quotations about books
A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That's a sign of a good novel. Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000
There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.... Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.
RAY BRADBURY
Coda
The thing one reads and likes, and then forgets, is of no account. The thing that stays, and haunts one, and refuses to be forgotten, that is the sincere thing.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
Ponkapog Papers
The book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty -- and vice versa.
DORIS LESSING
introduction, The Golden Notebook
A book is like a money-changer: it pays you back in another form what you brint to it.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.
NICHOLSON BAKER
attributed, New York Times Book Review, 1994
So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.
ROALD DAHL
The Telegraph, Sep. 13, 2011
Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason--they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Books are not seldom talismans and spells.
WILLIAM COWPER
The Task
Books are influential in proportion to their obscurity, provided that the obscurity be that of inexpressible Realities. The Bible is the most obscure book in the world. He must be a great fool who thinks he understands the plainest chapter of it.
COVENTRY PATMORE
The Rod
A man who keeps a diary pays,
Due toll to many tedious days;
But life becomes eventful--then,
His busy hand forgets the pen.
Most books, indeed, are records less
Of fulness than of emptiness.
WILLIAM ALLINGHAM
A Diary
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Heretics
Your borrowers of books--those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.
CHARLES LAMB
"The Two Races of Men", Essays of Elia
The covers of this book are too far apart.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.
GRAHAM GREENE
Travels with My Aunt
He who possesses good books without gaining any profit from them, is like an ass that carries a rich burden and feeds upon thistles.
JOHN THORNTON
Maxims and Directions for Youth
For every good book is worth the reader's while when there is a real communion of the spirit, and this is possible only when he feels he is being taken into the author's confidence and the author is willing to reveal to him the innermost searchings of his heart and talk, as it were, in an unbuttoned mood, collar and tie loose, as by a friend's fireside.
LIN YUTANG
Between Tears and Laughter
The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer's ink is the greater explosive: it will win.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
The Haunted Bookshop
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
W. H. AUDEN
"Reading", The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays
All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words.
AMY LOWELL
Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds