Quotes about Books

Secondhand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.

That's the thing about some librarians - they love telling you a look is out of print, borrowed, lost, or not even written yet.
I have a list of titles that I leave at the desk, because they are bound to be written some day, and it's best to be ahead of the queue.

In the act of writing, the writer externalizes his or her thoughts. The writer enters into a reflective and reflexive relationship with the written page, a relationship in which thoughts are bodied forth. It becomes difficult to say where thinking ends and writing begins, where the mind ends and the writing space begins. With any technique of writing - on stone or clay, papyrus or paper, and particularly on the computer screen - the writer comes to regard the mind itself as a writing space. The writing space becomes a metaphor, in fact literate culture's root metaphor, for the human mind.

Books can be posessive, can't they?  You're walking around in a bookstore and a certain one will jump out at you, like it had moved
there on its own, just to get your attention.  Sometimes what's inside will change your life...

Books never appeared in the bathroom.  Like cats, they hated water.

Whether she liked it or not, books always appeared when she needed them.

Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves.

The book of love has music in it
In fact that's where music comes from
Some of it is just transcendental
Some of it is just really dumb

Gather up your telegrams
Your faded pictures, best laid plans
Books and postcards, 45's
Every sunset in the sky

Carry with you maps and string, flashlights
Friends who make you sing
And stars to help you find your place
Music, hope and amazing grace

Maybe what we leave
Is nothing but a tangled little mystery
Maybe what we take
Is nothing that has ever had a name

BIBLIOBLISS.  Transported into states of transcendent pleasure while immersed in reading a favorite book.

The average American child sees 20,000 murders in TV before reaching age 18.  This is considered normal.  Every community has video rental stores filled with multimillion-dollar films that depict people doing terrible things to each other.  If you read newspapers, you have every right to believe that Bad Nasty Things compose 90 percent of the human experience.  The authors of thousands of books pu

But you will be hard-pressed to find more than a few novels, films, news stories, and TV shows that dare to depict life as a gift whose purpose is to enrich the human soul.

Corliss had never once considered the fate of library books. She'd never wondered how many books go unread. She loved books. How could she not worry about the unread? She felt like a disorganized scholar, an inconsiderate lover, an abusive mother, and a cowardly soldier.

When I had no money, and a great book came out, I couldn't get it. I had to wait. I love the idea that I have hardcover books here and at home that I haven't read yet. That's how I view that I'm rich. I have hardcover books I may never read.

Our lives are the books people read; by the way we live and the words we speak we cannot stop setting an example.

All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten.  Remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned - the biggest word of all - look.

She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.

He had not a cent in his pocket, but he had faith.  He had decided, the night before, that he would be as much an adventurer as the ones he had admired in books.

A good book is a kind of paper club, serving to rouse the slumbrous and to silence the obtuse.

Books are like eggs - best when fresh.

Of all my books, I find only a few indispensible.

He ate and drank the precious words,
His spirit grew robust;
He knew no more that he was poor,
Nor that his frame was dust.
He danced along the dingy days,
And this bequest of wings
Was but a book.  What liberty
A loosened spirit brings!

There are many Beths in the world, shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and living for others so cheerfully that no one sees the sacrifices till the cricket on the hearth stops chirping, and the sweet sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind.

Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life.

You are so young; you stand before beginnings.  I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.  Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language.  Do not now look for the answers.  They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them.  It is a question of experiencing everything.  At present you need to live the question.  Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

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

Books, - lighthouses erected in the great sea of time, - books, the precious depositories of the thoughts and creations of genius, - books, by whose sorcery times past become time present, and the whole pageantry of the world's history moves in solemn procession before our eyes; - these were to visit the firesides of the humble, and lavish the treasures of the intellect upon the poor.

Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean.

When you are old and gray and full of sleep  
  And nodding by the fire, take down this book,  
  And slowly read, and dream of the soft look  
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words!  His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.  All day long, and every day, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those other things, are his history.  His acts and his words are merely the visible, thin crust of his world, with its scattered snow summits and its vacant wastes of water - and they are so trifling a part of his bulk! a mere skin enveloping it.  The mass of him is hidden - it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night, nor day.  These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written.  Every day would make a whole book of eighty thousand words - three hundred and sixty-five books a year.  Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man - the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

I feel the need of reading.  It is a loss to a man not to have grown up among books...  Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.