Books & Reading Quotes

“I am sunk deep in books... I get such a passion for reading sometimes its like the other passion — writing — only the wrong side of the carpet. Heaven knows what either amounts to. My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery — always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? Whats this passion for? You, who love questions, answer me that. No — nobody can.... oh so many books — doesn't it break your heart almost to think of me, with this passion, always consumed with the desire to read, chopped, chafed, bugged, battered by the voices, the hands, the faces, the bodily presence of those who are pleased to call themselves my friends?”

“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we inquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and the backs of books in libraries.”

“Let us look from our place here in 1882 — the age of civilization — forward one hundred years, to 1982 — in the age of enlightenment. A very peculiar feature of the morals of the infant ages was the effort to be good by being stupid. Children were forbidden to read novels and confined to Sunday-school books, till one morning the people waked up to find that every Sunday-school book that had been written for sixty years, was itself a novel, and of the poorest sort at that, and that all of these children had read them, and had read nothing else, and so had moral natures of a skim milk sort. The cream was all in the forbidden books... Now, as a matter of fact, the novel is considered one of the grandest educators in the world.”

“I cannot claim to be a dainty feeder; I like to read of frantic passions, and am not at all reluctant to wade ankle-deep in blood.”

“The ardor of possessing books, commonly called bibliomania, also styled bibliophilism and "biblio"—whatever else that has suggested itself to the fruitful imaginations of dozens of felicitous writers upon the subject,—is described by Dibdin as a "disease which grows with our growth, and strengthens with our strength." ⁂ It should be remembered, however, that one possessing a fondness for books is not necessarily a bibliomaniac. There is as much difference between the inclinations and taste of a bibliophile and a bibliomaniac as between a slight cold and the advanced stages of consumption. Some one has said that "to call a bibliophile a bibliomaniac is to conduct a lover, languishing for his maiden's smile, to an asylum for the demented, and to shut him up in the ward for the incurables." A bibliomaniac might properly be called an insane or crazy bibliophile. It is, however, a harmless insanity.”

“The sun has left us on time. Am going to read from the Encyclopedia Brittanica to steady my nerves, and go to bed early.”

“Read Edgar Allan Poe with me in an abandoned cemetery on a fog-laden day with the sound of ravens in the distance, or don't tell me you're "down for a good time".”

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

“A London publisher says that unsettled weather means the taking up of more serious books than continued sunshine tempts to, and in an exceptionally fine summer there is a notable falling away of reading of whatever kind. The successful publisher of books for summer reading in England must be one who combines an intimate knowledge of the records of the Weather Bureau with a study of its daily bulletin and a first-hand and unremitting observation of thermometer, barometer, anemometer, the shapes of clouds, and the color of the sky. Without a moment's warning the treacherous weathervane may compel him to stop the presses that are pouring out "Lady Geraldine's Lovers" or "Patsy's Husbands," and start "Wet Days at Wedgewood" or "Soul-Fog," or "Mist and Mysticism."”

“People read every thing nowadays, except books.”

“UNBOOKISH, a. — Not addicted to books or reading.”

“Davy, however, was perfectly happy... he was reading an enthralling tale, in a school library book, of a wonderful hero who seemed blessed with a miraculous faculty for getting into scrapes from which he was usually delivered by an earthquake or a volcanic explosion, which blew him high and dry out of his troubles, landed him in a fortune, and closed the story with proper éclat.”