7,712 Quotes About Books

All I have learned, I learned from books.

Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait on line for Santa, or some such inconvenience.

My arms are killing me. I didn't know words could be so heavy.

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation."[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]

If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.

The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.

I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.