7,712 Quotes About Books

I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books.

I woke up one day and realized?--I am just tired. Not in a desperate way, not from a quitters point of view. This is different. It's the taste of disappointment. Over-whelming disappointment. In life, in situations, in experiences, in other people...but most of all? In my own God-damned self.

The summer passed quietly. I busied myself as best I could, reading a good deal.

Its better to hold a book between your Fingers than to Hold a Cigarette.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.

It must be that people who read go on more macrocosmic and microcosmic trips – biblical god trips, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake trips. Non-readers, what do they get? (They get the munchies.)

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

He says he knows someone isn't from the same race as he when that person looks at his library and asks, 'Have you read all of these?' A true book lover knows that, no, he hasn't read them all. It's about the process, it's about when the right reference comes up, you have the right book to go to; it's about never being without something to occupy your eyes and mind.

The spirits of the brain are directly connected to the testicles. This is why men who weary their imagination in books are less suitable for procreative functions...