quotations about books
Don't judge a book by its cover.
ENGLISH PROVERB
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
WILLIAM STYRON
attributed, Writers at Work
I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.
DORIS LESSING
Time Bites
No two persons ever read the same book, or saw the same picture.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Airelles,", The Writings of Madame Swetchine
One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.
GEORGE W. BUSH
"W's Greatest Hits: The top 25 Bushisms of all time", Slate, January 12, 2009
The thing one reads and likes, and then forgets, is of no account. The thing that stays, and haunts one, and refuses to be forgotten, that is the sincere thing.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
Ponkapog Papers
For books are more than books, they are the life
The very heart and core of ages past,
The reason why men lived and worked and died,
The essence and quintessence of their lives.
AMY LOWELL
"The Boston Athenæum", A Dome of Many-coloured Glass
For out of old fields, as men saith,
Cometh all this new corn from year to year;
And out of old books, in good faith,
Cometh all this new science that men learn.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
"Parliament of Foules"
One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.
GRAHAM GREENE
Travels with My Aunt
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
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
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
It is only a novel ... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.
JANE AUSTEN
Northanger Abbey
McDonald’s has announced that for the next month in the United Kingdom, Happy Meals will come with a book instead of a toy. And they will be renamed "Disappointment Meals."
JIMMY KIMMEL
Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Jan. 12, 2012
There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!
EMILY DICKINSON
"There is no frigate like a book"
All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words.
AMY LOWELL
Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds
The power of a book lies in its power to turn a solitary act into a shared vision. As long as we have books, we are not alone.
LAURA WELCH BUSH
Bringing Out the Best in Everyone You Coach
The prosperity of a book lies in the minds of readers. Public knowledge and public taste fluctuate; and there come times when works which were once capable of instructing and delighting thousands lose their power, and works, before neglected, emerge into renown.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
The Principles of Success in Literature
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
The Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger (tutor to Nero) complained that his peers were wasting time and money accumulating too many books, admonishing that "the abundance of books is a distraction." Instead, Seneca recommended focusing on a limited number of good books, to be read thoroughly and repeatedly.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
The Organized Mind