quotations about books
There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.
CHARLES DICKENS
Oliver Twist
That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer's ink is the greater explosive: it will win.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
The Haunted Bookshop
The greatest advantage of books does not always come from what we remember of them, but from their suggestiveness. A good book often serves as a match to light the dormant power within us.
ORISON SWETT MARDEN
Architects of Fate
I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer is not aware of.
UMBERTO ECO
The Paris Review, summer 2008
It is with books as with new acquaintances. At first we are highly delighted, if we find a general agreement--if we are pleasantly moved on any of the chief sides of our existence. With a closer acquaintance differences come to light; and then reasonable conduct mainly consists in not shrinking back at once, as may happen in youth, but in keeping firm hold of the things in which we agree, and being quite clear about the things in which we differ, without on that account desiring any union.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
As many as six out of ten American adults have never read a book of any kind, and the bulletins from the nation’s educational frontiers read like the casualty reports from a lost war.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy
For every good book is worth the reader's while when there is a real communion of the spirit, and this is possible only when he feels he is being taken into the author's confidence and the author is willing to reveal to him the innermost searchings of his heart and talk, as it were, in an unbuttoned mood, collar and tie loose, as by a friend's fireside.
LIN YUTANG
Between Tears and Laughter
I think the thing about reading is to read a lot, so you open lots of different views on the world. I'd much rather they read six random books than just one brilliant one. And what you get out of a book as an adult isn't what you'd get out of it when you're fifteen and encountering ideas for the first time and they can blow your head off. Whenever I think of narrowing it down to just one I can't bear to exclude the others.
JO WALTON
interview, RT Book Reviews
The inspiration of a single book has made preachers, poets, philosophers, authors, and statesmen. On the other hand, the demoralization of a single book has sometimes made infidels, profligates, and criminals.
ORISON SWETT MARDEN
Architects of Fate
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
Pindar and Sophocles--as we all so glibly, and often with so little discernment of the real import of what we are saying--had not many books; Shakespeare was no deep reader. True; but in the Greece of Pindar and Sophocles, in the England of Shakespeare, the poet lived in a current of ideas in the highest degree animating and nourishing the creative power; society was, in the fullest measure, permeated by fresh thought, intelligent and alive; and this state of things is the true basis for the creative power's exercise--in this it finds its data, its materials, truly ready for its hand; all the books and reading in the world are only valuable as they are helps to this.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"The Function of Criticism at the Present Time", Essays
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Studies,", Essays
Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness.
CHARLES LAMB
"On Books and Reading", The Last Essays of Elia
The history of books shows the humblest origin of some of the most valued, wrought as these were out of obscure materials by persons whose names thereafter became illustrious. The thumbed volumes, now so precious to thousands, were compiled from personal experiences and owe their interest to touches of inspiration of which the writer was less author than amanuensis, himself the voiced word of life for all times.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
Sometimes you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read that book.
JOHN GREEN
The Fault in Our Stars
If you want to read a perfect book there is only one way: write it.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Norwegian Wood
I know not how it is, but during a voyage I collect books as a ship does barnacles.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
letter to Charles Sumner, September 17, 1842
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
J. D. SALINGER
The Catcher in the Rye