Books & Reading Quotes

“What thrills have been mine as I stood perched on one leg like a stork, half way up a ladder, utterly oblivious of time and space, drinking in equal parts Jules Verne and the dust of the Central Library...!”

“I find it necessary to confine my purchases strictly to books. My me! Yes, strictly to books.”

“MRS. DICKINSON, TO EMILY: No, we're not going to the party. We're doing the things that Dickinsons do, which is to stay at home and sit very quietly with our own thoughts. MR. DICKINSON, TO EMILY: What she said. SHIP, TO LAVINIA: A quiet night in, baby. Novels and chill.”

“There are more truths in a good book than its author meant to put into it.”

“Books are embalmed minds.”

“Books people solitude with shapes more glorious than ever glittered in palaces. Books send healing to the sick heart and energy to the wasted brain.”

“Set your pace to a stroll. Stop whenever you want. Interrupt, jump back and forth, I won't mind. This book should be as easy as laughter. It is stuffed with small things to take away. Please help yourself.”

“Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people — people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.”

“In the gradual growth of every student's library, he may or may not continue to admit literary friends and advisers; but he will be sure, sooner or later, to send for a man with a tool-chest. Sooner or later, every nook and corner will be filled with books, every window will be more or less darkened, and added shelves must be devised. He may find it hard to achieve just the arrangement he wants, but he will find it hardest of all to meet squarely that inevitable inquiry of the puzzled carpenter, as he looks about him, "Have you really read all these books?"... Yet if you asked him in turn, "Have you actually used every tool in your tool-chest?" you would very likely be told, "Not one half as yet, at least this season; I have the others by me, to use as I need them." Now if this reply can be fairly made in a simple, well-defined, distinctly limited occupation like that of a joiner, how much more inevitable it is in a pursuit which covers the whole range of thought and all the facts in the universe. The library is the author's tool-chest. He must at least learn, as he grows older, to take what he wants and to leave the rest.”

“It is a curious thing that so many people only go into a bookshop when they happen to need some particular book... There are some knightly souls who... go in not because they need any certain volume, but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them. Some wistful, little forgotten sheaf of loveliness, long pining away on an upper shelf — why not ride up, fling her across your charger (or your charge account), and gallop away. Be a little knightly, you booklovers!”

“I was a bookman; I had always been a bookman. From adolescence books had been one of my passions. Books not merely — and perhaps not chiefly — as vehicles of learning or knowledge, but books as books, books as entities, books as beautiful things, books as historical antiquities, books as repositories of memorable associations. Questions of type, ink, paper, margins, watermarks, paginations, bindings, were capable of really agitating me. I was too sensitive and catholic a lover a books to be a scholar in the strict modern meaning of the term. My magnum opus was not a work of scholarship, and even such scholarship as it comprised had been attained by a labor hateful to me. I would inhale the scholarship of others as a sweet smell. I would gather it like honey, but eclectically, never exhausting one flower before trying the next. My knowledge was, perhaps, considerable, but it was unorganized. And my principal claim to consideration was that I could wander in any demesne of culture without having the awkward air of a stranger. In brief, I was comprehensively bookish.”

“Pin your faith on brave books! Beware o' newspapers, an' fight off the priest! Read brave books — books that were written centuries ago to teach people courage — an' read brave books that are written now to keep courage goin'!”