Some Quotes on Books

A good book on your shelf is a friend that turns its back on you and remains a friend. ~Author Unknown

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy. ~Edward P. Morgan

The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it. ~James Bryce

Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book. ~Author Unknown

A good book should leave you... slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it. ~William Styron, interview, Writers at Work, 1958

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read. ~G.K. Chesterton

Many people, other than the authors, contribute to the making of a book, from the first person who had the bright idea of alphabetic writing through the inventor of movable type to the lumberjacks who felled the trees that were pulped for its printing. It is not customary to acknowledge the trees themselves, though their commitment is total. ~Forsyth and Rada, Machine Learning

If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. ~Toni Morrison

A good book has no ending. ~R.D. Cumming

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. ~Anna Quindlen, "Enough Bookshelves," New York Times, 7 August 1991

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers. ~Charles W. Eliot

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. ~P.J. O'Rourke

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. ~Groucho Marx

I find television to be very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book. ~Groucho Marx

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. ~Mark Twain, attributed

A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins. ~Charles Lamb, Last Essays of Elia, 1833

Let books be your dining table,
And you shall be full of delights
Let them be your mattress
And you shall sleep restful nights.
~Author Unknown


I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things. ~George Robert Gissing

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket. ~Chinese Proverb

There's nothing to match curling up with a good book when there's a repair job to be done around the house. ~Joe Ryan

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own. ~William Hazlitt

My test of a good novel is dreading to begin the last chapter. ~Thomas Helm

A dirty book is rarely dusty. ~Author Unknown

As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate! ~William James

You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend. ~Paul Sweeney

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it. ~Oscar Wilde

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul. ~Franz Kafka

Lord! when you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book. ~Christopher Morley

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all. ~Abraham Lincoln

The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television. ~Andrew Ross