Books & Reading Quotes

“I decided there's two types of people in the world — people who are meant to live their life to the fullest, and people who are meant to read about those people. I'm the latter.”

“As for Flaubert, Madame Bovary is one of the few novels that moves me in every way, not only in its style, but in its total communicability, like the effect of good poetry. What I really mean is that a great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it. Its writer should, too.”

“I fancy that at the beginning some fairy may have offered me the choice between great power and station and the privilege of living always among books, and that I, like the good child in the fairy tale, chose the latter.”

“Destroying a book is like destroying a whole world.”

“It's just got me kind of wild, being turned loose amongst so many books.”

“Our passions are ourselves. My old books are Me. I am just as old and thumb-worn as they are.”

“There is a great deal of difference between the eager man who wants to read a book, and the tired man who wants a book to read. A man reading a Le Queux mystery wants to get to the end of it. A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end.”

“Old Books are best!... What though the prints be not so bright, The paper dark, the binding slight? Our author, be he dull or sage, Returning from a distant age So lives again. We say of right: Old Books are best.”

“I like old books with covers worn... Old books I do not want to mend. Each speaks to me with pages torn And gently says, "I am your friend."”

“Let's get drunk at the library and have a book party! "What a good time!" she said in an excited whisper.”

“A writer only begins a book, it is the reader who completes it; for the reader takes up where the writer left off as new thoughts stir within him.”

“Reading and writing are as necessary to him as eating and drinking, and he hopes he will never lack for books.”