm between the two; there are days when I use them as scenery, other days when I want them as society; so that, as you see, my library represents a makeshift compromise between looks and brains, and the collectors look down on me almost as much as the students.
— Edith Wharton, The Touchstone
I've always believed in spreading the gospel of good books.
— S. Evan Townsend
Escapism sold books, to be sure, but not nearly as many as were sold by exposing America’s flaws and making the average American reader (and book club member) look closely at his or her most cherished social assumptions. Americans might not be eager to accept integration, feminism, homosexuality, juvenile delinquency, and the drug culture– or to shoulder the blame for the existence of these problems– but they were certainly willing to read about them.
— Michael Korda, Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller, 1900-1999
The evils arising from the loss of her uncle were neither trifling nor likely to lessen; and when thought had been freely indulged, in contrasting the past and the present, the employment of mind and dissipation of unpleasant ideas which only reading could produce made her thankfully turn to a book.
— Jane Austen
So we may use our books to form a barricade against the world,interweaving their words with our own to ward off the heat of the day.
— Peter Ackroyd, English Music
I am not man or beast; I am bibliosexual, and a seedy bibliosexual who haunts the streets, laden with carrier bags held by blistered fingers, stooping under the weight of the rucksack that has brought on sciatica and a Dickensian demeanour.
— Robin Ince, Robin Ince's Bad Book Club: One Man's Quest to Uncover the Books that Time Forgot
At times, I have been convinced that books hold all the material of life--at least all the stuff that fits between an A and a Z.
— Abelardo Morell, A Book of Books
There may be little room for the display of this supreme qualification in the retail book business, but there is room for some. Be enterprising. Get good people about you. Make your shop windows and your shops attractive. The fact that so many young men and women enter the teaching profession shows that there are still some people willing to scrape along on comparatively little money for the pleasure of following an occupation in which they delight. It is as true to-day as it was in Chaucer's time that there is a class of men who "gladly learn and gladly teach," and our college trustees and overseers and rich alumni take advantage of this and expect them to live on wages which an expert chauffeur would regard as insufficient. Any bookshop worthy of survival can offer inducements at least as great as the average school or college. Under pleasant conditions you will meet pleasant people, for the most part, whom you can teach and form whom you may learn something.
— A. Edward Newton, A Magnificent Farce And Other Diversions Of A Book Collector
Roger Bacon held that three classes of substance were capable of magic: the herbal, the mineral, and the verbal. With their leaves of fiber, their inks of copperas and soot, and their words, books are an amalgam of the three.
— Matthew Battles, Library: An Unquiet History
We knew the difference between that which cannot be expressed and that which must. We understood that while words are a path taking us only so far, they are a requisite to the journey. They are like road maps that show us which way to go.
— Laura Bynum, Veracity
And reading this way - with no deadline, no agenda - she remembered why she loved literature so much. It was like fucking a new man and knowing that he had made other women come, but that when she came it would be an unshareable, untranslatable pleasure. She opened herself up to her books, and the words got inside her and fucked her senseless.
— Emily Maguire, Taming the Beast
Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message from the dead - from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.
— Charles Kingsley
You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.
— Michael Cunningham, The Hours
‎'He often envied people who hadn't read his favourite books. They had such happiness before them.
— Charles Finch, A Stranger in Mayfair
I decide a book is bad if I get angrier and angrier as I read it.
— Daniel T. O'Hara
It would be unfair to say that I prefer the back of a book to its contents, but it is true that the sight of a lot of books gives me the hope that I may some day read them, which sometimes develops into the belief that I have read them.
— Kenneth Clark, Another Part of the Wood : A Self Portrait
I generally read every night befi=ore I fall asleep: Brad does too. I find it comforting to lie beside my husband, each of us with a book in our hands. I see it as a period of calm and intimacy, and as the perfect metaphor-together, yet individual-for our marriage.
— Debbie Macomber, Summer on Blossom Street
Books are like bacon for the mind.
— Thomas F. Shubnell
Ignatius B. Samson, welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game
The book and I secret ourselvesBehind the paneled door.We merge our thoughts in retrospectOf ancient mystic lore.We spend a pleasant quiet hour,Nor know it passed us by...The easy chair, the shaded lamp,A well-loved book and I.
— Edna Moore Schultz
The e-reading revolution may have reached our shores this year but it has yet to reckon with Australia's summer holidays. Intense sunlight plays havoc with screens and the sand invades every nook and cranny, so as convenient and sexy as your new iPad may be, the battered paperback, its pages pocked and swollen from contact with briny hands, will likely remain the beach format of choice for a few years yet.
— Geordie Williamson
The finest music in the room is that which streams out to the ear of the spirit in many an exquisite strain from the little shelf of books on the opposite wall. Every volume there is an instrument which some melodist of the mind created and set vibrating with music, as a flower shakes out its perfume or a star shakes out its light. Only listen, and they soothe all care, as though the silken-soft leaves of poppies had been made vocal and poured into the ear.
— James Lane Allen
Who can say how many lives have been saved by books?
— Michelle Cliff, Everything Is Now: New and Collected Stories
One generation's pleasure became a burden for another. Hence, entire collections from father to son were sold for a song, and the vendors, knowing nothing about literature, would place a price on the books. (about secondhand literature book)
— Murzban F. Shroff, Breathless in Bombay
It may be whispered to those uninitiated people who are anxious to know the habits and make the acquaintance of men of letters, that there are no race of people who talk about books, or, perhaps, who read books, so little as literary men.
— William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis: His Fortunes And Misfortunes, His Friends And His Greatest Enemy
I was no longer able to hear the music that issues from a decent piece of prose.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game
Its appearance was greeted with cries of rapture, and following a brief struggle over possesion of the volume, William rescued it before it should be torn to pieces, but allowed himself to be induced to read some of the passages aloud, his dramatic rendering being greeted by wolflike howls of enthusiasim and hails of live pits.
— Diana Gabaldon
No matter how strong you are, you cannot hold open the jaws of a great-white shark with your bare hands... that can do your brain.
— Ivan Stoikov
Chicken Soup for the Soul". You've heard of these books, am I right? We've all heard of them. But I wonder if you're aware of just how many "Chicken Soup" books exist on the planet. No offense, but I doubt it. I doubt it because in the time it would take you to come up with a number, the number would have become obsolete. Even as you read this, in some quiet, fecund place, another "Chicken Soup" book is being born.
— Marisa de los Santos, Belong to Me
Remain humble in your journey as an author and your audience will embrace you. Remain grateful for every publicity opportunity that comes your way, and the media will embrace you.
— Linda F. Radke
The door could not be heard slamming; they had probably left it open, as is the custom in homes where a great misfortune has occurred.
— Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
Don't forget, and don't let your reader forget, that the small world in which you have held him for the last hour or two hasn't ended. Be aware, and make him aware, that tomorrow all of its remaining inhabitants will pick up the broken fragments of their lives, and carry on.
— Joseph Hansen
I love books. If they are good books, I love them even more. But even if they are bad books, I still love them.
— Hugo Chávez
Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.
— William Saroyan
Books, in the plural lose their solidity of substance and become a gas, filling all available space.
— John Derbyshire
Libraries can in general be too narrow or too wide for the soul.
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
But stories are like people, Atticus. Loving them doesn’t make them perfect. You try to cherish their virtues and overlook their flaws. The flaws are still there, though. ""But you don’t get mad. Not like Pop does.""No, that’s true, I don’t get mad. Not at stories. They do disappoint me sometimes." He looked at the shelves. "Sometimes, they stab me in the heart.
— Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country