7,712 Quotes About Books

If I had read as many books as other people, I would know as little.

Miss Binney stood in front of her class and began to read aloud from Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, a book that was a favorite of Ramona’s because, unlike so many books for her age, it was neither quiet and sleepy nor sweet and pretty.

The tome weighed more than all of their schoolbooks combined and smelled musty, like a shop filled with things much older than themselves. Each page looked one breath away from breaking, and the boys took great pains not to damage the book.

[I]f a book is well written, I always find it too short.

It is often the case that, at times of great anxiety, when the diversion of a good story should seem most welcome, one is least equipped to focus one’s mind on reading.

Our books can know and remember for us, but cannot think for us.

How can there ever be a substitute for a book, which you can read in a bus, lying in your bed or sitting on a rock by the sea? A book allows you to explore your imagination as you interpret the author’s intention. A book offers us refined delights of being a part of something much bigger than ourselves. It gives us the purified exhilaration of nuances and undertone and equivocacy and contrariety; a book gives us imagination and imagination is happiness.

We are oversupplied with people and books that make us know more, but are undersupplied with those that make us think and live better.

ou think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read