quotations about books
Books are not seldom talismans and spells.
WILLIAM COWPER
The Task
Books are all right, but dead men's brains are no good unless you mix a live one's with them.
GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
Old Gorgon Graham
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
Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.
CHINA MIÉVILLE
The City and the City
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
All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words.
AMY LOWELL
Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds
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
Books admitted me to their world open-handedly, as people for their most part, did not. The life I lived in books was one of ease and freedom, worldly wisdom, glitter, dash and style.
JONATHAN RABAN
For Love and Money
Books are the training weights of the mind.
EPICTETUS
The Art of Living
Books are influential in proportion to their obscurity, provided that the obscurity be that of inexpressible Realities. The Bible is the most obscure book in the world. He must be a great fool who thinks he understands the plainest chapter of it.
COVENTRY PATMORE
The Rod
So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.
ROALD DAHL
The Telegraph, Sep. 13, 2011
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 novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Heretics
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
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
W. H. AUDEN
"Reading", The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays
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
No two persons ever read the same book, or saw the same picture.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Airelles,", The Writings of Madame Swetchine
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
Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason--they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.
W. H. AUDEN
The Complete Works of W. H. Auden