Books Quotes

Aziraphale collected books. If he were totally honest with himself he would have to have admitted that his bookshop was simply somewhere to store them. He was not unusual in this. In order to maintain his cover as a typical second-hand book seller, he used every means short of actual physical violence to prevent customers from making a purchase. Unpleasant damp smells, glowering looks, erratic opening hours - he was incredibly good at it.

Terry Pratchett

People tend to find books when they are ready for them.

Neil Gaiman

A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you can not expect an apostle to peer out.

G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenb

If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you.

Terry Pratchett

Second hand 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.

Virginia Woolf

Literature flourishes best when it is half trade and half an art.

W. R. [William Ralph] Inge

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

Virginia Woolf

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

Kurt Vonnegut

The self-styled intellectual who is impotent with pen and ink hungers to write history with sword and blood.

Eric Hoffer

There are books which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are a good many books, are there not, my boy? said Mr. Brownlow, observing the curiosity with which Oliver surveyed the shelves that reached from the floor to the ceiling.A great number, sir, replied Oliver; I never saw so many.You shall read them if you behave well, said the old gentleman kindly; and you will like that, better than looking at the outsides, - that is, in some cases, because there are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

Charles Dickens

The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.

Johann von Goethe

English literature is a kind of training in social ethics. English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action.

Marilyn Butler

Only your friends steal your books

Voltaire

I am a product [...of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.

C.S. Lewis

There are certain books in the world which every searcher for truth must know: the Bible, the Critique of Pure Reason, the Origin of Species, and Karl Marx's Capital.

W. E. B. Du Bois

If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.

W. H. Auden

Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?

Virginia Woolf

A room without books is like a life without meaning.

Thomas Jefferson

but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.

Jane Austen