quotations about books
When a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author -- then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new.
DORIS LESSING
Partisan Review, 1973
God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distand and the dead.... They give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society ... of the best and greatest of our race.
WILLIAM E. CHANNING
Thoughts
Libraries really are wonderful. They're better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit in selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.
JO WALTON
Among Others
All her life she had known that books were living things, not just a convergence of concept and ink, intellect and paper. They did not breathe or think, but they grew and gave a sense of potential so much larger than whatever was written on their pages.
TIM LEBBON
Dawn
A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.
J. M. COETZEE
Summertime