7,712 Quotes About Books

Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes–characters even–caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives."[Turning the Page: The future of reading is backlit and bright, Newsweek Magazine, March 25, 2010]

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.

Wouldn't you like to have comrades?' But she would not like that. She wanted only to rest and to read her old, rain-swollen books, turning the pages carefully, so carefully.

Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was, in a manner, a literary ghoul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature.

She always wanted to be the kind of person who could play the "Moonlight" Sonata.She buries her failure in this, as she buries all her failures, in reading.

A house without books must be sad. Even sadder a house of books without people.

Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.