Books Quotes

That's the pleasure and challenge of reading great novels; you get to see yourself as others see you and you get to see others as they see themselves.

John Green

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Books must be treated with respect, we feel that in our bones, because words have power. Bring enough words together they can bend space and time.

Terry Pratchett

Human existence is temporary and all the knowledge of the universe we acquire will in time be forgotten because there will be no humans left to benefit from any of the stuff we learned.And yet, this doesn't invalidate scientific exploration to me. We seek to understand the universe because it makes our lives better and more rich. Similarly, we tell stories (and think about why and how to tell stories) because it makes human existence richer. Made-up stories matter. They bring us pleasure and solace and nurture empathy by letting us see the world through others' eyes. They also help us to feel unalone, to understand that our grief and joy is shared not just by those around us but by all those who came before us and all those still yet to come.

John Green

A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.

Kurt Vonnegut

How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!

Jane Austen

He helped the Librarian up. There was a red glow in the ape's eyes. It had tried to steal his books. This was probably the best proof any wizard could require that the trolleys were brainless.

Terry Pratchett

I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

Edith Wharton

[Books] were devices as crassly practical for storing or transmitting language, as the latest Silicon Valley miracles. But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our mind and souls, in a spiritual adventure.

Kurt Vonnegut

Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers -- such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a fa?ade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

By and large the literature of a democracy will never exhibit the order, regularity, skill, and art characteristic of aristocratic literature; formal qualities will be neglected or actually despised. The style will often be strange, incorrect, overburdened, and loose, and almost always strong and bold. Writers will be more anxious to work quickly than to perfect details. Short works will be commoner than long books, wit than erudition, imagination than depth. There will be a rude and untutored vigor of thought with great variety and singular fecundity. Authors will strive to astonish more than to please, and to stir passions rather than to charm taste.

Alexis de Tocqueville

If the self-help books worked, it would be a shrinking industry not a growing one.

Steve Maraboli

I thought of the one thing about home that I missed, my dad's study with its built-in, floor-to-ceiling shelves sagging with thick biographies and the black leather chair that kept me just uncomfortable enough to keep from feeling sleepy as I read.

John Green

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books.

C.S. Lewis

For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.

Herman Melville

Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.

Henry Miller

The truth is that literature, particularly fiction, is not the pure medium we sometimes assume it to be. Response to it is affected by things other than its own intrinsic quality; by a curiosity or lack of it about the people it deals with, their outlook, their way of life.

Vance Palmer

In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.

Northrop Frye

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

Ezra Pound

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.

Ezra Pound