50+ Thought-Provoking Quotes on the World of Books and Ideas

“Have you thought of an ending?”Yes, several, and all are dark and unpleasant.”Oh, that won’t do! Books ought to have good endings. How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily ever after?”It will do well, if it ever came to that.”Ah! And where will they live? That’s what I often wonder.”

“What I saw next stopped me dead in my tracks. Books. Not just one or two dozen, but hundreds of them. In crates. In piles on the floor. In bookcases that stretched from floor to ceiling and lined the entire room. I turned around and around in a slow circle, feeling as if I’d just stumbled into Ali Baba’s cave. I was breathless, close to tears, and positively dizzy with greed.”

“I had found a new friend. The surprising thing is where I’d found him – not up a tree or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the hill streams, but in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend. Or that you could slip inside the skin of another. Or travel to another place with marshes, and where, to our ears, the bad people spoke like pirates.”

“…Something we once loved, and love now, in the shape of a book. Maybe eBooks are going to take over, one day, but not until those whizzkids in Silicon Valley invent a way to bend the corners, fold the spine, yellow the pages, add a coffee ring or two and allow the plastic tablet to fall open at a favorite page.”

“Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,Are a substantial world, both pure and good:Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,Our pastime and our happiness will grow.”

“It looked like the sort of book described in library catalogues as ‘slightly foxed’, although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.”

“An hour spent reading is one stolen from paradise.”

“The feel of them (books) and the smell of them. A bookshop was like an Aladdin’s cave for me. Entire worlds and lives can be found just behind that glossy cover. All you had to do was look.”

“If a book is well written, I always find it too short.”

“Books fall open, you fall in”

“The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library,’The medicines of the soul.”

“Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.”

“Books are like truth serum– if you don’t read, you can’t figure out what’s real.”

“We become the books we read.”

“To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.”

“What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.”

“Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.”

“Imagination is what you do with your inspiration.”

“Books can ignite fires in your mind, because they carry ideas for kindling, and art for matches.”

“All of us can think of a book… that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf – that work I abhor – then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.”

“Associate with noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty. But learn to be happy alone. Rely upon your own energies, and so not wait for, or depend on other people.”

“Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.”

“Reading is my passion and my escape since I was 5 years old. Overall, children don’t realize the magic that can live inside their own heads. Better even then any movie.”

“What amazes me is that most days feel useless. I don’t seem to accomplish anything-just a few pages, most of which don’t seem very good. Yet, when I put all those wasted days together, I somehow end up with a book of which I’m very proud.”

“I’d volunteer to go to prison, as long as there are books. Because with books I am free.”

“The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.”

“How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!”

“Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”

“There are essentially two things that will make you wise — the books you read and the people you meet.”

“Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You’ll find what you need to find. Just read.”

“Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.”

“All of us can think of a book… that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf – that work I abhor – then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.”

“To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.”

“Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.”

“These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes them want to live in other ways they can never really be.”

“Censoring books that deal with difficult, adolescent issues does not protect anybody. Quite the opposite. It leaves kids in the darkness and makes them vulnerable. Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance. Our children cannot afford to have the truth of the world withheld from them”

“A novel is not an allegory…. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don’t enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won’t be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.”

“it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.”

“Well, I don’t like the first bit and I don’t know the last bit. So I’m really hoping the middle bit is exceptional.”

“If anything attacked us, we could just panic at it until it went away.”

“I find Bukowski to be so edgy, gritty, and daring that he oozes romance, and if couples read him in bed they would appreciate what they have.”

“Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.”

“Sometimes I think books are the only friends worth having.”

“I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them.”

“I care more about the people in books than the people I see every day.”

“I have gone to [this bookshop] for years, always finding the one book I wanted – and then three more I hadn’t known I wanted.”

“When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness.”

“Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with books, I felt myself relax and was suddenly at peace.”

“The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.”

“The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.”