Bookish Quotes

A collection of quotes about books and the art of reading.



"I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library."
     ~ Jorge Luis Borges

"Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack."
     ~ Virginia Woolf

"We read to know we are not alone."
     ~ C.S. Lewis

"Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere."
     ~ Jean Rhys

"What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us."
     ~ Thomas Carlyle

"'Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are' is true enough but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread."
     ~ François Muriac

"I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves."
     ~ Anna Quindlen

"Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in themselves."
     ~ Anne Fadiman

"I was born with a reading list I will never finish."
     ~ Maud Casey

"I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900."
     ~ Nick Hornby

"I think books are like people in the sense that they'll turn up in your life when you most need them."
     ~ Emma Thompson

"Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers."
     ~ Mary Ann Shaffer

"Reading is a staple of life, like bread or water. Or chocolate."
     ~ Rett MacPherson

"I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it."
     ~ David Foster Wallace

"Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which others have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of life."
     ~ Jesse Lee Bennett

"Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home."
     ~ Anna Quindlen

"A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it."
     ~ Samuel Johnson

"Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experiences of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms."
     ~ Angela Carter

"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."
     ~ Anne Fadiman

"I even love the smell of books."
     ~ Adriana Trigiani 

"When I got [my] library card, that was when my life began."
     ~ Rita Mae Brown

"Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book."
     ~ Anonymous 

"The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books."
     ~ Katherine Mansfield

"What is reading, but silent conversation."
     ~ Charles Lamb

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."
     ~Oscar Wilde

"No two persons ever read the same book."
     ~ Edmund Wilson

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."
     ~ Haruki Murakami

"Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out."
     ~ J. K. Rowling

"A good book has no ending."
     ~ R. D. Cumming

"For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately."
     ~ Virginia Woolf

 "I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not not run out before the small hours."
     ~ Dorothy Parker

"I am simply a 'book drunkard'.  Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee.  I cannot withstand them."
     ~ Lucy Maud Montgomery

"My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices."
     ~ Alberto Manguel

"What are books but tangible dreams?  What is reading if it is not dreaming?  The best books cause us to dream; the rest are not worth reading."
     ~ Rikki Ducornet

 "He that loves reading has everything within his reach."
     ~ William Godwin

"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life."
     ~ W. Somerset Maugham