7,712 Quotes About Books

Now, the world is more than it seems to be. You know this, of course, because you read stories.

Reading was one of the few things she felt she was truly good at, one of the few things she prided herself on.

I love being at my store early in the morning. With golden sunlight streaming in through the windows and the smell of old pages and fresh coffee lingering in the air, it’s like my own personal piece of Heaven.

It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature, but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short. (...) If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. That's the world of hicks and slobs. Real people would be ashamed of themselves doing that.

Wait for the dust of reading to settle; for the conflict and the questioning to die down; walk, talk, pull the dead petals from a rose, or fall asleep. Then suddenly without our willing it, for it is thus that Nature undertakes these transitions, the book will return, but differently. It will float to the top of the mind as a whole.

The bookshelves here are not walls They're closed windows and all I have to do is pull out one book to make these windows wide open

She read with “abandon,” it would probably be called, though when you read a book you didn’t abandon anything; instead, you marshaled it all.

Books might be one way to recover some space. Stories. Fiction. When I was eleven, friendless, struggling to fit in at school, I read The outsiders and Rumble Fish and Tex by S.E. Hinton, and I suddenly had friends again. Her books were friends.. And the stories they inhabited could be places I could hide inside. And feel safe. In a world that can get too much, a world where we are running out of mind space, fictional worlds are essential. They can be an escape from reality.

Imagination is what you do with your inspiration.