BOOK QUOTES VI

quotations about books

Book burning is a charming old custom, hallowed by antiquity. It has been practiced for centuries by fascists, communists, atheists, school children, rival authors, and tired librarians. Like everything of importance since the invention of the cloak and the shroud, its origins are cloaked in mystery and shrouded in secrecy. Some scholars believe that the first instance of book burning occurred in the Middle Ages, when a monk was trying to illuminate a manuscript. All agree that book burning was almost non-existent during the period when books were made of stone.

RICHARD ARMOUR

"How to Burn a Book," , A Safari into Satire


I consider books to be good for our health, and also our spirits, and they help us to become poets or scientists, to understand the stars or else to discover them deep within the aspirations of certain characters, those who sometimes, on certain evenings, escape from the pages and walk among us humans, perhaps the most human of us all.

JOSÉ SARAMAGO

The Notebook


If you would understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely.

ARTHUR HELPS

Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd


What makes the success of many books consists in the affinity there is between the mediocrity of the author's ideas and those of the public.

CHAMFORT

The Cynic's Breviary


He who possesses good books without gaining any profit from them, is like an ass that carries a rich burden and feeds upon thistles.

JOHN THORNTON

Maxims and Directions for Youth


A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That's a sign of a good novel. Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.

ALAN LIGHTMAN

interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000


There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island and at the bottom of the Spanish Main ... and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

WALT DISNEY

attributed, Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time


We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.

JOHN LUBBOCK

The Pleasures of Life


The book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty -- and vice versa.

DORIS LESSING

introduction, The Golden Notebook


A book is like a money-changer: it pays you back in another form what you brint to it.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought


Books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life.

CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI

Eragon


A man who keeps a diary pays,
Due toll to many tedious days;
But life becomes eventful--then,
His busy hand forgets the pen.
Most books, indeed, are records less
Of fulness than of emptiness.

WILLIAM ALLINGHAM

A Diary


If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts.

THOMAS CARLYLE

Heroes and Hero Worship


Your borrowers of books--those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.

CHARLES LAMB

"The Two Races of Men", Essays of Elia


My main disappointment was always that a book had to end. And then what? But I don't think I was ever disappointed by the books. I must have been what any author would consider an ideal reader. I felt every pain and pleasure suffered or enjoyed by all the characters. Oh, but I identified!

EUDORA WELTY

Conversations with Eudora Welty


I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.

CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON

The Shadow of the Wind


Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

W. H. AUDEN

"Reading", The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays


When you’re reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners?

ELIF BATUMAN

interview, The Rumpus, Apr. 25, 2012


The best books are those which lift us to a higher plane where we breathe a purer atmosphere.

ORISON SWETT MARDEN

Architects of Fate


There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.... Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

RAY BRADBURY

Coda