50+ Best Book Quotes to Ignite Your Imagination & Love for Reading

“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.”

“Reading radically changed the course of my life, and I did not aim to gain any certificates to improve my position, but rather I wanted to live intellectually.”

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”

“I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.”

“Some books leave us free and some books make us free.”

“Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.”

“Reading is probably another way of being in a place.”

“A book is a device to ignite the imagination.”

“When I discovered libraries, it was like having Christmas every day.”

“It was amazing how many books one could fit into a room, assuming one didn’t want to move around very much.”

“In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.(Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.)”

“Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.”

“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.”

“Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.”

“Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.”

“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.”

“I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructed, a feeling there is something more than the mundane, and a reason for our plodding.”

“And books, they offer one hope — that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.”

“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.”

“Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.”

“I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.”

“Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.”

“Come with me,’ Mom says.To the library. Books and summertimego together.”

“those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers…”

“Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks.”

“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.”

“I only read biographies, metaphysics and psychology. I can dream up my own fiction.”

“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’t it?”

“I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.”

“Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I’ll waste no time reading it.”

“If your library is not ‘unsafe,’it probably isn’t doing its job.”

“Libraries should be open to all – except the censor.”

“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.”

“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.”

“When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.”

“Even a book can be dangerous in the wrong hands, and when that happens, you blame the hands, but you also read the book.”

“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 world.”

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“The Enduring Essence of Books”

“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.”

“My hands could be considered deadly weapons. You see, I write with both of them.”

“I know the X’s and O’s of football. I just don’t know the other 24 letters. And as a writer, this bothers me.”

“It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part.”

“Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I’ve read and what I haven’t read.”

“When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.”

“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.”

“A woman’s destiny, they say, is not fulfilled until she holds in her arms her own little book.”

“Nobody steals books but your friends.”

“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.”

“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.”