7,712 Quotes About Books

Libraries are like caves. They are places of transformation. There are secrets hidden within those walls.

I absolutely look at people’s bookshelves. And I have some judgment. I mean, they’re openly showing you themselves.

The first place I go in someone’s house is their bookshelves. You can tell exactly who they are.

The ‘right reading’ is an invention of academics and critics. Every reader gets from the book he is reading nothing else but his book. The shelves where we line up the volumes we’ve read are deceptive. We have available there only titles, covers, pages. But the books we’ve truly read are phantoms conjured up by reading with no rules.

I knew I must do all as I was told, yet something burned inside me, a seed of defiance that must have derived from a long-ago ancestor. Perhaps my mind was inflamed from the books I had read and the worlds I had imagined.

What does reading mean to me? For me it is like breathing, so vital, so basal, a necessity I cannot live without. Reading is my comfort and my retreat. Without reading I can exist, but I cannot thrive.

There are ways to make room for more books and still have room to live.

I like to look around me and see all the books, all the possibilities. I don’t ever want to be the smartest person in the room. As long as I have books around me, I won’t be.

That's what books are for," Sara said, smiling at him. "The perfect excuse to do nothing. Make no decisions.