7,712 Quotes About Books

I think that pretty much every form of fiction (I’d include fantasy, obviously) can actually be a real escape from places where you feel bad, and from bad places. It can be a safe place you go, like going on holiday, and it can be somewhere that, while you’ve escaped, actually teaches you things you need to know when you go back, that gives you knowledge and armour and tools to change the bad place you were in.So no, they’re not escapist. They’re escape.

A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.

He said it was the kind of book you made your own.

Sitting down with a great book means that when you stand up, you will be a completely different person from who you were when you sat down.

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

Books are like truth serum-- if you don't read, you can't figure out what's real.

The lack of power to take joy in outdoor nature is as real a misfortune as the lack of power to take joy in books

He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say.

In other words, it's one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of "This is me!