BOOK QUOTES
quotations about books
Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.
JOHN MILTON
Areopagitica
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
"A Letter from Cuba,", Esquire, Dec. 1934
What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.
RAY BRADBURY
Fahrenheit 451
The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation -- a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.
FRANZ KAFKA
letter to Oskar Pollak, 1904
No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.
CHARLES DICKENS
Our Mutual Friend
A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him.
WALTER MOSLEY
The Long Fall
Everybody can tell a story but it is different to create a real book, a real literary text that has several voices in itself and that breathes with its own mouth and has its own lungs and looks toward its own body. To create that body you have to start out with a stone and stones do not have lungs or air in themselves.
CARMEN BOULLOSA
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1995
Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
"Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading", Harper's Magazine, February 2008
A book is like a man -- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.
JOHN STEINBECK
"On Publishing,", Writers at Work
A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.
JOHN MILTON
Areopagitica
No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books.
ROMAIN ROLLAND
Journey Within
The physical book really has had a 500-year run. It's probably the most successful technology ever. It's hard to come up with things that have had a longer run. If Gutenberg were alive today, he would recognize the physical book and know how to operate it immediately. Given how much change there has been everywhere else, what's remarkable is how stable the book has been for so long. But no technology, not even one as elegant as the book, lasts forever.
JEFF BEZOS
Newsweek, Dec. 20, 2009
Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
The Round Table
A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.
THOMAS CARLYLE
speech in support of the London Library, 1840
The indulgent 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you're going to write something like "The Brothers Karamazov" or "Moby-Dick," go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don't care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 20, 2009
One must always be careful of books ... and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.
CASSANDRA CLARE
Clockwork Angel
Call me a pessimist, call me Ishmael, but I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea. We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numerals (U R 2 1derful), blogging like crazy, reading for hours off their little screens, surfing around from Henry James to Jesse James to the epistle of James to pajamas to Obama to Alabama to Alanon to non-sequiturs, sequins, penguins, penal institutions, and it's all free, and you read freely, you're not committed to anything the way you are when you shell out $30 for a book, you're like a hummingbird in an endless meadow of flowers.
GARRISON KEILLOR
"The End of an Era in Publishing,", A Prairie Home Companion, May 25, 2010
If you love books enough, books will love you back.
JO WALTON
Among Others
'Tis the good reader that makes the good book.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Society and Solitude