27 Quotes About Bibliophilia

I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage

Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)

My ears become my conduit to the world. In the darkness I listen—to thrillers, to detective novels, to romances; to family sagas, potboilers and historical novels; to ghost stories and classic fiction and chick lit; to bonkbusters and history books. I listen to good books and bad books, great books and terrible books; I do not discriminate. Steadily, hour after hour, in the darkness I consume them all.

By way of this unprecedented, unbridled literary promiscuity, I have made some pleasant discoveries.

A good rule of thumb is: Pack twice as many books as changes of underwear.

Until you opened it, the book was nothing that an untrained eye would look twice at.

The memory of a tone, the rhythm of an author's sentences, the sorrow we felt on a novel's last page--perhaps that is all that we can expect to keep from books.

It's an old story, really: seduced and corrupted, in the end, by an obsessive love for the text.

This is incredible. This is quite amazing because who you're honoring tonight is not only myself but the ghost of a lot of your favorite writers. And I wouldn't be here except that they spoke to me in the library. The library's been the center of my life. I never made it to college. I started going to the library when I graduated from high school. I went to the library every day for three or four days a week for 10 years and I graduated from the library when I was 28.