Bookish Quotes #47

 “When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.”
    ~  Julian Barnes, A Life with Books

“I collect books just as others store grain,
And bitterly complain I don’t have enough granaries.
In order to make space for a myriad ancient men,
I end up building three more rooms.
The books then ask the man who stores them:
“When will you have time to read us, sir?”

~	Yuan Mei (1716–1797), Book Storage, tr. J.D.Schmidt

Bookish Quotes #46

“Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.”
~ Umberto Eco

 "Even books, word-things that should be judged by their content, fascinate me as objects.  I confess I have many books in my library that I have never read nor had the intention of reading.  I want them because their sheer presence represents a yearning, a mood, a love, and yes, an act of self-preservation.  When my eyes scan my library, the typefaces of the titles, the textures of the covers, and their imagined weight give me a moment very like the pleasure of reading."
~ Leo Lionni

Bookish Quotes #45

"Some people are happy when they are at the sea; I’m happy when I’m standing in front of a shelf of books. It feels like the known place and also the beginning of a new adventure. It has that simultaneous paradoxical effect of making me feel absolutely calm and very excited."
~ Jeanette Winterson

“When you sell a man a book you don't sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.”
~ Christopher Morley

Bookish Quotes #44

“The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den.”
~ Philip Adams

 “Life is limited, but by writing, and reading, we can live in different worlds, get inside the skins and minds of other people, and, in this way, push out the boundaries of our own lives.”
~ Joan Lingard

Bookish Quotes #43

“Live for awhile in the books you love. Learn from them what is worth learning, but above all love them. This love will be returned to you a thousand times over. Whatever your life may become, these books — of this I am certain — will weave through the web of your unfolding. They will be among the strongest of all threads of your experiences, disappointments, and joys.”
~ Rainer Marie Rilke

 “How do you press a wildflower in the pages of an e-book?”
― Lewis Buzbee, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

Bookish Quotes #42

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.”
~ Alan Bennett, The History Boys: The Film

 “I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it appears to represent a disengagement from day-to-day life. But reading, and particularly the reading of fiction, encourages us to view the world in new and challenging ways...It allows us to inhabit the consciousness of another which is a precursor to empathy, and empathy is, for me, one of the marks of a decent human being.”
 ~ John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things

Bookish Quotes #41

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
~ Philip Pullman

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They depen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”
~ Anne Lamott

Bookish Quotes #40

“The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den.”
~ Philip Adams

“Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.” 
~ Clifton Fadiman

Bookish Quotes #39

“We human being build houses because we`re alive but we write books because we` re mortal. We live in groups because we`re sociable but we read because we know we`re alone. Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one`s place but that no one can replace either. It offers no definitive explanation of our destiny but links us inextricably to life. Its tiny secret links remind us of how paradoxically happy we are to be alive while illuminating how tragically absurd life is.”
~ Daniel Pennac

 “I look at the books on my library shelves. They certainly seem dormant. But what if the characters are quietly rearranging themselves? What if Emma Woodhouse doesn’t learn from her mistakes? What if Tom Jones descends into a sodden life of poaching and outlawry? What if Eve resists Satan, remembering God’s injunction and Adam’s loving advice? I imagine all the characters bustling to get back into their places as they feel me taking the book down from the shelf. “Hurry,” they say, “he’ll expect to find us exactly where he left us, never mind how much his life has changed in the meantime.”
~ Verlyn Klinkenborg

Bookish Quotes #38

"The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading."
~ Edith Wharton

"Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper."
~ David Quaimen

Bookish Quotes #37

"A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way."
~ Caroline Gordon

"A little before you go to sleep read something exquisite."
~ Desiderius Erasmus

Bookish Quotes #36

"When people ask me, 'Do you collect books?' I always say, 'No, books collect me'"
~ Nicholas Barker

 "'I can always tell when you're reading somewhere in the house', my  mother used to say.  'There's a special silence, a reading silence.'"
~ Francis Spufford

Bookish Quotes #35

"Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time."
~ Edwin P. Whipple

"Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existance."
~ Jan Morris

Bookish Quotes #34

“A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.”
~ Susan Sontag

 “Reading brings us unknown friends.”
~ Honoré de Balzac

Bookish Quotes #33

"A good book is always on tap; it may be decanted and drunk a hundred times, and it is still there for further imbibement."

  ~Holbrook Jackson

"Having fun isn't hard when you've got a library card."

  ~Sylvia Plath

Bookish Quotes #32

"Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know."
 ~John Keats

"We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate."
 ~Henry Miller

Bookish Quotes #31

"To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is a pleasure beyond compare."
~ Kenko Yoshida

"To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company."
~ Andre Gide

Bookish Quotes #30

"Books are chocolate for the soul.  They don't make one fat.  One need not brush one's teeth after reading.  They are quiet.  One can bring them anywhere - no passport required.  Books have only one downfall:  even the fattest book has a last page, and then one needs a new one again."
  ~ Antonie Schneider

"Books are delightful society.  If you go into a room and find it full of books - even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome."
  ~ William Ewart Gladstone

Bookish Quotes #29

"The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones."
     ~ John Wooden

"Everything in the world exists to end up in a book."
     ~ Stephane Mallarme

Bookish Quotes #28

"I have lived a thousand lives lost within the pages of a book."
     ~ Robert Cormier

"I have a real soft spot in my heart for librarians and people who care about books."
     ~ Ann Richards