50+ Reading Quotes: Dive Deeper into the World of Books

“Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.”

“Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.(Acceptance speech, National Book Award 2010 (Nonfiction), November 17, 2010)”

“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.”

“Of course I loved books more than people.”

“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.”

“You’re never alone when you’re reading a book.”

“No furniture is so charming as books.”

“The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.”

“Stories are important, the monster said. They can be more important than anything. If they carry the truth.”

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”

“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.”

“Generally speaking, books don’t cause much harm. Except when you read them, that is. Then they cause all kinds of problems.”

“My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.”

“If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.”

“The best stories don’t come from good vs. bad”but “good vs. good.””

“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.”

“Only the ship is made of books, its sails thousands of overlapping pages, and the sea it floats upon is dark black ink.”

“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.”

“My arms are killing me. I didn’t know words could be so heavy.”

“When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values.”

“Literature is news that stays news.”

“V-Day…if you need this one day in a year to show everyone else you truly care for “your loved one” I think it’s quite stupid. I hate this commercialism. It’s all artificial, and has nothing to do with real love.”

“Elend: I kind of lost track of time…Breeze: For two hours?Elend: There were books involved.”

“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.”

“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 day.(Interview with The Booklovers blog, September 2010)”

“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.”

“Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait on line for Santa, or some such inconvenience.”

“My head’ll explode if I continue with this escapism.”

“When a stargirl cries, she sheds not tears but light.”

“One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.”

“Rule number one: Don’t fuck with librarians.”

“It’s a reflex. Hear a bell, get food. See an undead, throw a knife. Same thing, really.”

“The world must be all fucked up,he said then, “when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.””

“No two persons ever read the same book.”

“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.”

“Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines — it’s hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.”

“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.”

“As always, one of her books was next to her.”

“More people are leaving TV behind to read my books than ever before. In the last year alone I gained over two readers (three, to be exact). So I’d like to take a moment and say thanks mom, dad, and kidnap victim I keep chained in the basement.”

“When you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.”

“I was with book, as a woman is with child.”