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 #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 #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

Piccadilly Jim: Filling Out a Form for a Transatlantic Crossing

The clerk had finished writing the ticket, and was pressing labels and a pink paper on him. The paper, he gathered dully, was a form and had to be filled up. He examined it, and found it to be a searching document. Some of its questions could be answered off-hand, others required thought.

“Height?” Simple. Five foot eleven.

“Hair?” Simple. Brown.

“Eyes?” Simple again. Blue.

Next, queries of a more offensive kind.

“Are you a polygamist?”

He could answer that. Decidedly no. One wife would be ample—provided she had red-gold hair, brown-gold eyes, the right kind of mouth, and a dimple. Whatever doubts there might be in his mind on other points, on that one he had none whatever.

“Have you ever been in prison?” Not yet.

And then a very difficult one. “Are you a lunatic?”

Jimmy hesitated. The ink dried on his pen. He was wondering.

— P. G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim (p. 62)

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 #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 #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

Bookish Quotes #27

"A good book should leave you...slightly exhausted at the end.  You live several lives while reading it."
     ~ William Styron

"In a real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read.  It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and a many kinds of lives as we wish."
     ~ S. I. Hayakawa

Bookish Quotes #26

"Books can be dangerous.  The best ones should be labeled, "This could change your life"."
     ~ Helen Exley

"Every reader finds himself.  The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself."
     ~ Marcel Proust

Bookish Quotes #25

"The greatest gift is a passion for reading...It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind.  It is a moral illumination."
     ~ Elizabeth Hardwick

"Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers."
     ~ Charles W. Eliot

Bookish Quotes #24

"A novel is a mirror carried along a main road."
     ~ Henri B. Stendhal

"Above all, a book is a riverbank for the river of language.  Language without the riverbank is only television talk - a free fall, a loose splash, a spill."
     ~ Cynthia Ozick