Ruiz Zafón, Carlos "The Shadow of the Wind"

Ruiz Zafón, Carlos "The Shadow of the Wind" (Spanish: La Sombra del Viento) - 2001
(El cementerio de los libros olvidados #1) 

This novel certainly deserves to be on my list of favourite books ever. I don't know why I actually love it so much but I do. Usually, I try not to read a famous bestseller immediately as everyone raves about it and then I am disappointed. But something attracted me to this book, I just had to read it. And then I had to finish it as soon as possible. Hardly got any sleep in those days ...

This is one of the best books I ever found. It is intriguing, exciting, has all the parts a good book should have, an interesting story, a historical background, a description of a great city. And, most important, it's a book about a book, how someone can get involved in something after reading a story. A wonderful book by a very promising author.

We discussed this in our book club in October 2006.

Find more books by this great author here.

From the back cover:

"Hidden in the heart of the old city of Barcelona is the 'cemetery of lost books', a labyrinthine library of obscure and forgotten titles that have long gone out of print. To this library, a man brings his 10-year-old son Daniel one cold morning in 1945. Daniel is allowed to choose one book from the shelves and pulls out 'La Sombra del Viento' by Julian Carax.

But as he grows up, several people seem inordinately interested in his find. Then, one night, as he is wandering the old streets once more, Daniel is approached by a figure who reminds him of a character from La Sombra del Viento, a character who turns out to be the devil. This man is tracking down every last copy of Carax's work in order to burn them. What begins as a case of literary curiosity turns into a race to find out the truth behind the life and death of Julian Carax and to save those he left behind. A page-turning exploration of obsession in literature and love, and the places that obsession can lead."

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2022.

Griffin, John Howard "Black Like Me"

Griffin, John Howard "Black Like Me" - 1961

Another book that was brought to me through our international book club. The author takes some medication that alters his skin colour and disguises as a black guy in the late 50s in the Deep South of the United States. He lives as a "Negro" for several weeks, has lots of problems and gets into some dangerous situations, not just during that time but also when he returns as a white man and publishes his experiences.

A fascinating story, not just for US Americans. The courage it takes to do this and keep on going, amazing. There were so many problems that came up. Although - the most interesting fact about this book is that it isn't a history about a place far far away. Prejudices against people who are different are still present and even though people have different opportunities today, injustice exists everywhere whether you are an immigrant in another country with a different skin colour, have a different opinion, a different history, we can always think about reasons not to like someone.

We discussed this in our book club in December 2009.

From the back cover:

"In the Deep South of the 1950s, journalist John Howard Griffin decided to cross the color line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a Southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man. His audacious, still chillingly relevant eyewitness history is a work about race and humanity-that in this new millennium still has something important to say to every American."

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2022.

Albom, Mitch "The five people you meet in heaven"

Albom, Mitch "The five people you meet in heaven" - 2003

Mitch Albom starts this novel with the main character, Eddie trying to save a young girl's life on his 83^rd birthday. Unfortunately, he dies trying this. We then read about his afterlife and what happens to him in heaven. He meets five people who changed his life or whose life he changed, sometimes unaware.

I thought this was a very inspiring book. I loved the idea the author gave about heaven and the way your life is explained to you. Our book club found that the author did a great job describing the ideas of life after death. Depending on our religion, we interpreted it in different ways which shows how sensitive this subject is. Most members club really liked it.

This book leaves you with a very nice feeling and gives you a lot to think about.

If you enjoyed this, you should also read "Tuesdays with Morrie".

We discussed this in our book club in December 2008.

 

From the back cover:

"From the author of the phenomenal #1 New York Times bestseller Tuesdays with Morrie, a novel that explores the unexpected connections of our lives, and the idea that heaven is more than a place; it's an answer.

Eddie is a wounded war veteran, an old man who has lived, in his mind, an uninspired life. His job is fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. On his 83^rd birthday, a tragic accident kills him as he tries to save a little girl from a falling cart. He awakes in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a destination. It's a place where your life is explained to you by five people, some of whom you knew, others who may have been strangers. One by one, from childhood to soldier to old age, Eddie's five people revisit their connections to him on earth, illuminating the mysteries of his 'meaningless' life, and revealing the haunting secret behind the eternal question: 'Why was I here?'"

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2022.

Lanchester, John "The Debt to Pleasure"

Lanchester, John "The Debt to Pleasure" - 1996

Another book club read. It was totally strange and weird. I had a hard time getting into it or follow the plot. We had chosen this book because one of our members said her friend thought this was the best book she had ever read. After we had chosen it, one of our members heard who the friend was who had suggested the book. She said she had a very weird taste.

Well, at the end I thought if I'd known the end before I read it, I might have enjoyed it better. I certainly would have understood it better. When I knew the end, I thought the author had done a good job, I actually might read it again with this knowledge.

From the back cover:

"Tarquin Winot, voluptuary and supercivilized ironist (and snob), sets out on a journey of the senses from the Hotel Splendide, Portsmouth, to his cottage in Provence, his spiritual home. With his head newly shaved and his well-thumbed copy of the Mossad Manual of Surveillance Techniques safely stowed, Tarquin elegantly introduces his life, itself a work of art, through the medium of seasonal menus. 'Coruscatingly, horribly funny . . . a cunning commentary on art, appetite, jealousy and failure. Tarquin is a splendid creation, genuinely learned (the scholarship is dazzling), poisonously bigoted and wholly mad' John Banville, Observer, 'A fully achieved work of art . . .a triumph. You have to salute the real thing. The Debt to Pleasure is a major work, a supreme literary construct that's also deliriously entertaining. Even the recipes are gorgeously seductive; several pages of my copy are flecked with stains of ragu and ratatouille to mark the moments when I could stand temptation no more' John Walsh, Independent. 'Reading between the lines to discover what Tarquin is up to is enormous, sinister fun . . .dazzling, languidly brilliant, his verbal flourishes are irresistible' James Walton, Daily Telegraph. 'The chilling, deluded Tarquin is the best character to come out of an English novel since Charles Dickens put pen to paper' Cressida Connolly, Tatler"

We discussed this in our international book club in October 2002.

Mason, Daniel "The Piano Tuner"

Mason, Daniel "The Piano Tuner" - 2002

Another book club read. Quite an interesting story, written by a young American author about colonialism, history, music, plants. If you like stories about this part of the world or set in a historical environment, you will enjoy this book.

In the late 19th century, a young piano tuner is sent to Burma to repair a rare piano. He leaves his wife in London and starts his travel through Europe, the Red Sea and India. He meets a lot of interesting people along the road until he arrives in the mysterious jungles of Burma.

I liked the description of the people, the scenery, the country, the culture, the politics, even the little stories inserted. I also liked the story itself, I just wasn't happy with the end because it left too many loose ends for my liking.

We had a great discussion because one of the members didn't like the book at all whereas the rest of us was quite pleased with it.

We liked it because
… it is about an area that little is written about and we thought his descriptive passages were very lucid and evoking, the language just sweeps you along .
… there is a lot of symbolism and talk about the belief of the Burmese people.
… of the description of the people, the scenery, the country, the culture, the politics, even little stories within the novel.
… the author introduced so many other subjects, all the details about tuning and music, we kept being surprised that it was written by a man, loved the personality of the main character, he was sensitive and gentle.
… there were really good descriptions of Burma and the passage, cultural differences and colonialism.
… the three different parts of the book portray three different parts of his life, ordinary life, looking forward to something new, changing his perspective in the end.

I still enjoyed reading this book because I became interested in this part of the world and its history after reading "The Glass Palace" by Amitav Ghosh.

There are talks about this being made into a movie. Should be interesting.

From the back cover:

"In 1886 a shy, middle-aged piano tuner named Edgar Drake receives an unusual commission from the British War Office: to travel to the remote jungles of northeast Burma and there repair a rare piano belonging to an eccentric army surgeon who has proven mysteriously indispensable to the imperial design. From this irresistible beginning, The Piano Tuner launches its protagonist into a world of seductive loveliness and nightmarish intrigue. And as he follows Drake’s journey, Mason dazzles readers with his erudition, moves them with his vibrantly rendered characters, and enmeshes them in the unbreakable spell of his storytelling."

We discussed this in our book club in December 2006.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2022.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor "The Adolescent"

Dostoevsky, Fyodor "The Adolescent" (or: The Raw Youth - Russian: Подросток = Podrostok) - 1875

I love classics. Besides English classic authors like Jane Austen, George Eliot and Charles Dickens, I probably like the Russians best. After reading (and loving) Anna Karenina, this book was recommended to our book club by one of our members who knows a lot about Russian literature. And I was not disappointed. The description of the simple life in Russia about 150 years ago is very interesting. Also, you can imagine how the revolution started and why some things in history happened the way it did.

The story portrays the life of 19-year-old Arkady Dolgoryky, the conflicts he has with his father, a landowner, the difference between the "old" ways and the views of the young Russians of the time. As a lot of young people, Arkady rebels against what society expects of him.

Even though this book is more than a century old, it still holds a lot of truth. Some things always have been a certain way and will never change, even though the environment and the circumstances kids grow up in change.

I really liked this book, it gave me a lot to think about. If you like Russian classics, read it.

We discussed this in our international book club in December 2005.

From the back cover:

"The narrator and protagonist of Dostoevsky’s novel The Adolescent (first published in English as A Raw Youth) is Arkady Dolgoruky, a naïve 19-year-old boy bursting with ambition and opinions. The illegitimate son of a dissipated landowner, he is torn between his desire to expose his father’s wrongdoing and the desire to win his love. He travels to St. Petersburg to confront the father he barely knows, inspired by an inchoate dream of communion and armed with a mysterious document that he believes gives him power over others. This new English version by the most acclaimed of Dostoevsky’s translators is a masterpiece of pathos and high comedy."

I also since read "The Gambler", "Crime and Punishment" and a few other books by Dostoevsky, see here.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2022.

Hislop, Victoria "The Island"

Hislop, Victoria "The Island" - 2005

An interesting book about a wonderful part of this world with a harrowing past. When I visited Crete, we also took a boat to the unoccupied island of Spinalonga. We were able to walk across it while listening to the story of this beautiful little piece of land. The most exciting part: it was used as a leper colony from 1903 to 1957. People who were banned there wouldn't return into normal life until a cure was found.

This book reflects on the lives of the people on this island, how they got there, how their everyday life was, how life was for those left behind, how the people in the little village just opposite the island were. The author managed to illustrate all this through a family who was involved in the whole history. There are some strong characters in this devastating family saga.

Book Description:

"The Petrakis family lives in the small Greek seaside village of Plaka. Just off the coast is the tiny island of Spinalonga, where the nation's leper colony once was located - a place that has haunted four generations of Petrakis women. There's Eleni, ripped from her husband and two young daughters and sent to Spinalonga in 1939, and her daughters Maria, finding joy in the everyday as she dutifully cares for her father, and Anna, a wild child hungry for passion and a life anywhere but Plaka. And finally there's Alexis, Eleni's great-granddaughter, visiting modern-day Greece to unlock her family's past.

A richly enchanting novel of lives and loves unfolding against the backdrop of the Mediterranean during World War II, The Island is an enthralling story of dreams and desires, of secrets desperately hidden, and of leprosy's touch on an unforgettable family."

I also read "The Return", "The Thread" and "The Last Dance and Other Stories" in the meantime and they were just as great.

Victoria Hislop has written a sequel in the meantime, "One August Night", if you enjoyed this one, I highly recommend you read that, as well.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2022.

Find the other Victoria Hislop books I read here. 

Jessop, Carolyn "Escape"

Jessop, Carolyn "Escape" - 2007

Imagine being forced into a marriage at the age of 18 to a man 32 years older than you. Imagine further that you are wife no. 4 with more following. That you have eight children in fifteen years which you share with the other wives. That you have to obey your husband. That he abuses you and your children. What would you do?

Carolyn Jessop is the woman who experienced exactly this. She did the only thing possible, she escaped. This is the story of her life, an account of a woman in a completely destitute position who fought for her life and that of her children.

Even though this is a book about one terrible thing after another, it is also a book of hope, that there is something you can do in a hopeless situation, where everyone tells you it's impossible to get away from but it shows there is hope. I have nothing but admiration for this woman.

From the back cover:

"In the closed world of the fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints. Carolyn Jessop was forced to obey HER Controlling husband's every Demand. She had no money. No power and existed AS one of six wives battling for her husband's attention. For seventeen years Carolyn suffered for the sake of her children. She tried to protect them as the cult's new leader. Warren Jeffs. started marrying girls off younger and younger. But when Carolyn discovered that her twelve-year-old daughter had spent three days at Jeffs' home. she knew she had to do everything in her power to take her children and flee. At 35 Carolyn escaped. This is her harrowing - and ultimately triumphant - story."

Another book about the FLDS (which I didn't really like very much):
Krakauer, Jon "Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith"

de Loo, Tessa "The Twins"

de Loo, Tessa "The Twins" (Dutch: De Tweeling) - 1993

Tessa de Loo is a highly acclaimed writer in the Netherlands (though she lives in Switzerland). This book is remarkable.

Twin sisters are separated after the death of their parents, one goes to a farmer in Germany, the other one is taken in by Dutch relatives. Now they have to lead their separate lives as their countries enter into war from two opposing sides.

The author doesn't just write about something she didn't experience herself (she was born in 1947), she also tries to understand both sides, she doesn't just see the Dutch as the victims but also understands the problems the Germans had. A very touching story, as the twins get separated in childhood and just by chance end up in the two different countries. That way, de Loo suggests that most people did not really have a chance as to which way they turned during the war.

Has anybody read this book? It's exciting, it's informative, it's great.

We discussed this in our international book club in December 2004 and in our Dutch International Women's Book Club in 2000/2001.

From the back cover: 

 

"Twins who were orphaned at six and sent to live with different relatives on opposite sides of WW II are reunited by chance seventy years later at a Belgian health resort. This international bestseller, a powerful novel, is both a European allegory and a poignant story of family ties."

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2022.

Vreeland, Susan "Girl in Hyacinth Blue"

Vreeland, Susan "Girl in Hyacinth Blue" - 1999

I'm not much of a fan of short stories. But in this case they don't seem like short stories because all these people are linked by the painting. I read it because we had chosen "Girl with a Pearl Earring" for our book club (being set in the Netherlands) and somebody suggested this would be a good addition. So, some of us read both the books. I'm glad I did. I guess, if you liked "Girl with a Pearl Earring", you will like this one, as well.

Again, the main subject of the novel is a painting, however, in this case the life of the fictitious painting by Vermeer is described, starting with the last owner. A lot of interesting stories, every important timeframe is included and the change of owner is almost every time highly dramatic.

The painting has a different effect on every owner and through this we can understand a painting better.

I loved this book, it shows history in its best form, through the people who lived it.

We discussed this in our book club in December 2001.

From the back cover: 

 

"A professor invites a colleague from the art department to his home to view a painting he has kept secret for decades in Susan Vreeland's powerful historical novel, Girl in Hyacinth Blue. The professor swears it's a Vermeer -- but why exactly has he kept it hidden so long? The reasons unfold in a gripping sequence of stories that trace ownership of the work back to Amsterdam during World War II and still further to the moment of the painting's inception."

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2022.

Chevalier, Tracy "Girl with a Pearl Earring"

Chevalier, Tracy "Girl with a Pearl Earring" - 1999

One of our first book club reads in the Netherlands. We chose this because of the "Dutch background", i.e. a painting of the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer. The main character is 16 year old Griet from Delft, a maid in the house of the famous painter. She doesn't just become a good help, she also is the model for his famous picture "Girl with a Pearl Earring". Even though this is fiction and it is generally assumed that the girl in this painting is one of Vermeer's own daughters, the story still is very interesting. The author describes the way a painting is done, the politics behind it, the life in the 1600s both in poor and rich houses.

As expatriates in the Netherlands, this novel also brought us closer to one of this country's great geniuses. You can tell the author loves art and history. This is also one of the few books turned into a film where I didn't entirely dislike the movie, even though alterations were made.

I also read Tracy Chevalier's "The Virgin Blue" and absolutely loved it. "Falling Angels" was also wonderful.

We discussed this in our book club in November 2001. We also discussed "Remarkable Creatures" by the same author in October 2010.

From the back cover:

"A brilliant historical novel on the corruption of innocence, using the famous painting by Vermeer as an inspiration.

Griet, the young daughter of a tilemaker in seventeeth century Holland, obtains her first job, as a servant in Vermeer’s household. Tracy Chevalier shows us through Griet’s eyes, the complicated family, the society of the small town of Delft, and life with an obsessive genius. Griet loves being drawn into his artistic life, and leaving her former drudgery, but the cost to her own survival may be high."

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2022.

Find the other books I read by this author here.

Shaffer, Mary Ann & Barrows, Annie "The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Society"

Shaffer, Mary Ann & Barrows, Annie "The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Society" - 2008

One of our latest book club reads.

When I first started this, I thought it was a very superficial book but it grew on me quite quickly. A novel about the history of the island of Guernsey during World War II, how the war affects people, often in a bad way and sometimes in a good one, about friendship and people standing up for each other, a book about people getting together to share their love for literature and their need for communication, and food, about how people can get creative when in need, a story that shows how people were getting along in pre-internet and pre-mobile phone times, even in pre-phone times. People actually sat down and wrote letters, we saw how beautiful letter writing is and how it teaches us patience.

I really like this book, it’s a quick and easy read with a good message, lively characters, interesting accounts, humoristic, emotional, very descriptive.

We discussed this in our international book club in October 2010.

From the back cover:

"'I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some sort of secret homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers.' January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man she’s never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has come across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb….

As Juliet and her new correspondent exchange letters, Juliet is drawn into the world of this man and his friends - and what a wonderfully eccentric world it is. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi when its members were discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island - boasts a charming, funny, deeply human cast of characters, from pig farmers to phrenologists, literature lovers all.

Juliet begins a remarkable correspondence with the society’s members, learning about their island, their taste in books, and the impact the recent German occupation has had on their lives. Captivated by their stories, she sets sail for Guernsey, and what she finds will change her forever.

Written with warmth and humor as a series of letters, this novel is a celebration of the written word in all its guises, and of finding connection in the most surprising ways." 

 

* * *

 

I discussed this book again ten years later with our international online book club in September 2020. The members loved it just as much.

Some of the comments:

•    I absolutely loved the book. It was wonderfully written and felt really warm, funny, interesting, heartbreaking, showing horrifying historical things in a more local setting. I used to write letters as a child so liked the writing style and storytelling way.
Same here, that might be the reason why I love epistolary books so much.

•    I also felt very much historical connection, for example I visited Auschwitz some years ago and had grandparents fighting in the war and grew up learning about it. It gave me lots to think and feel about. In a nice way, thankfully, as I am too sensitive to read books about war and suffering otherwise.
I think it is extremely important that we read about war and suffering, even though I understand those who can't. But it hopefully helps us to never forget and repeat history.

•    One thing I keep wondering about is why I could only in my mind see it as a very small village only, while it supposedly was a community of 42,000 people. Maybe it was that I felt very close to the reading group and their connection through books which reminded me of myself raiding my grandparents' shelves for old books when visiting. But I know it was a much bigger place, with much differences in how people coped with the situation, starvation, terrors, some turning on neighbors, some befriending the "enemy".
I suppose we all think of the Channel Islands as quite small and therefore, the communities can't be large. Also, even in a large place, in a situation like this, people usually share their private thoughts only in very small groups.

•    Another thing that seemed strange, was how it felt strange that the time difference portrayed in the book between the war and the writing of the letters and the time Juliet spent in Guernsey, was so short. It felt more like the writers were telling of a past that they had already started healing from. While I know no one can heal from war experiences in a year or two, no forests regrow or supplies be plentiful so fast.
This might be due to the fact that the book and therefore the letters were written after such a long time. If it had been written by the protagonists at the time, we might have seen different feelings.

•    Overall, really much to think about in a really enjoyable way. I also really liked the movie but would absolutely say the book is better.
Definitely. Although the movie really is not bad.

•    One of the best books I have read.
I couldn't agree more.

* * *

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2021.

Book Quotes

I always come across these fabulous quotes about books, reading, libraries, well, anything that has to do with reading is great. I thought I’d share them and if you have some, please, let us know about it and I’ll add them to the list. Thank you. If no source is given, the author is unknown. If you do know him/her, please, let me know.

• "In the winter she curls up around a good book and dreams away the cold." Ben Aaronovitch
• "A great book helps the reader see the world in a way they haven't before, or it helps the reader articulate thoughts and emotions they already have but not yet put into the right words." Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
• "You do not let your words stunt unknown possibilities." Elizabeth Acevedo "Clap When You Land"
• "Learn as much by writing as by reading." Lord Acton
• "I read my eyes out and can't read half enough... The more one reads the more one sees we have to read." John Adams 
• "Let us tenderly and kindly cherish therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write." John Adams
• "Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors." Joseph Addison
• "Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body." Joseph Addison
• " absent teachers." Mortimer J. Adler
• "In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many gent get through to you." Mortimer J. Adler
• "Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life." Mortimer J. Adler 
• "This is the only perfection there is. The perfection of helping others. This is the only thing we can do that has any lasting value or meaning. This is why we’re here, to make each other feel safe." Andre Agassi, Open
  
• "A town with more drinking joints than reading joints has a problem reading can solve." Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
• "If a nation reads what is good with a good understanding, it gets a good understanding for a good nation building!" Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
• "I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books - whether it's strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking. Or a chance meeting with a stranger or friend who recommends a book we would never ordinarily reach for. Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives." Cecelia Ahern
• "To choose a good book, look in an inquisitor’s prohibited list." John Aikin
• "I don't read to pass the time, I read to open up my mind." Steven Aitchison
• "Read to lead in order to succeed." Habeeb Akande
• "How can you be bored? There are so many books to read!" Lailah Gifty Akita
• "I do not read for I have renounced my life, I read because one life is just not enough for me." Abbas Al-Akkad
• "Re-read your favourite books at different stages of your life. The plot never changes but your perspective does." Junaid Akram
  
• "By nature, a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across - each incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clip - is a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom, sometimes a tiny pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar, and served as a piping-hot tale." Rabih Alameddine
• "One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well." Amos Bronson Alcott
• "That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with delight and profit." Amos Bronson Alcott
• "Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable." Louisa May Alcott 
• "Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again." Louisa May Alcott
• "Take some books and read; that's an immense help; and books are always good company if you have the right sort." Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
  
• "Keep reading. It's one of the most marvellous adventures that anyone can have." Lloyd Alexander
• "'Reader' is our primary occupation." Svetlana Alexievich about Russians
• "What kind of life can you have in a house without books?" Sherman Alexie
• "If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one's chances of survival increase with each book one reads." Sherman Alexie
• "I can read a book twice as fast as anybody else. First I read the beginning, and then I read the ending, and then I start in the middle and read toward whichever end I like best." Gracie Allen
• "I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia." Woody Allen
• "I don’t think of literature as an end in itself. It’s just a way of communicating something." Isabel Allende
• "The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night." Isabel Allende
  
• "Write what should not be forgotten." Isabel Allende  
• "Reading is like breathing in, writing is like breathing out." Pam Allyn
• "Honestly, I hate when in books, the guy changes the girl's life. Like, no. The girl needs to change her own life." Sasha Alsberg
• "The virus is enhancing what is already inside each person:
  * Jerks are turning into bigger jerks.
  * Compassionate people are becoming more compassionate.
  You get to decide in this very difficult time who you really are. Hopefully, we all make the right decision." James Altucher
• "Time Machines have existed for Centuries" Michael Andereck
• "Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from one generation to the next. Books save lives." Laurie Anderson
• "A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song." Maya Angelou 
• "Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him." Maya Angelou
• "I always felt if I can get to a library, I’ll be okay." Maya Angelou
• "Reading is the ultimate adventure, books are the ultimate destination." Marc Douglas Ankerud
• "Literacy Is A Bridge From Misery To Hope and opportunity. Literacy changes the trajectory of a family's story." Kofi Annan
• "The most dangerous person has read only one book." (Hominem unius libri timeo. = I fear the man of a single book.) Saint Thomas Aquinas
• "Knowledge has no borders, wisdom has no race or nationality. To block out ideas is to block out the kingdom of God." Aristotle 
• "Curiosity is what lets a young mind grow and keeps an old mind young." Kelley Armstrong, Sea of Shadows
  
• "What a blessing it is to love books. Everybody must love something, and I know of no objects of love that give such substantial & unfailing returns as books & a garden." Elizabeth von Arnim
• "I like books. They’re quiet, dignified and absolute. A man might falter but his words, once written, will hold." Luke Arnold, The Last Smile in Sunder City
• "I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander." Isaac Asimov
• "It isn't just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you - and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful life." Isaac Asimov
  
• "No books are lost by loaning except those you particularly wanted to keep." Alan Atwood
• "A word after a word after a word is power." Margaret Atwood
• "In the end, we all become stories." Margaret Atwood
• "I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most." Margaret Atwood 
• "There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too." Margaret Atwood
• "A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us." W.H. Auden 
• "Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud." W.H. Auden
• "The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page." St. Augustine
• "Evil is the Absence of Good". St. Augustine
  
• "Reading and thinking breeds limitless progress." Auliq-Ice
• "A fondness for reading, properly directed, must be an education in itself." Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
  
• "I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! - When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library." Jane Austen
• "I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon women's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men." Jane Austen, Captain Harville in Persuasion
• "If a book is well written, I always find it too short."  Jane Austen
• "I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library." Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
  
• "It is only a novel… or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language." Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
  
• "Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything." Jane Austen, Persuasion
• "The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."  Jane Austen
• "There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart." Jane Austen, Emma 
• "Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head." Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies
• 
  
• "I would rather be poor in a cottage full of books than a king without the desire to read." Thomas Babington Macaulay
• "If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats." Richard Bach
• "To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry." Gaston Bachelard 
• "We can’t change the world, and a lot of the time we can’t even change people. No more than one bit at a time. So we do what we can to help whenever we get the chance. We save those we can. We do our best." Fredrik Backman, Anxious People
• "For friends ... do but look upon good Books: they are true friends, that will neither flatter nor dissemble." Francis Bacon
• "Reading makes a full man, writing a precise man." Francis Bacon
• "Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention." Francis Bacon
• "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few are to be chewed and digested." Francis Bacon
• "Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable." Francis Bacon
• "Reading is the key that opens doors to many good things in life. Reading shaped my dreams, and more reading helped me make my dreams come true." Ruth Bader Ginsburg
• "The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading." David Bailey
• "Americans like fat books and thin women." Russell Baker 
• "Why can't people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?" David Baldacci
• "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive." James Baldwin
  
• "Reading brings us unknown friends." Honoré de Balzac
• "Dear book, take me away, far, far from here. Take me away from this cruel, cruel world. Take me away from hegemony and prejudice. Take me away from misogyny and hatred. Take me way from racism, narcissism, imperialism and consumerism and make me believe.
  Make me believe that we don't all hate each other. That we don't want to wipe each other off the face of this earth. That we are trying our best to preserve this delicate rock we are precariously balanced upon and that maybe, just maybe there is some good in the world.
  Dear book, take me away." Tom Banfield
  
• "A story is like a giant jigsaw puzzle, a jigsaw puzzle that would cover the whole floor of a room with its tiny pieces." Angelica Banks
  
• "Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own." Julian Barnes
• "When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it." Julian Barnes
• "School libraries are part sanctuary, part laboratory, part university, part launch pad; every library on earth is a multiverse - truth inside of truth, story inside of story, idea inside of idea - which is to say, infinite." Kelly Barnhill
• "Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear." E.S. Barrett
• "The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is." Sir James M. Barrie
• "He who loveth a book will never want for a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter." Isaac Barrow
• "Reading… a vacation for the mind…." Dave Barry
  "I think what's rare is to have both a talent for writing and a pragmatic, stubborn sense that makes you go to the desk every day and keep doing it." Kevin Barry
• "The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers." Stan Barstow
• "The best stories are worth the risk of finding out the ending, you know? And sometimes, they're just a beginning to the next story." Pepper Basham, Jane by the Book
  
• "She had read enough stories to know that the princess and the monster were never the same. She had been alone long enough to know which one she was." Melissa Bashardoust, Girl Serpent Thorn
•  "The library gave birth to a movement of knowledge and learning, and enabled us to explore new things. It was also our sanctuary, and our minaret. It guided us through all the horrors, lit the path we should take and inspired us to carry on. It taught us that a fighter without knowledge is not a hero, but a gangster. The library's many books were fuel for our souls. They gave us back our lives. While bombs rained down from the skies, we discussed new ideas, learned from the past and planned for the future. The library united us all. It was an essential part of Daraya, and what it stood for. Looking back, the secret library was not only our saviour, it was our biggest weapon against the regime." Abdul Basit in "Syria's Secret Library"
• "The secret library was filled with the wonderful aroma of old books and paper. It smelt of history, literature, philosophy, and culture. It was a deep, rich, comforting smell. It was like when you walk in the door of your home and are guided to the kitchen by the smell of fine food. That special dish, and all its delicious ingredients, are waiting there for you. To me, the library was like that. It gave us a precious space where we could breathe hope instead of despair. It liberated us from suffered and savagery. Inside its walls the love of science, literature and ideas filled the air. This symphony of books soothed our hearts. As we entered, its aura revived us, like fresh air to a suffocating man. It was the oxygen for our souls. It was a place where angels met. Each time I stepped inside, I flew with them." Abdul Basit in "Syria's Secret Library"
• "Books, are a travelling machine! They take you to the past or the future or somewhere in between. They take you to places no passport can take you to, and areas no one knows about." Olivia S. Bassily
• "Reading was a joy, a desperately needed escape - I didn’t read to learn, I was reading to read." Christian Bauman
  
• "My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn't have any excuse to be stupid." Joan Bayer
• "That place that does contain
  My books, the best companions, is to me
  A glorious court, where hourly I converse
  With the old sages and philosophers;
  And sometimes, for variety, I confer
  With kings and emperors, and weigh their counsels;
  Calling their victories, if unjustly got,
  Unto a strict account, and, in my fancy,
  Deface their ill-placed statues."
  Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
• "When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair that confined me that culture was the highest of values." Simone de Beauvoir 
• "Life without books is like an unsharpened pencil... it has no point." Belcastro
• "People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned." Saul Bellow
  
• "I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction." Aneurin Bevan
• "Books are not men and yet they stay alive." Stephen Vincent Benet   
• "The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself." Walter Benjamin
• "We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector." Walter Benjamin
• "A book is a device to ignite the imagination." Alan Bennett
• "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
• "'I would have thought,' said the prime minister, 'that Your Majesty was above literature.' 'Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one is above humanity.'" Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader 
• Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life." Jesse Lee Bennett
• "All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape." Arthur Christopher Benson
• "When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own." John Berger 
• "A good reading strengthens the soul." Toba Beta
• "The ability to read becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one's life." Bruno Bettelheim
• "Poetry in translation is, like Guinness outside Dublin, just a shadow of the real thing." Ananyo Bhattacharya
• "The covers of this book are too far apart." Ambrose Bierce?
• "An ordinary man can... surround himself with two thousand books... and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy." Augustine Birrell
• "Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one." Augustine Birrell, Obiter Dicta, "Book Buying"
• "Books, I found had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future". Jim Bishop
• "Reading gives one something to think about other than one’s self." Tom Bissell
• "For as long as she could remember, she had thought that autumn air went well with books, that the two both somehow belonged with blankets, comfortable armchairs, and big cups of coffee or tea." Katarina Bivald, The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend
• "There are certain emotions in your body that not even your best friend can sympathize with, but you will find the right film or the right book, and it will understand you." Björk
• "Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use." Professor Blackie
• "Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while." Malorie Blackman
• "Reading has given me more satisfaction than really anything else." Bill Blass,  fashion designer
• "Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you." Harold Bloom
• "It’s not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read." Judy Blume
• "Librarians save lives by handing the right book at the night time to a kid in need." Judy Blume 
• "Something will be offensive to someone in every book, so you've got to fight it." Judy Blume
• "Although it's clear that some books are better than others by any objective standard, literature isn't algebra. Two people can have wildly different opinions about a book and both be right." Chris Bojhalian
  
• "Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach." Roberto Bolaño, 2666
• "Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions." Roberto Bolaño
• "Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world." Napoleon Bonaparte
• "Books do not age as you and I do. They will still speak when we are gone, to generations we will never see. Yes, the books must survive." Corrie Ten Boom, The Rabbi of Haarlem in The Hiding Place 
• "A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you." Daniel J. Boorstin
• "Emerson said that a library is a magic chamber in which there are many enchanted spirits. They wake when we call them. When the book lies unopened, it is literally, geometrically, a volume, a thing among things. When we open it, when the book surrenders itself to its reader, the aesthetic event occurs. And even for the same reader the same book changes, for the change; we are the river of Heraclitus, who said that the man of yesterday is not the man of today, who will not be the man of tomorrow. We change incessantly, and each reading of a book, each rereading, each memory of that rereading, reinvents the text. The text too is the changing river of Heraclitus." Jorge Luis Borges
• "I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books." Jorge Luis Borges
• "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library." Jorge Louis Borges
• "Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plough and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination." Jorge Luis Borges
• "Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism." Jorge Luis Borges
• "Who needs to go somewhere when you can read about it." Pseudonymous Bosch in "The name of this book is secret"
• "Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us." Alain de Botton
• Writers open our hearts and minds, and give us maps to our own selves." Alain de Botton
• "Books are embalmed minds." Christian Nevell Bovee
• "Reading to me is like unconditional love. I always feel like I'm home when I read a book." Susan Boyiddle
• "I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories." Ray Bradbury
• "I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book." Ray Bradbury
• "The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." Ray Bradbury
• "There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing." Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 
• "Without libraries, what do we have? We have no past and no future." Ray Bradbury 
• "You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world." Ray Bradbury
• "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." Neena H. Brar
• "Stories were power. And whoever controlled the story controlled everything. A story could bring people together, or it could tear them apart. It could spread like a sickness, infecting people. It could lead them into battle or shake them into seeing what they had refused to see before" Libba Bray, "The King of Crows"
• "We’re all strangers connected by what we reveal, what we share, what we take away - our stories. I guess that’s what I love about books - they are thin strands of humanity that tether us to one another for a small bit of time, that make us feel less alone or even more comfortable with our aloneness, if need be." Libba Bray 
• "Fluency is important because it provides a bridge between word recognition and comprehension." Kelly L. Briggs, "Reading in the Classroom"
• "It’s hopeless! Tomorrow there will be even more books I should have read than there are today." Ashleigh Brilliant
• "Man is what he reads." Joseph Brodsky
  "I like to write when I'm not supposed to be writing. Like, in a bathroom at a party, just hiding in there for half an hour. On the subway, or just walking around New York on my phone." Melissa Broder
  
• "There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them." Joseph Brodsky
• "A book may be compared to your neighbour; if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early." Henry Brooke
• "It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it." Jacob Bronowski
• "Books have been my classroom and my confidant. Books have widened my horizons. Books have comforted me in my hardest times. Books have changed my life." Po Bronson
• "Reading is my favourite occupation, when I have leisure for it and books to read." Anne Brontë
• "There are great books in this world and great worlds in books." Anne Brontë
• "If you love a book, write a nice review. It gives the author encouragement for bad days, when they want to take up scorpion petting." Liana Brooks
• "I cannot imagine life without books any more than I can imagine life without breathing." Terry Brooks
• "It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything." Lord Henry P. Brougham 
• "Despite his money and his looks and all the good-on-paper attributes he possessed, he was not a reader, and well, let’s just say that is the sort of nonsense up with which we will not put." Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters
  
• "Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream." Les Brown
• "Having fun isn't hard when you have a library card." Marc Brown, Arthur the Aardvark
  
• "Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going." Rita Mae Brown
  
• "When I got [my] library card, that was when my life began." Rita Mae Brown
• "Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; piled high, packed large - where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!" Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• "No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books." Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• "The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.' James Bryce
• "If you have enough room for your books, you don’t have enough books." James Bryce
• "If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?" E.A. Bucchianeri
• "There is much to discover that’s not on the back cover!" E.A. Bucchianeri
• "You can’t enjoy art or books in a hurry." E.A. Bucchianeri
• "Children are made readers in the laps of their parents." Emilie Buchwald
• "One doesn’t read Jane Austen; one re-reads Jane Austen." William F. Buckley, Jr.
• "It was a joy! Words weren’t dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you." Charles Bukowski
• "That's how it is with books, isn't it: They're not in a hurry. They’ll wait for you till you're ready." Charles Bukowski
• "Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting." Edmund Burke
• "To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting." Edmund Burke 
• "It is better to read a little and ponder a lot than to read a lot and ponder a little." Denis Parsons Burkitt
• "Home is where the books are." Richard Francis Burton
• "Fight from an educated perspective. Always be ready to learn." Sophia Bush
• "Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them." Samuel Butler
• "The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them." Samuel Butler
• "No one ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have tried while trying to write one." Robert Byrne
  
• "A drop of ink may make a million think." Lord Byro
• "If I could always read I should never feel the want of company." Lord Byron
• "One of the pleasures of reading old letters is the knowledge that they need no answer." Lord Byron
  
• "The purpose of a writer is to make revolution irresistible." Toni Cade Bambara
• "If there are no books, there is no civilization." Thomas Cahill
• "A classic does not necessarily teach us anything we did not know before. In a classic we sometimes discover something we have always known (or thought we knew), but without knowing that this author said it first, or at least is associated with it in a special way. And this, too, is a surprise that gives much pleasure, such as we always gain from the discovery of an origin, a relationship, an affinity." Italo Calvino
• "A classic is a book that comes before other classics; but anyone who has read the others first, and then reads this one, instantly recognizes its place in the family tree." Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics
  
• "A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say." Italo Calvino 
• "A classic is something that persists as a background noise even when the most incompatible momentary concerns are in control of the situation." Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics
  
• "A classic is something that tends to relegate the concerns of the moment to the status of background noise, but at the same time this background noise is something we cannot do without." Italo Calvino 
• "Every rereading of a classic is as much a voyage of discovery as the first reading." Italo Calvino 
• "The classics are books that exert a peculiar influence, both when they refuse to be eradicated from the mind and when they conceal themselves in the folds of memory, camouflaging themselves as the collective or individual unconscious. Italo Calvino "Why Read the Classics"
• "The classics are books which, upon reading, we find even fresher, more unexpected, and more marvellous than we had thought from hearing about them." Italo Calvino
  
• "The classics are the books of which we usually hear people say, 'I am rereading . . .' and never 'I am reading . . .'" Italo Calvino 
  
• "The classics are the books that come down to us bearing the traces of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on the culture or cultures they have passed through (or, more simply, on language and customs)." Italo Calvino 
• "We use the word 'classic' of a book that takes the form of an equivalent to the universe, on a level with the ancient talismans. With this definition we are approaching the idea of the 'total book' as Mallarmé conceived of it." Italo Calvino 
  
• "We use the words 'classics' for books that are treasured by those who have read and loved them; but they are treasured no less by those who have the luck to read them for the first time in the best conditions to enjoy them." Italo Calvino "Why Read the Classics"
• "If you have never said 'Excuse me' to a parking meter or bashed your shins on a fireplug, you are probably wasting too much valuable reading time." Sherri Chasin Calvo
• "Bookshops are time machines, spaceships, story-makers, secret-keepers, dragon-tamers, dream catchers, fact finders & safe places." Jen Campbell
• "When you find a writer who really is saying something to you, read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there and elsewhere. Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is really marvelous." Joseph Campbell 
• "A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images." Albert Camus
• "Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
  Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
  Walk beside me… just be my friend" Albert Camus
  
• "In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there's something stronger – something better, pushing right back." Albert Camus (Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un invincible été.)
• "And whatever kind of book you are reading, you get to rest for a while in the author's mind and share their unique way of looking at things and putting them together. In a few hours you will learn, without effort, everything this other person has laboured for years to know and understand." Clare Carlisle
• "Reading is a gift. It's something you can do almost anytime and anywhere. It can be a tremendous way to learn, relax, and even escape." Richard Carlson
• "In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time: the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream." Thomas Carlyle
• "Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books." Thomas Carlyle
• "The greatest university of all is a collection of books." Thomas Carlyle
• "What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us." Thomas Carlyle
• "Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms." Angela Carter
• "If you have not done things worthy of being written about, at least write things worthy of being read." Giacomo Casanova
• "One should be wary of people who have only read one book. ..." Giacomo Casanova
• "I was born with a reading list I will never finish." Maud Casey
• "Speak the truth in a million voices. It is silence that kills!" St. Catherine of Siena
  
• "Nothing ever comes out the way I hope it will. That first vision, that initial vision you have of a book what it's going to be like when it's done, it begins to go wrong the second you start to write." Michael Chabon
  
• "Reading a great work of literature can truly be likened to having a conversation with a great mind." Jennie Chancey
• "One to whom books are as strangers has not yet learned to live. He is a solitary, though he dwell amid a vast population. On the other hand, he to whom books are as friends possesses a Key to the Garden of Delights, where the purest pleasures are open for his entertainment, and where he has for his companions the master minds of all the ages." Charles Noel Douglas
• "Read! Read all the time, the understanding will come by itself." Paul Celan 
• "Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind." Robert Chambers
• "A good title is the title of a successful book." Raymond Chandler
• "If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood … … and if they had been any better, I should not have come." Raymond Chandler
• "God be thanked for books! they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages." W.E. Channing
• "The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring." Warren Chappell
  
• "There is no substitute for books in the life of a child." May Ellen Chase
• "And all the books you've read have been read by other people. And all the songs you've loved have been heard by other people. And that girl that's pretty to you is pretty to other people. And you know that if you looked at these facts when you were happy, you would feel great because you are describing 'unity'." Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
  
• "Dear and most respected bookcase! I welcome your existence, which has for over one hundred years been devoted to the radiant ideals of goodness and justice." Anton Chekhov 
  
• "I knew a gentleman who was so good a manager of his time that he would not even lose that small portion of it which the calls of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary-house; but gradually went through all the Latin poets in those moments." Lord Chesterfield
• "Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote." Lord Chesterfield
• "The mere brute pleasure of reading - the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing." Lord Chesterfield 
• "A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author." G.K. Chesterton
• "Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten." G.K. Chesterton
• "There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read." Gilbert K. Chesterton
• "I have consistently loved books that I’ve read when I’ve been sick in bed." Tracy Chevalier
  
• "Read widely, think broadly, judge wisely" Dr T.P. Chia
• "The more you read, the more you learn, the more you learn, the smarter you are." Dr T.P. Chia
• "Thinking is more powerful than talking. Reading is more enlightening than seeing." Dr T.P. Chia
• "A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language." Noam Chomsky
  
• "You will be transformed by what you read." Deepak Chopra
• "If you cannot read all your books ... fondle them - peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances." Winston S. Churchill
• "A room without books is like a body without a soul." Marcus Tullius Cicero
  (Una stanza senza libri è come un corpo senz'anima.)
• "I always have time for my books for they are never busy." Marcus Tullius Cicero
• "I can study my books at any time, for they are always disengaged." (Mihi omne tempus est ad meus libros vacuum, numquam enim sunt illi occupati.) Marcus Tullius Cicero "De re publica"
• "I have put out my books and now my house has a soul." Marcus Tullius Cicero
• "If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need." Marcus Tullius Cicero
• "To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child." Marcus Tullius Cicero
• "The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense." Tom Clancy
• "The only way to do all the things you'd like to do is to read." Tom Clancy 
• "How can you tell? That I like books, I mean." Cassandra Clare
• "Life is a book and there are a thousand pages I have not yet read." Cassandra Clare
• "One must always be careful of books and what is inside them, for words have to power to change us." Cassandra Clare, The Infernal Devices
• "Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry." Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel
• "People who know and love the same Books as you have the road map to your Soul." Cassandra Clare
• "You’re a reader as well as a writer, so write what you’d want to read." Cassandra Clare
• "The fluent reader sounds good, is easy to listen to, and reads with enough expression to help the listener understand and enjoy the material." Charles Clark
• "All of us possess a reading vocabulary as big as a lake but draw from a writing vocabulary as small as a pond. The good news is that the acts of searching and gathering always expand the number of usable words." Roy Peter Clark
• "Everyone should read, we say, but we act as if only those with special talent should write." Roy Peter Clark
• "My father always says, 'Never trust anyone who has a TV bigger than their bookshelf.' So I make sure I read. Back at home, I just put up a massive bookcase and asked everyone I know and love to help me fill it with their favourite books. I'ts been quite nice because I've learned a lot about my friends and family from what they've been giving me. A book says a lot about a person." Emilia Clarke
  
• "Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow…" Lawrence Clark Powell
• "We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed." Lawrence Clark Powell
• "Not every book is for every reader." Meg Waite Clayton
• "Literacy is not a luxury, it is a right and a responsibility. If our world is to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century we must harness the energy and creativity of all our citizens." President Clinton on International Literacy Day, September 8th 1994
• "If you’re talking to a writer and they go 'this is a real masterpiece and I didn’t have no trouble,' trust me, that book stinks. The rest of us have to kind of go through this, you sort of live with this natural insecurity. The key is to understand it’s part of the process." Harlan Coben
  
• "Blessed are those who do not fear solitude, who are not afraid of their own company, who are not always desperately looking for something to do, something to amuse themselves with, something to judge." Paulo Coelho 
• "Read. Forget everything you've been told about books and read." Paulo Coelho
• "The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That's why we go to movies and say, 'Oh, the book is better'." Paulo Coelho
• Readers may be divided into four classes:
  1. Sponges, who absorb all that they read and return it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtied.
  2. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time.
  3. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read.
  4. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• "Books, books, books... all of them were necessary to me. Their presence, their smell, the letters of their titles, and the texture of their leather bindings." Colette
• "Real poverty is lack of books." (Sidonie-Gabrielle) Colette
• "I love bookstores. I love the energy in a bookstore and the smell of the paper." Chris Colfer
• "A man may as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading." Jeremy Collier
• "Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves". Jeremy Collier 
• "The love of books is among the choicest gifts of the gods." Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• "My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence." Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes 
  
• "He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger ... Men of superior mind busy themselves first getting at the root of things; when they succeed, the right course is open to them." Confucius
• "No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance." Confucius 
• "Words are the voice of the heart." Confucius
• "You cannot open a book without learning something." Confucius  
• "As soon as I saw bookshelves through the store windows, I felt lighter. Just thinking about the smell inside. Paper, compressed nature, and hands making words, a must of knowing and magic. Periods. Commas. Digressions. Analogies. The beauty of everyday thought turned poetry. It was all there, and I was hit with a sliver of peace in the chaos of my brain." Dave Connis, Suggested Reading
  
• "Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." Cyril Connolly
• "While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living." Cyril Connolly
• "Read to escape reality ... Write to embrace it." Stephanie Connolly
• "One writes only half the book; the other half is with the reader." Joseph Conrad
• "Reading gives us some place to go when we have to stay where we are." Mason Cooley
• "There are different rules for reading, for thinking, and for talking. Writing blends all three of them." Mason Cooley
• "I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book." Coolio
• "To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge." Nicolaus Copernicus
  
• "I often feel sorry for people who don't read good books; they are missing a chance to lead an extra life." Scott Corbett
• "It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book." Maureen Corrigan, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Book
  
• "A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life." Norman Cousins
• "Any fiction should be a story. In any story there are three elements: persons, a situation, and the fact that in the end something has changed. If nothing has changed, it isn't a story." Malcolm Cowley
•  "I love the way that each book - any book - is its own journey. You open it, and off you go…." Sharon Creech
• "The relationship of a girl and her favourite novel can be complex indeed." Andrea Cremer
• "You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide." Justin Cronin
• "Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation." Walter Cronkite
• "I don’t know a lot about history, but I do understand that all it takes is a whole bunch of bystanders and people just doing their jobs for ugly things to happen." Sarah Crossan, Moonrise
• "From my point of view, a book is a literary prescription put up for the benefit of someone who needs it." S.M. Crothers
• "Nothing can compare to the feeling evoked by turning the page in a great book." Aneta Cruz
• "I can feel infinitely alive curled up on the sofa reading a book ..." Benedict Cumberbatch 
• "Why Read the Classics?" "Reading is one of the joys of life and once you begin you can't stop and you've got so many stories to look forward to." Benedict Cumberbatch 
• "A good book has no ending." R.D. Cumming
• "One always has a better book in one’s mind than one can manage to get onto paper." Michael Cunningham
• "On rare occasions there comes along a profound original, an odd little book that appears out of nowhere, from the pen of some obscure storyteller, and once you have read it, you will never go completely back to where you were before. The kind of book you may hesitate to lend for fear you might miss its company. The kind of book that echoes from the heart of some ancient knowing, and whispers from time's forgotten cave that life may be more than it seems, and less." A.B. Curtiss
• "I treat my books like I treat my shoes: The more I love them, the shodier they become." Rachel Cusk
• "All the reading she had done had given her a view of life they had never seen." Roald Dahl, Matilda
• "If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books." Roald Dahl
• "So Matilda’s strong mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out in the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone." Roald Dahl, Matilda 
• "So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install a lovely bookshelf on the wall." Roald Dahl
• "The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village." Roald Dahl, Matilda
• "The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected." Frank Dane
• "Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow." Anthony J. D'Angelo
• "Books are flying carpets into the realm of fantasy." James Daniel
• "Someday I hope to write a book where the royalties will pay for the copies I give away." Clarence Darrow
• "My imagination doesn't require anything more of the book than to provide a framework within which it can wander." Alphonse Daudet
• "The pictures are better. No fancy computer-enhanced video can compete with reading, and re-reading, the actual text. Imagination is the key to enjoying good literature." Paul Davies
  
• "A truly great book should be read in youth, against in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen be seen by morning light, at noon, and by moonlight." Robertson Davies
• "I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed - and one of them hadn't even been coloured in yet." John Dawkins
• 
  "The internet is amazing because it connects us with one another. But it’s also horrific because … it connects us with one another." Felicia Day, You're Never Weird on the Internet
  
• "To enter a wood is to pass into a different world in which we ourselves are transformed." Roger Deakin, Wildwood
  
• "I would like my readers to close the cover at the end and say, 'Wow, I never thought of it like that before'." Ted Dekker
• "What we read and why we do so defines us in a profound way. You are what you read, I suppose. Browsing through someone’s library is like peeking into their DNA." Guillermo del Toro
  
•  "I became a book lover at a very young age. Books taught me that there are different lives and beautiful things." Rene Denfeld
• "When we read with children, we increase their vocabulary and imagination, and with a larger vocabulary, they become better at expressing themselves with their own words. It strengthens their ability to enter into communities that benefit them both now and in the future." HKH Crown Princess Mary Elizabeth of Denmark
  
• "Reading is important, because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything." Tomie dePaola
• Are we not like two volumes of one book?" Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
• "The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries." René Descartes
• "A book is a whole world that you can fit into your pocket." Matshona Dhliwayo
• "The greatest deed you can do for anyone is not free them from pain or hunger, but from ignorance." Matshona Dhliwayo
• "A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. A writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway." Junot Díaz
• "You’re the only person I’ve ever met who can stand a bookstore as long as I can.” Junot Díaz, "This Is How You Lose Her" 
• "Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, a duty. It should be offered as a gift." Kate DiCamillo
• "The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them." Philip K. Dick
  
• "Memory is my curse, and if I could forget my sorrow and my wrong, I would." Charles Dickens
• "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry." Emily Dickinson 
• "I have nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine." Emily Dickinson
• "There is no Frigate like a Book
  To take us Lands away
  Nor any Coursers like a Page
  Of prancing Poetry -
  This Traverse may the poorest take
  Without oppress of Toll -
  How frugal is the Chariot That bears the Human Soul". Emily Dickinson
• "The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream." Joan Didion
• "Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolours. Every stroke you put down you have to go with." Joan Didion
• "She reads books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live." Annie Dillard
• "Do not read good books - life is too short for that - read only the best." Ernest Dimnet
• "There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island." Walt Disney 
• "I read like a flame reads the wood." Alfred Döblin
• "Books! People never really stop loving books. 51st century. By now, you've got holovids, direct-to-brain downloads, fiction mist. But you need the smell. The smell of books, Donna - Deep Breath!" The Doctor (Doctor Who, TV Series) 
• "Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book." Anthony Doerr
• "Books change people's destinies." Carlos Maria Dominguez
• "I opened a book and in I strode. Now nobody can find me." Julia Donaldson
• "Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it." Fyodor Dostoevsky
• "My mother and my father were illiterate immigrants from Russia. When I was a child they were constantly amazed that I could go to a building and take a book on any subject. They couldn't believe this access to knowledge we have here in America. They couldn't believe that it was free." Kirk Douglas * Aren't we lucky??? 
• "Once you learn to read, you will be forever free." Frederick Douglass
• "The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world." Rita Dove
• "The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it." Elizabeth Drew
• "Reading one book is like eating one potato chip." Diane Duane 
• "A good reader should always have two books with him: one to read, the other one to lend." Gabrielle Dubois
• "Let's be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading." Lena Dunham
• "Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance." Will Durant
• "What makes a good book? Simply put, a good book is one that you enjoy reading." Carmela Dutra

• "Never judge a book by its movie." J.W. Eagan
• "Authors from whom others steal should not complain, but rejoice. Where there is no game there are no poachers." Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
• "Not reading a beautiful book again because you've already read it, that is, as if you were not visiting a dear friend again because you know him already." Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
• "The spirit of a language reveals itself most clearly in its untranslatable words." Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
• "A non-reader, at 70 years old, will have lived only one life: his own! He or she who reads will have lived 5000 years. Reading is immortality... backwards." Umberto Eco
• "I love the smell of book ink in the morning." Umberto Eco
• "To survive, you must tell stories." Umberto Eco 
• "Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told." Umberto Eco
• "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, " The Name of the Rose"
  
• "We know that books are not a way of letting someone else think in our place: On the contrary, they are machines that provoke further thought." Umberto Eco
• "We live for books."  Umberto Eco
  
• "Healing isn’t about recovery, it’s about discovery. Discovering hope in hopelessness, discovering an answer when there doesn’t seem to be one, discovering that it’s not what happens that matters - it’s what you do with it." Dr. Edith Eva Eger, The Choice: Embrace the Possible
• "I can’t heal you - or anyone - but I can celebrate your choice to dismantle the prison in your mind, brick by brick. You can’t change what happened, you can’t change what you did or what was done to you. But you can choose how you live now. My precious, you can choose to be free." Dr. Edith Eva Eger, The Choice: Embrace the Possible
• "Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let's not forget this." Dave Eggers
• "The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library." Albert Einstein, who was one of the wisest guys who ever lived. Obviously.
• "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 William Eliot
• "It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view." George Eliot
• "Every time you open a book, a little magic falls out." Carrie Elks
• "Let every man, if possible, gather some good books under his roof." Wiliam Ellery Channing
• "I'd rather carry a two pound book and not read it instead of being caught somewhere with no book to read." Helen Ellis
  
• "Maybe Heaven will be a library. Then I will be able to finish my to-read list." Kellie Elmore (Amen to that one.)
• "A man is known by the books he reads." Ralph Waldo Emerson
• "I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." Ralph Waldo Emerson
• "If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask  him what books he reads." Ralph Waldo Emerson
• "In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leather boxes." Ralph Waldo Emerson
• "Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet." Ralph Waldo Emerson
• "Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough of literature." Ralph Waldo Emerson 
• "Some books leave us free and some books make us free." Ralph Waldo Emerson
• "'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart." Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude, 1870
• "We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages." Ralph Waldo Emerson
• "When I read a good book, I wish my life were three thousand years long." Ralph Waldo Emerson
• "Even in the most stressed times there is always time for reading." Emilie and Stephanie
• "A book, too, can be a star, 'explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,' a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe." Madeleine L'Engle
• "You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children." Madeleine L'Engle
• "Let books be your dining table and you shall be full of delights, let them be your mattress and you shall sleep restful nights." St. Ephraim the Syrian
• "Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss." Nora Ephron
• "I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults." Desiderius Erasmus
• "When I get a little money I buy books; if any is left, I buy food and clothes." Desiderius Erasmus 
• "To read is to empower
  To empower is to write
  To write is to influence
  To Influence is to change
  To change is to live." Jane Evershed, More than a Tea Party
  
• •    "I realize that I have left part of myself in a place where I shall probably never come back." Annie Ernaux, La Honte (Shame)
  •    "I started to make a literary being of myself, someone who lives as if her experiences were to be written down someday." Annie Ernaux, Mémoire de fille (A Girl's Story)
  •    "Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people." Annie Ernaux, L'Événement (Happening)
  •    "Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to find out whether other people have done or felt the same things or, if not, for them to consider experiencing such things as normal. Maybe I would also like them to live out these very emotions in turn, forgetting that they had once read about them somewhere." Annie Ernaux, Passion Simple (Simple Passion)
  •    "When I write I do not have the impression of looking inside me, I look inside a memory." Annie Ernaux
• "Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labelled 'This could change your life.'" Helen Exley
• 
  
• "In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar." Anne Fadiman
• "Reading to small children is a speciality." Clifton Fadiman
• "To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our own and are ready to burrow back, back to that private life of the imagination we all led as a child and to whose secret satisfactions so many of us have mislaid the key." Clifton Fadiman
• "When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before." Clifton Fadiman
• "A book is to me like a hat or coat - a very uncomfortable thing until the newness has been worn off." Charles B. Fairbanks
• "Read, read, read. Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window." William Faulkner
• "I wanted to lose myself in happy memories, to be inhabited by gentle novels, to live deep inside books." Gaël Faye 
• "Books open your mind, broaden your mind, and strengthen you as nothing else can." William Feather
• "Finishing a good book is like leaving a good friend." William Feather
• "If the crowns of all the kingdoms of Europe were laid down at my feet in exchange for my books and my love of reading, I would spurn them all." François Fénelon
• "There is a wonder in reading Braille that the sighted will never know: to touch words and have them touch you back." Jim Fiebig
• "In dystopia, when time has run out and the worst is yet to come, the urge to live still remains." Elizabeth Fifer
• "I have read Fahrenheit 451 enough times to know that libraries are one institution that should never be eliminated from a society.... Even when certain civil liberties are taken away, the liberty to read should never be tampered with." Marilyse Figueroa
• "That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong." F. Scott Fitzgerald
• "Reading a good book in silence is like eating chocolate for the rest of your life and never getting fat." Becca Fitzpatrick
• "A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul." Richard Flanagan in "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" 
• "Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one's words and one's soul." Richard Flanagan
• "Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live." Gustave Flaubert
• "For whatever the power of truth may be, literature's own special power has always lain in fiction, that wonder we construct. It is the invention that unbreaks the heart." Angus Fletcher
• "He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odour, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings. It was its pages covered with dust - dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight." Gustave Flaubert
• "Read in order to live." Gustave Flaubert 
• "Reading is another way we survive. It helps to know where we came from, how we got here. And most of all, for me, even though these low and empty islands are all I have ever known, when I open the front cover of a new book, it's like a door, and I can travel far away in place and time." C. A. Fletcher "A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World"
  
• "When a farmer dies who knows the land and the story of the people working it, when a wise man dies, who knows how to read the moon and the sun, the wind and the flight of the birds, ... not just one man dies. It's a whole library that dies." Dario Fo
• "A big book is like a serious relationship, it requires a commitment. Not only that, but there's no guarantee that you will enjoy it, or that it will have a happy ending." Mick Foley 
• "Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West." E.M. Forster
• "I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves." E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951
• "One always tends to overpraise a long book because one has got through it." E.M. Forster
• "Many people, other than the authors, contribute to the making of a book, from the first person who had the bright idea of alphabetic writing through the inventor of movable type to the lumberjacks who felled the trees that were pulped for its printing. It is not customary to acknowledge the trees themselves, though their commitment is total." Forsyth and Rada, Machine Learning
• "A good bookshop shows you the books that you never knew you wanted. It doesn't merely fulfill your desires, it expands them. It you know the book you want, go into a bookshop and buy it, you have failed." Mark Forsyth
• "Some people will lie, cheat, steal and back-stab to get ahead... and to think, all they have to do is READ." Fortune
  
• "Self-pity gets you nowhere. One must have the adventurous daring to accept oneself as a bundle of possibilities and undertake the most interesting game in the world: making the most of one’s best." Harry Emerson Fosdick
• "Your classic author is the one you cannot feel indifferent to, who helps you to define yourself in relation to him, even in dispute with him." Italo Calvino, "Why Read the Classics?""The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing." Alan Dean Foster
  
• "We all suffer alone in the real world. True empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with their own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple." David Foster Wallace
• "I never feel lonely if I've got a book - they're like old friends. Even if you're not reading them over and over again, you know they are there. And they're part of your history. They sort of tell a story about your journey through life." Emilia Fox
• "Because paper has more patience than people." Anne Frank
• "I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn." Anne Frank 
• "Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." Benjamin Franklin
• "The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn't know how to read." Benjamin Franklin
• "The first thing that reading teaches us is how to be alone." Jonathan Franzen
• "Books aren't like broccoli. You don't have to eat it because it's good for you. Books drag you in because they are fascinating." Jackie French
• "It's the secret we never, ever tell our children. No adult ever read a book because it's good for us. We read because it is fun." Jacqueline French
  
• "When I discovered libraries, it was like having Christmas every day." Jean Fritz
• "Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper." Robert Frost
• "Since the pandemic, it's like nothing we've ever seen. We have so many books, but they all seem to be selling." James Fugate, a co-owner of Eso Won Books in Los Angeles
  
• "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." Robert Frost
• "Today a reader, tomorrow a leader." Margaret Fuller
• "A life without books is like a child without a fairytale, is like a youth without love, is like an old man without peace." Carl Peter Fröhling
• "A book that is shut is but a block." Thomas Fuller
• A reader doesn't really see the characters in a story; he feels them." Cornelia Funke 
• "Books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them." Cornelia Funke in "Inkheart"
• "Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn't ask anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly. Love, truth, beauty, wisdom and consolation against death. Who had said that? Someone else who loved books." Cornelia Funke, "Inkheart" (Tintenherz)
• "Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?" Mo had said..."As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells...and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower...both strange and familiar." Cornelia Funke
• "It's a good idea to have your own books with you in a strange place." Cornelia Funke, Inkheart
• "This book taught me, once and for all, how easily you can escape this world with the help of words! You can find friends between the pages of a book, wonderful friends." Cornelia Funke, "Inkspell"
• "Books make fine friends. With soothing words the soul is fed. A page is turned. New thoughts are painted in the mind. Thoughts join letters in joy." Connie Furgason
• "One technology doesn't replace another, it complements. Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators." Stephen Fry
• "The most technologically efficient machine that man ever invented is the book." Northop Frye
•  
• "A book is a dream that you hold in your hands." Neil Gaiman   
• "Books make great gifts because they have whole world inside of them. And it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!" Neil Gaiman
• "Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten." Neil Gaiman 
• "Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over." Neil Gaiman
  
• "I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. It's tosh. It's snobbery and it's foolishness. Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading. We need our children to get onto the reading ladder. Anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy." Neil Gaimain
• "I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else." Neil Gaiman
• "Libraries are the thin red line between civilisation and barbarism." Neil Gaiman
• "Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you're a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable." Neil Gaiman
• "My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of 'Gone With the Wind', and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for." Neil Gaiman
• "Picking five favourite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose." Neil Gaiman
• "Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You'll find what you need to find. Just read." Neil Gaiman
• "What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore it knows it's not fooling a soul." Neil Gaiman 
• "Opening a beer when you get home will reward you for an hour. Opening a book when you get home will reward you for life." Douglass Gaking
• "Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." Mahatma Gandhi
• "If I had to give a young writer some advice I would say to write about something that has happened to him; it’s always easy to tell whether a writer is writing about something that has happened to him or something he has read or been told. Pablo Neruda has a line in a poem that says 'God help me from inventing when I sing.' It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination." Gabriel García Márquez
• "In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact hat is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That's the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it." Gabriel García Márquez
  
• "It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination." Gabriel García Márquez
• "We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images." John Champion Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist
• "The true alchemists do not change lead into gold. They change the world into words." William H. Gass
• "There is no such thing as a bad book, I just like some books more than others…" Chris Geiger
• "Every time a story is told, we are taken somewhere new, somewhere familiar yet strange, somewhere unsafe yet reassuring. A writer who can embrace these contradictions and offer a new way of looking at our time will always be sought after." Jonny Geller 
  
• "Read books. Some of them have been written especially for that." Michail Genin
• "Books amuse and touch. And they can distract - not least from ourselves." Andrea Gerk "Reading as Medicine" ("Lesen als Medizin")
• "And sometimes I read as a way of keeping a grip on the world, a grip on myself in the world, a tiny speck, in the rushing darkness that I am. Hold fast. Reading for my life, I guess." Nicci Gerrard
  
• "The love of my life ever since I was old enough to read. There's nothing better than a nice book on a rainy day." Niko Geyer
• "Let us read with method, and propose to ourselves an end to which our studies may point. The use of reading is to aid us in thinking." Edward Gibbon
• "Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost." Khalil Gibran
• "A book: just a pile of dead letters? No, a bag full of seeds." André Gide 
• "Self-learner; reading." Lailah Gifty Akita
• "Oh, I just want what we all want: A comfortable couch, a nice beverage, a weekend of no distractions and a book that will stop time, lift me out of my quotidian existence and alter my thinking forever." Elizabeth Gilbert
• "You will always have friends. Real life doesn't always hand you the right people. But a book is the perfect place to find your people whenever you need them." Gillian
• "You may have tangible wealth untold; Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I you can never be - I had a mother who read to me." Strickland Gillilan
• "The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning." Nikki Giovanni
• "I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things." George Robert Gissing
• "Books are delightful society. If you go into a room & 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
• "Reading - even browsing - an old book can yield sustenance denied by a database search." James Gleick
• "When you learn to read you will be born again … and you will never be quite so alone again." Rumer Godden
• "He that loves reading has everything within his reach." William Godwin 
• "The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  
• "Bookstores always remind me that there are good things in this world." Vincent Van Gogh
• "For all my students
  past, present, and future
  May we all meet in heaven café
  writing for eternity!"
  Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
• "When I was your age, television was called books." William Goldman, The Princess Bride
• The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one." Oliver Goldsmith
• "I wander through fiction to look for the truth" The Goo-Goo Dolls in "Before it's too late"
• "His hands were weak and shaking from carrying far too many books from the bookshop. It was the best feeling." Joseph Gordon-Levitt
• "The universe is not made of atoms - it's made of tiny stories." Joseph Gordon-Levitt 
• "Keep reading books, but remember that a book’s only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself." Maxim Gorky
• "Set your pace to a stroll. Stop whenever you want. Interrupt, jump back and forth, I won’t mind. This book should be as easy as laughter. It is stuffed with small things to take away. Please help yourself." Willis Goth Regier, In Praise of Flattery
• "Books don't change the world. People are who change this. Books only change people" Caio Graco
• "Words, I’ve come to learn, are pulleys through time. Portals into other minds. Without words, what remains? Indecipherable customs. Strange rites. Blighted hearts. Without words, we’re history’s orphans. Our lives and thoughts erased." Alena Graedon, "The Word Exchange"
• "Books build empathy.
  Empathy leads to compassion.
  Compassion leads to change.
  Books can change the world." Alan Gratz
  
• "One must always be careful of books and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us." Tessa Gray
• "To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries." A C Grayling
• "Read books. care about things. get excited. try not to be too down on yourself. enjoy the ever present game of knowing." Hank Green
• "A novel is a conversation between a reader and a writer." John Green
• "As a reader, I don't feel a story has an obligation to make me happy. I want stories to show me a bigger world than the one I know." John Green
• "Books are the ultimate dumpees: put them down and they'll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back." John Green 
• "Don’t make stuff because you want to make money - it will never make you enough money. And don’t make stuff because you want to get famous - because you will never feel famous enough." John Green
• "Every year, many, many stupid people graduate from college. And if they can do it, so can you." John Green
• "Gentlemen, nerd girls are the world’s most under-utilized romantic resource. Do not tell me that nerd girls aren't hot because that shows a Paris Hilton-esque failure to understand hotness." John Green
• "Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood." John Green
• "He liked all books, because he liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head." John Green
• "I don’t have a favourite book, I have hundreds." John Green
• "Public education does not exist for the benefit of students or the benefit of their parents. It exists for the benefit of the social order.
  We have discovered as a species that it is useful to have an educated population. You do not need to be a student or have a child who is a student to benefit from public education. Every second of every day of your life, you benefit from public education.
  So let me explain why I like to pay taxes for schools, even though I don't personally have a kid in school: It's because I don't like living in a country with a bunch of stupid people." John Green
  
• "Reading forces you to be quiet in a world that no longer makes place for that." John Green
• "Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are books... which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal. It wasn't even that the book was so good or anything; it was just that the author... seemed to understand me in weird and impossible ways." John Green, The Fault in Our Stars, 2012
  [The omitted words in this quotation refer to a fictitious book and author - An Imperial Affliction by Peter Van Houten - the title of which is taken from an Emily Dickinson poem "There's a certain slant of light..." According to Green, if you want to "read" the imaginary book, read "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace and "The Blood of the Lamb" by Peter De Vries and then try to blend the feeling of those two books.]
• "There is this unwritten contract between author and reader and I think not ending your book kind of violates that contract.' John Green, "The Fault in Our Stars"
• "Writing is something you do alone. It's a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doing it." John Green 
• "It often requires more courage to read some books than it does to fight a battle." Sutton Elbert Griggs
• "Reading is by far the most successful pursuit of happiness." John Grisham
• "A country that does not know how to read and write is easy to deceive." Che Guevara
• "Browsing the dim back corner
  Of a musty antique shop
  Opened an old book of poetry
  Angels flew out from the pages
  I caught the whiff of a soul
  The ink seemed fresh as today
  Was that voices whispering?
  The tree of the paper still grows."
  Terri Guillemets
• "Reading in bed jumpstarts dreams." Terri Guillemets
• "Reading is departure and arrival." Terri Guillemets
• "The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story. Ursula K. Guin
• "The greatest degree of inner tranquillity comes from the development of love and compassion. The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being." Tenzin Gyatso (The Dailai Lama)
•  
• "As I remember saying to you back in Daraya, just like the body needs food the soul needs books." Anas Habib in "Syria's Secret Library"
• "I think books are like rain. Wherever rain falls things grow. So hopefully where our books land, the person who reads them will gain knowledge, and his or her mind will grow." Anas Habib in "Syria's Secret Library"
  "We had a place of sanctuary, an oasis of calm and harmony in what seemed like a world gone mad. … It was another world, a world we shared together. And while outside was destruction and pain, inside was creation and hope. Despite all that was happening, I felt inspired inside those walls." Anas Habib in "Syria's Secret Library"
• "Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well." Mark Haddon
•  "Lyrics do that sometimes. They find their home at just the right time. Like a secret message in a bottle, floating on a current for decades, only to wash up at someone’s feet when the words are needed." Erin Hahn, More Than Maybe"
  
• "From every book invisible threads reach out to other books; and as the mind comes to use and control those threads the whole panorama of the world’s life, past and present, becomes constantly more varied and interesting, while at the same time the mind’s own powers of reflection and judgment are exercised and strengthened." Helen E. Haines
• "In each hard copy I have between three and five revisions. So that's seven or eight hard copies. It's crazy, I know. Writing is stupid. Writing should make you money, with the labor you have to put in." Ha Jin
  
• "But, how do you know if an ending is truly good for the characters unless you've travelled with them through every page?" Shannon It is books that are the key to the wide world; if you can’t do anything else, read all that you can." Jane Hamilton  
• "I've read too many books to believe what I am told." Suheir Hammad
• "Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more." Elizabeth Hardwick
• "Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere." Elizabeth Hardwick
• "The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind, it is a moral illumination." Elizabeth Hardwick
• "Here's to books, the cheapest vacation you can buy." Charlaine Harris
• "Some books you read. Some books you enjoy. But some books just swallow you up, Heart and Soul." Joanne Harris
• "The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure." Sydney Harris
• "You must understand that when you are writing a novel, you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it." Thomas Harris 
• "Every time you open a book a writer gets her wings ... and a Kardashian breaks a nail. (Read)" Harris County Public Library
• "MY BOOK!
  I did it!
  I did it!
  Come and look
  At what I’ve done!
  I read a book!
  When someone wrote it
  Long ago
  For me to read,
  How did he know
  That this was the book
  I’d take from the shelf
  And lie on the floor
  And read by myself?
  I really read it!
  Just like that!
  Word by word,
  From first to last!
  I’m sleeping with
  This book in bed,
  This first FIRST book
  I’ve ever read!"
  David L. Harrison
  
• "Reading is a gymnasium for the imagination where people can work out, get ready for the shocks of existence." Robert Hass
• "Books are the most loyal and trusted friends you can ever have." Birgitta Hassel
• "Yes, books are dangerous, they should be dangerous - they contain ideas." Pete Hautman
• "Nothing is better than reading and gaining more and more knowledge." Stephen Hawking
• "It is not true we have only one life to love, if we can read, we can live as many lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish." S.I. Hayakawa
• "Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own." William Hazlitt
• "The most important asset of any library goes home at night - the library staff." Timothy Healy
• "Every book is a children’s book if the kid can read!" Mitch Hedberg
• "We learn from history that we do not learn from history." Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• "What I like about black-and-white photographs is that they're more like reading the book than seeing the movie." Robert Heinecken 
• "Women with clean houses do not have finished books." Joy Held
  
• "My test of a good novel is dreading to begin the last chapter." Thomas Helm
• "All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer." Ernest Hemingway
• "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." Ernest Hemingway
• "There is no friend as loyal as a book." Ernest Hemingway 
• "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed." Ernest Hemingway 
• "Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries." Anne Herbert
• "For my whole life, my favourite activity was reading. It's nto the most social pastime." Audrey Hepburn
• "Having books standing on a shelf in a room is like having completely different worlds at the reading watiing to be explored." J.F. Hermans
• "A house without books is a poor house, even if beautiful rugs are covering its floors and precious wallpapers and pictures cover its walls". Hermann ‎Hesse‬
• "Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity." Hermann ‎Hesse‬
• "It is both relaxing and invigorating to occasionally set aside the worries of life, seek the company of a friendly book … from the reading of 'good books' there comes a richness of life that can be obtained in no other way." Gordon B. Hinckley
• "These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice... and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart." Gilbert Highet
• "Life is a handful of short stories pretending to be a novel." Susan Hill 
• "There is something wonderful about a book. We can pick it up. We can heft it. We can read it. We can set it down. We can think of what we have read. It does something for us. We can share minds, great actions, and great undertakings in the pages of a book." Gordon B. Hinckley
  
• "I've tried atheism and I can't stick at it: I keep having doubts. That probably sums up my position." Ian Hislop (husband to Victoria Hislop)
  
• "There is something wonderful about a book. We can pick it up. We can heft it. We can read it. We can set it down. We can think of what we have read. It does something for us. We can share great minds, great actions, and great undertakings in the pages of a book." Gordon B. Hinckley
• "As novels became more prominent during the 1700s, society and the media grew increasingly concerned that young people spent too much time reading books. They even went so far as to call it 'reading rage,' 'reading fever,' 'reading mania,' and 'reading lust.'" History Today  
• "Books may well be the only true magic." Alice Hoffman
• "The smartest thing Shakespeare ever did was kill off Romeo and Juliet before they had to consider combining their book collections. Because, for literary-inclined star-cross’d lovers, such is a fate worse than death..." Robert Hoge, author of Ugly, considers the challenges of combining libraries.
• "Old books, you know well, are books of the world’s youth, and new books are the fruits of its age." Oliver Wendell Holmes
• "The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts." Oliver Wendell Holmes
• "When you read a book, and who you are when you read it, makes it matter or not." Ann Hood
• "Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep; for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter." Paxton Hood
• "Books are, let's face it, better than everything else." Nick Hornby 
• "My perfect reader doesn’t just read – he or she devours books." Anthony Horowitz
• "A story is like a moving train: no matter where you hop on board, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later." Khaled Hosseini, "And the Mountains Echoed"
• "Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work." Khaled Hosseini 
• "What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it thinks about education." Harold Howe, former U.S. Commissioner of Education
• "A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you." Elbert Hubbard
  
• "This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum." Elbert Hubbard
• "Everything comes to him who waits, except a loaned book." Kin Hubbard
• "I love the world of words, where life and literature connect." Denise J Hughes
  
• "He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two." Describing the character Father Mabeuf. Victor Hugo, "Les Misérables"
• "To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark." Victor Hugo, "Les Misérables"
  "You want to know about anybody? See what books they read, and how they’ve been read…" Keri Hulme, "The Bone People"  
• "Books are dreams lived out on paper." TrueTateHunter
• "She reads. She reads. She reads words of splendour to comfort her soul." Leila Hussein
• "Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting." Aldous Huxley
• "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." Aldous Huxley
• "The trouble with fiction is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense." Aldous Huxley
  
• "Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly - they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced." Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
•  
• "Don’t buy books for your shelf, buy them for yourself." Saji Ijiyemi
  
• "And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it - perhaps your favourite sentence - to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears." John Irving, "In One Person"
•  "A writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories." John Irving
• "The scholar only knows how dear these silent, yet eloquent, companions of pure thoughts and innocent hours become in the season of adversity. When all that is worldly turns to dross around us, these only retain their steady value." Washington Irving
• "A book is like a trapdoor that leads to a secret attic: You can open it and go inside. And your world is different." Antonio Iturbe, The Library of Auschwitz
  
• "There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing." Isaac D'Israeli 
• 
  
• "Reading has seen me through good times and bad. It has taken me to places I longed to go and some I did not want to go. At times, it has challenged, at times comforted." Kathy J.
• "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 
• "A large, still book is a piece of quietness, succulent and nourishing in a noisy world, which I approach and imbibe with 'a sort of greedy enjoyment', as Marcel Proust said of those rooms of his old home whose air was 'saturated with the bouquet of silence'." Holbrook Jackson
• "Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today." Holbrook Jackson
• "The newest books are those that never grow old." George Holbrook Jackson
• "The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practised at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness." Holbrook Jackson
• "Your library is your portrait." Holbrook Jackson
• "It’s what you’re reading that matters, and how you’re reading it, not the speed with which you’re getting through it. Reading is supposed to be about the encounter with other minds, not an opportunity to return to the endlessly appealing subject of Me." Alan Jacobs
• "How do you explain to somebody who doesn't understand that you don't build a library to read. A library is a resource. Something you go to, for reference, as and when. But also something you simply look at, because it gives you succour, answers to some idea of who you are or, more to the point, who you would like to be, who you will be once you own every book you need to own." Howard Jacobsen
• "Reading aloud with children is known to be the single most important activity for building the knowledge and skills they will eventually require for learning to read." Marilyn Jager Adams
• "My mother taught me that reading is a kind of work, and that every paragraph merits exertion, and in this way, I learned how to absorb difficult books. Soon after I went to kindergarten, however, I learned that reading difficult books also brings trouble. I was punished for reading ahead of the class, for being unwilling to speak and act "nicely." I didn't know why I simultaneously feared and adored my female teachers, but I did know that I needed their attention." Hope Jahren, Lab Girl
• "Books aren't interested in who is reading them... A book will welcome any reader; any age, any background, any point of view. Books don't care if you can't understand every word in them, or if you want to skip bits or reread bits. Books welcome everyone who wants to explore them, and thankfully no one has ever worked out a way to stop that." Anna James, Tilly and the Lost Fairytales
• "The act of reading makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life - that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience." Henry James
• "Just the fact of a printed book is something that I don't think I'll ever get over." Marlon James
• "All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction." P.D. James
• "As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!" William James
• "So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky." William James
• "There comes a time when you have to choose between turning the page and closing the book." Josh Jameson
• "Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." Thomas Jefferson
• "I cannot live without books." Thomas Jefferson
• "Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude." Thomas Jefferson
• "You are taller with every book you read." Silly Jellie, DeviantArt
• "A blessed companion is a book, a book that, fitly chosen, is a lifelong friend, ... a book that, at a touch, pours its heart into our own." Douglas Jerrold
• "There are bits and pieces of yourself scattered in every book you read." Janaya Jessalyn
• "You are a reader, and therefore a thinker, an observer, a living soul who wants more out of this human experience." Salil Jha   
• "A book is the most effective weapon against intolerance and ignorance." Lyndon Baines Johnson
• "Where her books were, she was." Maureen Johnson, Truly Devious
• "A book should teach us to enjoy life, or to endure it." Samuel Johnson
• "A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good." Samuel Johnson
• "A writer only begins a book: a reader finishes it." Samuel Johnson
• "What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure." Samuel Johnson
• "You’re the same today as you’ll be in five years except for the people you meet and the books you read." Charlie "Tremendous" Jones
• "I had found a new friend. The surprising thing is where I’d found him - not up a tree or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the hill streams, but in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend. Or that you could slip inside the skin of another. Or travel to another place with marshes, and where, to our ears, the bad people spoke like pirates." Lloyd Jones
• "You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames." Lloyd Jones
• "Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader." Joseph Joubert
• "The great objection to new books is that they prevent our reading old ones." Joseph Joubert
•  "To teach is to learn twice." Joseph Joubert
• "Translating is writing, and I see no distinction, really, between being a writer and being a translator, apart from the very major distinction that I don’t start with a blank page but immerse myself in another writer’s words and transpose them into my own language. People often ask if I don’t yearn to write my own novels, and I don’t. I don’t have that kind of storytelling imagination." Margaret Jull Costa
  
• "I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief." Franz Kafka
• "Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one's own self." Franz Kafka
• "Before this generation lose the wisdom, one advice - read books." Amit Kalantri
• "The more you read, the less you sound foolish when you speak." Amit Kalantri
• "I tell you these stories because these things happen to everyone. It’s not about being starched or polished or cute or polite. It’s about having ears that stick out, about breaking yet another glass. It’s about seeing something for the first time and making a million mistakes and not ever getting completely discouraged." Maira Kalman
• "I feel like I have friends all over the world, through space and time, who I can visit whenever I need a break from my own life." Kat
• "A book is a gift you can open again and again." Garrison Keillor 
• "One reads books in order to gain the privilege of living more than one life. People who don’t read are trapped in a mine shaft, even if they think the sun is shining." Garrison Keillor
• "Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved." Helen Keller
• "Nothing can do what a book can do. Lifts you out of your life… to a whole new world, whole new perspective. A book is like a dream you are borrowing from a friend." Dave Kellet
• "We become the books we read." Matthew Kelly   
• "A book has but one voice, but it does not instruct everyone alike." Thomas Kempis
• "There are many little ways to enlarge your child's world. Love of books is the best of all." Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
• "The problem with books is that they end." Caroline Kepnes  
• "Education: This is not just the obvious help that reading gives to the formal process of learning at school or university. Reading is a wonderful gift for life-long learning. I read to learn more about more, to educate myself further, to extend my knowledge. That is something that never ends." Ian Kershaw
  
• "Thank God for books and music and things I can think about." Daniel Keyes, Charlie Gordon in Flowers of Algernon
  
• "Reading is the life-saving water for our minds. Drink pure words as much as you need and remain alive!" Munia Khan
• "What great writers do is to turn the reader into the writer." David Comer Kidd
• "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." Søren Kierkegaard
• "People don’t read any more. It’s a sad state of affairs. Reading’s the only thing that allows you to use your imagination. When you watch films it’s someone else’s vision, isn’t it?" Lemmy Kilmister
• "The libraries have become my candy store." Juliana Kimball  
• "The beautiful thing about learning is that nobody can take it away from you." B.B. King
• "The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education." Martin Luther King, Jr.
• "Books and movies are like apples and oranges. They both are fruit, but taste completely different". Stephen King
• "Books are a completely portable magic" Stephen King
• "Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life." Stephen King
• "If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that." Stephen King
• "When asked, 'How do you write?' I invariably answer, 'One word at a time,' and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope." Stephen King
• "Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message to us from the dead, - from human souls whom we never saw, who lived perhaps thousands of miles away; and yet these, on those little sheets of paper, speak to us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers." Charles Kingsley
• "I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written." Barbara Kingsolver
• "Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, throwing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up." Barbara Kingsolver
• Every time a newspaper dies, even a bad one, the country moves a little closer to authoritarianism; when a great one goes, like the New York Herald Tribune, history itself is denied a devoted witness." Richard Kluger
  "Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keep friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment." Greenville Kleisser
• "Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more imprtnat than an unread library." Austin Kleon
• How to Read More:
  1. Throw your phone in the ocean (or keep it in airplane mode).
  2. Carry a book at all times.
  3. Have another book ready before you finish the one you're reading) make a stack of books to-read or load up your e-reader).
  4. If you aren't enjoying a book, stop reading it immediately (flinging it across the room helps provide closure).
  5. Schedule one hour a day for reading on your calendar like you would an important meeting (try commutes, lunch breaks, or getting into bed an hour early).
  6. Keep a reading log and share it (people will send you even more good books to read).
  Austin Kleon
  * Most of them work for me, especially #s 2, 3 and 6.
• "A well-read woman is a dangerous creature." Lisa Kleypas
• "Fairy tales in childhood are stepping stones throughout life, leading the way through trouble and trial. The value of fairy tales lies not in a brief literary escape from reality, but in the gift of hope that goodness truly is more powerful than evil and that even the darkest reality can lead to a Happily Ever After. Do not take that gift of hope lightly. It has the power to conquer despair in the midst of sorrow, to light the darkness in the valleys of life, to whisper 'One more time' in the face of failure. Hope is what gives life to dreams, making the fairy tale the reality" L.R. Knost
• "Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions." Aleron Kong, I The Land: Raiders
  
• "Books had shown me, however, that all people everywhere wanted their lives to have purpose and meaning. This longing was universal." Dean Koontz, Innocence
• "It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home." Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian
• "He found solace in what he wrote. It was an attempt to discover who he was at the moment." Brian Krans, A Constant Suicide
• "No novel that I've loved has ever given me an answer. It's given me the opportunity to live in the question." Nicole Krauss
  
• "There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning." Jiddu Krishnamurti
• "In your dark night, I urge you to hold to your faith, to embrace hope, and to bear your love before you like a burning candle, for I promise it will light your way." William Kent Krueger, When Ordinary Grace
• "Used correctly, a book can transport the reader on an instant mental vacation with no jet lag, TSA, or dysentery!" Todd Kruse
• "The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen." Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
• "I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense." Harold Kushner
• "It's the special role of a novelist to have the mystical belief in the power of art to bring meaning to people's lives". Rachel Kushner   
•  
• "Books are a hard bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am a happy victim of books!" Karl Lagerfeld
• "Reading a lot from the distant past furnishes one's head with rich, strange language and cadence that stay around forever." Olivia Laing
• "That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet." Jhumpa Lahiri
• "Borrowers of books - those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes." Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia, "The Two Races of Men," 1822
• "I love to lose myself in other men's minds.... Books think for me." Charles Lamb
• "It is pleasanter to eat one’s own peas out of one’s own garden, than to buy them by the peck at Covent Garden; and a book reads the better, which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots and dog’s-ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins, or over a pipe...." Charles Lamb, letter to S.T. Coleridge, 11 October 1802
• "For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die." Anne Lamott 
• "My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you get shushed, in the friendliest way." Anne Lamott
• "A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever." Louis L'Amour
• "For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived." Louis L'Amour
• "Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you." Louis L'Amour
• "Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on." Louis L'Amour
  
• "No person who can read is ever successful at cleaning out an attic." Ann Landers
• "What is reading but silent conversation?" Walter Landor
• "A book is a friend whose face is constantly changing. If you read it when you are recovering from an illness, and return to it years after, it is changed surely, with the change in yourself." Andrew Lang
• "No matter what his rank or position may be, the lover of books is the richest and the happiest of the children of men." J.A. Langford
• "The love of books is a love which requires neither justification, apology, nor defense." J.A. Langford
• "If you are depressed you are living in the past if you are anxious you are living in the future, if you are at peace, you are living in the present." Lao Tzu 
• "How vast an estate it is that we came into as the intellectual heirs of all the watchers and searchers and thinkers and singers of the generations that are dead! What a heritage of stored wealth! What perishing poverty of mind we should be left in without it!" J.N. Larned
• "It's a great blessing if one can lose all sense of time, all worries, if only for a short time, in a book." Nell Last
• "Reading was an escape to a different world, a different life. Plus it was very cheap." Sasha Laurens
• "All the apartments I buy or rent are for my books, not for myself." Fran Lebowitz
• "Magazines all too frequently lead to books and should be regarded by the prudent as the heavy petting of literature." Fran Lebowitz
• "Think before you speak. Read before you think." Fran Lebowitz
• "Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes." John LeCarré
• "I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide." Harper Lee
• "The book to read is not the one that thinks for you, but the one which makes you think." Harper Lee
• "Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing." Harper Lee
•  "Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren't real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books." Ursula K. Le Guin
  
• "In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane - bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed. Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society has ever trusted its artists?" Ursula K. Le Guin
• "Books allow me to get lost in the right direction." Leiter 1919
• "The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man’s frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search." Max Lerner
• "Parents should leave books lying around marked 'forbidden' if they want their children to read." Doris Lessing
• "That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your live, but in a new way." Doris Lessing 
• "Book love is something like romantic love. When we are reading a really great book, burdens feel lighter, cares seem smaller, and commonplaces are suddenly delightful. You become your best optimistic self. Like romantic love, book love fills you with a certain warmth and completeness. The world holds promise." Steve Leveen 
• "A library is infinity under a roof." Gail Carson Levine
• "There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you’ve read only once can’t." Gail Carson Levine
• "Books are like friends to me. Words come alive on the page." Beverly Lewis
• "A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest" C.S. Lewis
  
• "But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself." C.S. Lewis
• "Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years." C.S. Lewis
• "Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another 'What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .'" C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
• "I am a product of endless books." C.S. Lewis
• "I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once." C.S. Lewis
• "It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between." C.S. Lewis
• "Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become." C.S. Lewis
• "Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old." C.S. Lewis
• "No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally - and often far more - worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond." C.S. Lewis
• "Since it is so likely that children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage." C.S. Lewis
• "Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again." C.S. Lewis
• "We read to know that we are not alone." C.S. Lewis
• "You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me." C.S. Lewis
• "Education is the best gift you could ever receive, because once you have it, no one can ever take it from you." William Arthur Lewis
• "A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out. " Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
• "Libraries can in general be too narrow or too wide for the soul." Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
• "Reading means borrowing." Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms
• "Consider this: reading is a strange, modern behaviour that we never evolved to do. Of the 300,000 or so years in which our species has existed, humans started reading only about 5,000 years ago. That's barely 1 per cent of our existence. What is more, until the Industrial Revolution, just a handful of humans had to privilege of reading. From an evolutionary perspective, reading is nearly as novel and strange as driving cars or using credit cards." Daniel Lieberman
  
• "A capacity and taste for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others." Abraham Lincoln
• "Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all." Abraham Lincoln
• "I feel the need of reading. It is a loss to a man not to have grown up among books." Abraham Lincoln
• "My best friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read." Abraham Lincoln
• "The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read." Abraham Lincoln 
• "Books are better than the movie. There is so much going on in the minds of the characters that movies can't show. To really understand the movie characters you love, read the book." Linda
• "A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy." Astrid Lindgren
• "Having a huge number of books is not exactly about reading them all - it’s about having the possibility of reading them all. ..." Michael Lipsey
  
• "Beyond the highest mountain, past the farthest star, the stories found in a book are what makes us who we are." Jeff Liss
• "Books to the ceiling,
  Books to the sky,
  My pile of books is a mile high.
  How I love them! How I need them!
  I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them." Arnold Lobel 
• "Reading furnishes the mind with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours." John Locke 
• "Read widely. To me it is that simple. Every new book you read puts language and imagery and storytelling techniques into you head that weren't there before." E. Lockhart
• "The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• "Read obsessively. It will make you a better human and a better writer." Pittacus Lore  
• "No skill is more crucial to the future of a child, or to a democratic and prosperous society, than literacy." Los Angeles Times, "A Child Literacy Initiative for the Greater Los Angeles Area"
• "Books are best preserved in the minds of readers." Kat Lowe, Dream Cat 
• "There is no pleasure so cheap, so innocent, and so remunerative as the real, hearty pleasure and taste for reading." Robert Lowe
• "All books are either dreams or swords." Amy Lowell
• "Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind." James Russell Lowell
• "We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth." John Lubbock 
• "All writers, I think, are to one extent or another, damaged people. Writing is our way of repairing ourselves." J. Anthony Lukas
• "A vacation book doesn't need to have anything to do with where you are; it can be a destination in itself." Sarah Lyall
  
• "Far more seemly were it for thee to have thy study full of books, than thy purse full of money." John Lyly
•  
• "No. I can survive well enough on my own - if given the proper reading material." Sarah J. Maas, Throne of Glass 
  
• "Many persons read and like fiction. It does not tax the intelligence and the intelligence of most of us can so ill afford taxation that we rightly welcome any reading matter which avoids this." Rose Macaulay
• "As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other, you will find what is needful for you in a book." George Macdonald
• "The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters." Ross MacDonald
• "A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat." Hugh Maclennan
• "I love walking into a bookstore. It's like all my friends are sitting on shelves, waving their pages at me." Tahereh Mafi
  "I spent my life folded between the pages of books. In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction." Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me
  
• "Have you ever been heartbroken to finish a book? Has a writer kept whispering in your ear long after the last page has turned?" Elizabeth Maguire
• "Books fall open, you fall in. When you climb out again, you're a bit larger than you used to be." Gregory Maguire, the author of Wicked.
• "There comes a day when you realize turning the page is the best feeling in the world, because you realize there is so much more to the book than the page you were stuck on." Zayn Malik
• "Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book." Stéphane Mallarmé
  
• "In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation." Stéphane Mallarmé
• "A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination." Nelson Mandela
  
• "The best weapon is to sit down and talk." Nelson Mandela
  
• "Each book is a world entire. You're going to have to take more than one pass at it." Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading
• "We are rare and we are weird…there is nothing you can do to change us… Really, don't try. We are so happy, in our own way… Be glad of all the benefits it will bring, rather than lamenting all the fresh air avoided, the friendships not made, the exercise not taken, the body of rewarding and potentially lucrative activities, hobbies, and skills not developed. Leave us be. We're fine. More than fine. Reading's our thing." Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading
  
• "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." Alberto Manguel
• "If the book is second-hand, I leave all its markings intact, the spoor of previous readers, fellow-travellers who have recorded their passage by means of scribbled comments, a name on the fly-leaf, a bus ticket to mark a certain page." Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
• "Life happened because I turned the pages." Alberto Manguel 
• "Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know." Alberto Manguel
• "Old or new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that malignant booksellers attach to the backs. These evil white scabs rip off with difficulty, leaving leprous wounds and traces of slime to which adhere the dust and fluff of ages, making me wish for a special gummy hell to which the inventor of these stickers would be condemned." Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
• "Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading - once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive - is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good." Alberto Manguel, "The Library at Night"
• "We cannot do but to read. ... A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading." Alberto Manguel
• "A good book was its own brand of magic." Kerri Maniscalo
• "A house without books is like a room without windows." Horace Mann
• "There are a lot of people like me, people who need books the way they need air." Richard Marek
• "He fed his spirit with the bread of books." Edwin Markham
• The books we read answer questions we didn't even know existed. They make us wiser. They make us better." Axel Marazzi
• "I think reading is a gift. It was a gift that was given to me as a child by many people, and now as an adult and a writer, I’m trying to give a little of it back to others. It’s one of the greatest pleasures I know." Ann M. Martin
• "A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge." Tyrion Lannister (George R.R. Martin, Game of Thrones)
• "A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one." George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
• "Sleep is good," he said, "and books are better." George R.R. Martin
• "When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world you fear what he might say." George R. R. Martin, A Clash of Kings
• "Writing is like sausage making in my view; you'll all be happier in the end if you just eat the final product without knowing what's gone into it." George R.R. Martin
• "Reading is going somewhere without ever taking a train or ship, an unveiling of new incredible worlds. It’s living a life you weren’t born into and a chance to see something coloured by someone else’s perspective. It’s learning without having to face consequences of failures, and how best to succeed." Madeline Martin, The Last Bookshop in London
• "Books give us the panoramic spectrum of possibilities for encountering life in a new way." J. Michael Martin 
• "Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare." Harriet Martineau
• "I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book." Groucho Marx
• "Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read." Groucho Marx
• "When we read with children, we increase their vocabulary and imagination, and with a larger vocabulary, they become better at expressing themselves with their own words. It strengthens their ability to enter into communities that benefit them both now and in the future." HKH Crown Princess Mary Elizabeth of Denmark
• "70 million books in America's libraries, but the one you want to read is always out." Tom Masson (that also goes for other countries)
• "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 Mauriac
• "We love books because they are the greatest escape. That is because our own minds eye is the purest form of virtual reality." M.R. Mathias  
• "The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one’s encounter with it in a book." André Maurois 
• "The reading of a fine book is an uninterrupted dialogue in which the book speaks and our soul replies." André Maurois
• "A book is a magical thing that lets you travel to faraway places without ever leaving your chair." Katrina Mayer
• "Books were my friends when no friends were around." Katrina Mayer
• "Don't worry, it only takes four chapters!" Mayersche Buchhandlung
  
• "I would say it weighs as much as 2 hard covers!" Mayersche Buchhandlung
•  "This backpack has a capacity of ten books." Mayersche Buchhandlung 
• "Well, the house there is about three times as high as my TBR Pile!" Mayersche Buchhandlung
  
• "I have a shelf of comfort books, which I read when the world closes in on me or something untoward happens." Anne McCaffrey
• "Reading feeds the soul, writing nourishes it!" J.C. McClean
• "Stock your mind. It is your house of treasures and no one in the world can interfere with it." Frank McCourt 
• "To read well is to prepare oneself to live wisely, kindly and wittily." Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
• "Libraries literally aren't just a place to obtain books for free. They're one of the few public spaces left in our society where you're allowed to exist without the expectation of spending money." Long Tweets McGee
• "If you read the fine print, you will find that life is subject to change without notice." Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings
  
• "I like being the main character in your story." Jay McLean, Leo
  
• "The whole world opened to me when I learned to read." Mary McLeod Bethune
• "Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it's a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself." Rebecca Mead
• "The more I read the easier it is to express what I am thinking or feeling. Thanks to books, I have the words." Melanie
• "If books were roads, some would be made for driving quickly - details are scant, and what details there are appear drab - but the velocity and torque of the narrative is exhilarating. Some books, if seen as roads, would be made for walking - the trajectory of the road mattering far less than the vistas these roads might afford. The best book for me: I drive through it quickly but am forced to stop on occasion, to pull over and marvel. These books are books meant to be reread. (The first time through, I can tear along, as fast as possible, and then later, I’ll enjoy a leisurely stroll - so that I can see what I’ve missed)." Peter Mendelsund, author of "What we see when we read"
• "A positive attitude gives you power over your circumstances instead of your circumstances having power over you." Joyce Meyer  
• "Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city." Hebrew saying, from Anne Michaels in "Fugitive Pieces"
• "When I was young I felt there was a mystery contained in the fact that the word 'read' was two words - both past and present tenses. This time travel is one way we hold our life in our hands." Anne Michaels in "Fugitive Pieces"
• "Writers turn dreams into print." James Michener 
• "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." John Stuart Mill (often attributed to Edmund Burke) 
  
• "Books are many things: lullabies for the weary, ointment for the wounded, armour for the fearful, and nests for those in need of a home." Glenda Millard 
• "You are not done with a book until you pass it to another reader." Donalyn Miller
• "Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation, Lend and borrow to the maximum - of both books and money! But especially books, for books represent infinitely more than money. A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold". Henry Miller
• "We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate." Henry Miller
• "Writing is its own reward." Henry Miller
  
• "Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal!" Laura Miller
• "The first book we fall in love with shapes us every bit as much as the first person we fall in love with ..." Laura Miller
• "A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. " John Milton
• "A man may be a heretic in the truth, and if he believes things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy." John Milton
• "Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them." John Milton
• "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties." John Milton
• "Revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse." John Milton
• "Seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in books." John Milton
• "There is yet behind of what I purposed to lay open, the incredible loss and detriment that this plot of licensing puts us to; more than if some enemy at sea should stop up all our havens and ports and creeks, it hinders and retards the importation of our richest merchandise, truth." John Milton
• "Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?" John Milton
• "Truth and understanding are not such wares as to be monopolized and traded in by tickets and statutes and standards. We must not think to make a staple commodity of all the knowledge in the land, to mark and license it like our broadcloth and our woolpacks." John Milton 
• "Unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye." John Milton
• "We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre; whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life." John Milton
• "Where there is much desire to learn, here of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making." John Milton
• "Who shall silence all the airs and madrigals that whisper softness in chambers?" John Milton    
• "Books … the smell, the feel, the words, the weigh, the progression of turned pages, the portability, the immersion, the knowledge, the adventure, the addiction!" Mimi
• "A half-read book is a half-finished love affair." David Mitchell
• "Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw." David Mitchell
• "I have only read one book in my life and that is White Fang. It's so frightfully good I've never bothered to read another." Nancy Mitford
  
• "Teaching reading IS rocket science." Louisa Moats
• "One should examine oneself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others." Molière 
  
• "A good book tells you there’s a pink house and lets you paint some of the finishing touches, maybe choose the roof style,park your own car out front." Karen Marie Moning
• "I love books way more than movies. Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself." Karen Marie Moning
• "My imagination has always topped anything a movie could come up with ..." Karen Marie Moning   
• "When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps so much as returning to my books." Michel de Montaigne 
• "I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve." Charles de Montesquieu  
• "Love of reading enables a man [or woman] to exchange the weary hours which come to every one, for hours of delight." Charles de Montesquieu
• "Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee. I cannot withstand them." Lucy Maud Montgomery 
• "I am simply a book drunkard." Lucy Maud Montgomery
• "I am well in body although considerable rumpled up in spirit." L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables 
• "If you cannot say what you are going to say in 20 minutes you ought to go away and write a book about it." John Cuthbert Moore-Brabazon
  
• "Librarians are subversive. You think they're just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're like plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn't mess with them." Michael Moore
• "If you lay in your bed at night and haven’t learned anything new that day, get out of the bed and read a book." R. Moore
• "I did realize, as do you, how blessed I was to know bookjoy, the private pleasure of savoring text." Pat Mora
• "A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exist, a life-rat and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen instead." Caitlin Moran, The Book Habit
• "Books, moonlight, melodrama." Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic
  
• "A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few sources of information left that is served up without the silent black noise of a headline, the doomy hullabaloo of a commercial. It is one of the few havens remaining where a person's mind can get both provocation and privacy." Edward P. Morgan 
• "I enjoy sharing my books as I do my friends, asking only that you treat them well and see them safely home." Ernest Morgan
• "Someone needs to tell those tales. When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchong, someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There’s magic in that. It’s in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict." Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
  
• "Strange, isn’t it? To love a book. When the words on the pages become so precious that they feel like part of your own history because they are. It’s nice to finally have someone read stories I know so intimately." Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea  
• "We are all stardust and stories." Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
• "Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking." Christopher Morley 
• "There is no habit more valuable than that of dropping into a bookstore occasionally to look round - to look both inward and outward." Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop
  
• "When you sell a man a book you don’t sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book." Christopher Morley
• "I need to experience books, not just read them." Lauren Morrill, Meant to Be
• "Book lovers will understand me and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence." Jan Morris
• "If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it." Toni Morrison
• "One has to work very carefully with what is in between the words. What is not said. Which is measure, which is rhythm and so on. So, it is what you don’t write that frequently gives what you do write its power." Toni Morrison
  
• "There's more to life than books, you know. But not much more." Morrissey
• "I whispered the thrilling words to myself, then lifted the book to my nose and breathed the ink from its pages. The scent of possibilities." Kate Morton
• "Governments want to tell you that "science, technology, engineering, maths" (STEM) are the most important subjects. But reading is the real stem. Understanding what a fact means understanding how to read. A fact is an interpretation of date: a reading." Timothy Morton
  
• "A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him." Walter Mosley
• "If a person goes to a country and finds their newspapers filled with nothing but good news, there are good men in jail." Daniel Patrick Moynihan
• "Reading self-improvement books is like creating a mental savings account from which we can withdraw viable tools for what we perceive as tough days." Dr. Jacent Mpalyenkana
• "Nothing speaks to us as forcefully as a book." Herta Müller 
  
• "In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time - none, zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads - and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out." Charles T. Munger
• "A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you." Alice Munro, Selected Stories
• "Life would be grand if it weren't for the people." Alice Munro
• "The thing is to be happy, he said. No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It's nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn't believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, you're just there, going along easy in the world." Alice Munro, Dear Life
• "If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking." Haruki Murakami, "Norwegian Wood"
•  "The good thing about writing books is that you can dream while you are awake." Haruki Murakami
•  "With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy." Haruki Murakami
• 
  
• "A major writer combines these three - storyteller, teacher, enchanter - but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer." Vladimir Nabokov
• "Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations." Vladimir Nabokov
• "We do not read in order to turn great works of fiction into simplistic replicas of our own realities, we read for the pure, sensual, and unadulterated pleasure of reading." Azar Nafisi
  
• "Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light." Vera Nazarian
• "The books that help you most are those which make you think the most." Pablo Neruda
  
• "There is nothing more luxurious than eating while you read - unless it be reading while you eat." Edith Nesbit
• "Stories are wild creatures, the monster said. When you let them loose, who knows what havoc they might wreak?" Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls
• "The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity ..." A. Edward Newton
• "Time is a river...and books are boats. Many volumes start down that stream, only to be wrecked and lost beyond recall in its sands. Only a few, a very few, endure the testings of time and live to bless the ages following." Joseph Fort Newton
• "The story is truly finished - and meaning is made - not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters." Celeste Ng
• "We read to know we're not alone." William Nicholson
• "I have this weird obsession about buying books and looking at them with a smile, even if I won't read them soon. At least they are mine now." Anaïs Nin 
• "The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say." Anaïs Nin
• "We write to taste life in the moment and in retrospect." Anaïs Nin
  
• "When I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing. "Anaïs Nin
• "I’m a smeller of books and a marker-upper of books." Matthew Norman, We're All Damaged
  
• "Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting at the end of a long day makes that day happier." Kathleen Norris
• "Reading teaches you empathy, and it really gives you a chance to examine all the grey areas of life. You get to think about and see things from other perspectives - it's awesome!" Nyeisha  
•  
• "Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - in thinking, not writing." Joyce Carol Oates
• "Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul." Joyce Carol Oates 
• "Reading is important. If you know how to read then the whole world opens up to you" Barack Obama
• "There is nothing that I enjoy more or I think is more nourishing than being able to just walk into a bookstore run by people who love books and love reading." Barack Obama  
  
• "We are the first generation to feel the effect of climate change and the last generation who can do something about it." Barack Obama  
• "The most successful people I know have figured out how to live with criticism, to lean on to people who believe in them, and to push onward with their goals." Michelle Obama, Becoming
  
• "1. Write 50 words. That’s a paragraph. 2. Write 400 words. That’s a page. 3. Write 300 pages. That’s a manuscript. 4. Write everyday. That’s a habit. 5. Edit and Rewrite. That’s how you get better. 6. Spread your writing for people to comment. That’s called feedback. 7. Don't worry about rejection or publication. That’s a writer. When not writing, read. Read from writers better than you. Read and Perceive." Ajay Obri
• "History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders." Edna O'Brien 
  
• "There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher." Flannery O’Connor
• "Who collects books accumulates desires. And who has many desires is very young, even at eighty." Ugo Ojetti
• "I love books. I adore everything about them. I love the feel of the pages on my fingertips. They are light enough to carry, yet heavy with words and ideas. I love the sound of pages flicking against my fingers. Print against fingertips. Books make people quiet, yet they are so loud." Nnedi Okorafor, The Book of Phoenix
• "The job of the linguist, like that of the biologist or the botanist, is not to tell us how nature should behave, or what its creations should look like, but to describe those creations in all their messy glory and try to figure out what they can teach us about life, the world, and, especially in the case of linguistics, the workings of the human mind." Arika Okrent, In the Land of Invented Languages
  
• "Reading is an act of civilization; it’s one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities." Ben Okri
• "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But a book is never just a book." The Old Sage Bookshop in Prescott, Arizona
• "A book that we love haunts us forever; it will haunt us, even when we can no longer find it on the shelf or beside the bed where we must have left it. After all, it is the act of reading, for many of us, that forged our first link to the world. And so lost books - books that have gone missing through neglect or been forgotten in changing tastes or worst of all, gone up in a puff of rumour - gnaw at us. Being lovers of books, we've pulled a scent of these absences behind us our whole reading lives, telling people about books that exist only on our own shelves, or even just in our own memory. This is what was on our minds one rainy afternoon in Toronto, as we sat around a dining-room table where the four of us, every few months, make manifest a sporadic but long-lived magazine called Brick: A Literary Journal." Sample text for Lost classics / edited by Michael Ondaatje
  
• "She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams." Michael Ondaatje in "The English Patient"
• "Books invite all. They constrain none." Susan Orelan, The Library Book 
•  "Always read something that will make you look great if you die in the middle of it." P.J. O’Rourke
• "A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
  1. What am I trying to say?
  2. What words will express it?
  3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
  4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
  And he will probably ask himself two more.
  5. Could I put it more shortly?
  6. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
  George Orwell
• "When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing." George Orwell
• "The less people know, the more stubbornly they know it."  Osho
  
• "He’s read books, you know, it’s amazing. He’s drunk and wenched his way through London but he's thinking all the time." Peter O'Toole as King Henry II in Becket
• "Reading is food for the brain." Maribel C. Pagan
•  "Courage. Kindness. Friendship. Character. These are the qualities that define us as human beings, and propel us, on occasion, to greatness." R.J. Palacio, Wonder
  
• "Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow. " Orhan Pamuk, "My Name Is Red"
  "Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen." Orhan Pamuk, "My Name Is Red"
  
• "The first thing I learned at school was that some people are idiots; the second thing I learned was that some are even worse. " Orhan Pamuk, "Istanbul: Memories and the City"
  
• "Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world." Orhan Pamuk, "Snow"
• "How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?" Orhan Pamuk, "Snow"
• "I don't want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning." Orhan Pamuk, "My Name Is Red"
• "I read a book one day and my whole life was changed." Orhan Pamuk
• "My job is not to explain the Turks to the Europeans and the Europeans to the Turks, but to write good books." Orhan Pamuk
• "Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight." Orhan Pamuk, "My Name Is Red"
• "Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space." Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence 
• "Tell me then, does love make one a fool or do only fools fall in love?" Orhan Pamuk, "My Name Is Red"
  
• "You know, there are people who love their country by torturing them. I love my country by criticizing my state." Orhan Pamuk
• "Books should go where they will be most appreciated, and not sit unread, gathering dust on a forgotten shelf, don’t you agree?" Christopher Paolini
• "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 run out before the small hours." Dorothy Parker 
• "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force." Dorothy Parker
• "The books that help you the most are those which make you think the most." Theodore Parker
• "There’s no book that absolutely everyone loves." Carolyn Parkhurst
• "Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary." Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago
• "It's always better to have too much to read than not enough." Ann Patchett
• "Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking." Ann Patchett 
• "Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world." Walter Pater
• "No such thing as a kid who doesn't like reading. There are kids who love reading, and kids who are reading the wrong books." James Patterson
• "You see, one of the best things about reading is that you'll always have something to think about when you're not reading." James Patterson
• "It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading. Something that will stretch their imaginations--something that will help them make sense of their own lives and encourage them to reach out toward people whose lives are quite different from their own." Katherine Patterson   
• "You read for your life. You read to enrich your own life, and you read for the life of your family as you read together and talk about the books that you've read, and you read for your community to understand other people, and you read for your country, because you have to understand in order to be a good citizen, an informed citizen, and you read for the world so you can understand other people who are quite different from yourself." Katherine Patterson 
  
• "If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can’t be in books. The book needs you. " Gary Paulsen
• "I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books." Gary Paulsen
  
• "This is every reader's catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing. There is no way to finish, and perhaps that shouldn't be the goal." Pamela Paul 
• "One of my strongest held beliefs is that no one should ever finish a book that they're not enjoying, no matter how popular or well-reviewed the book is. Believe me, nobody is going to get any points in heaven by slogging their way through a book they aren't enjoying but think they ought to read." Nancy Pearl, Book Lust
  
• "I read because one life isn’t enough, and in the page of a book I can be anybody." Richard Peck
• "Reader’s Bill of Rights:
  1. The right to not read
  2. The right to skip pages
  3. The right to not finish
  4. The right to reread
  5. The right to read anything
  6. The right to escapism
  7. The right to read anywhere
  8. The right to browse
  9. The right to read out loud
  10. The right to not defend your tastes." Daniel Pennac
•  "The paradoxical virtue of reading lies in distancing ourselves from the world so that we may make sense of it." Daniel Pennac
• "We read fiction to satisfy a more basic need - to imagine our way into other lives, to explore characters and situations that tell us something new about the world, and maybe about ourselves, or to remind us of something important that we may have forgotten." Tom Perrotta
• "Literature exists because the world isn't enough." Fernando Pessoa
• "Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life." Fernando Pessoa
• "To read is to dream, guided by someone else's hand." Fernando Pessoa 
  
• "I have friends whose society is delightful to me; they are persons of all countries and of all ages; distinguished in war, in council, and in letters; easy to live with, always at my command." Francesco Petrarch  
• "Wear the old coat and buy the new book." Austin Phelps  
• "I divide all readers into two classes; those who read to remember and those who read to forget." William Lyon Phelps
• "The best education in the world is that got by struggling to get a living." Wendell Phillips 
•  "Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." Pablo Picasso ... The same applies to books.
• "Studies of the effects of education confirm that educated people really are more enlightened. They are less racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic and authoritarian. They place a higher value on imagination, independence and free speech. They are more likely to vote, volunteer, express political views and belong to civic associations such as unions, political parties and religious and community organizations. They are also likelier to trust their fellow citizens - a prime ingredient of the precious elixir called social capital, which gives people the confidence to contract, invest, and obey the law without fearing that they are chumps who will be shafted by everyone else.
  For all these reasons, literacy is an engine of human progress, material, moral, spiritual." Steven Pinker
  
• "Books don't change people; paragraphs do, sometimes even sentences." John Piper
• "I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited." Sylvia Plath
• "Books are immortal sons deifying their sires." Plato
• "Books give a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything!" Plato  
• "Never discourage anyone...who continually makes progress, no matter how slow." Plato
• "I never understood people who don't have bookshelves." George Plimpton
  "You can travel the world and never leave your chair when you read a book." Sherry K. Plummer
• "I don't love studying. I hate studying. I like learning. Learning is beautiful." Natalie Portman
• "There is so much more in those words than just loving books. I love the smell of them. I love the way their bindings look pressed together on a shelf. I love the feel of the pages buzzing through my fingers. I love big books and small books. I love words and how they’re strung together, and most of all, I love the stories. I love how books are not really books at all, but doorways." Ashley Poston, Bookish and the Beast
  
• "I do so hate finishing books. I would like to go on with them for years ..." Beatrix Potter
• "No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents." Ezra Pound 
• "We live in an age of science and of abundance. The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to ’the needs of society’, or to the conservation of learning. The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden." Ezra Pound, Chapter One, ABC of Reading, 1934
• "Books are keys to wisdom's treasure. Books are gates to lands of pleasure. Books are paths that upward lead, Books are friends: come let us read." Emilie Poulsson 
• "Books do furnish a room." Anthony Powell
• "Books are islands in the ocean of time. They are also oases in the deserts of time." Lawrence Clark Powell
• "Make reading your hobby, even if you don't like to read. You will learn things that will prove useful when you least expect it." Neelabh Pratap Singh
• "A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read." Terry Pratchett
• "Aziraphale collected books. If he were totally honest with himself he would have to have admitted that his bookshop was simply somewhere to store them. He was not unusual in this. In order to maintain his cover as a typical second-hand book seller, he used every means short of actual physical violence to prevent customers from making a purchase. Unpleasant damp smells, glowering looks, erratic opening hours - he was incredibly good at it." Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch 
  
• "Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one." Terry Pratchett 
  
• "To be successful in life what you need is education, not literacy and degrees." Munshi Premchand
• "True Readers Know Anything Makes a Good Bookmark." Toby Price
• "Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write." Annie Proulx
  
• "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
• "There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favourite book." Marcel Proust
• "There are some themes, some subjects too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book." Philip Pullman
• "We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever." Philip Pullman
• "You're in a world full of color and you want to see it in black and white." by Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth 
• "The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived." Howard Pyle
•  
• "Of course, anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can 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 Quammen
• "If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it's probably because at some level you find 'reality' a bit of a disappointment." Joe Queenan, One for the Books
• "Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home." Anna Quindlen, "How Reading Changed My Life"
• "In books I have travelled, not only to other worlds, but into my own." Anna Quindlen
• "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, “Enough Bookshelves”, New York Times, 7 August 1991
• "Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invisible companion. ... I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning, I read because I loved it more than any activity on earth." Anna Quindlen
• "We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind." Anna Quindlen
•  "We must form our minds by reading deep rather than wide." Marcus Fabius Quintilian 
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• "Children fall in love with books because of the memories created when they snuggle up and read with someone they love." Raising Readers
• "Reading is not a hobby ... it's a lifestyle!" Dayana Razo
  "One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind." Ishmael Reed, Writin’ is Fightin’: Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper
• "If you write, write about what you do and who you are and you can't be wrong. Don't lie about anything. You are very similar to everybody else in the world. You love, you hate, you have friends, you have enemies. Be who you are." Carl Reiner 
• "Every book is a dialogue between author and reader." Ludwig Reiners 
• "It is when we are faced with death that we turn most bookish." Jules Renard
• "When I think of all the books still left for me to read, I am certain of further happiness." Jules Renard
• "Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary." Jim Rohn
• "Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere." Jean Rhys
• "Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed." Anne Rice
• "Acting touches nerves you have absolutely no control over." Alan Rickman
• "A Film, a Piece of Theatre, A Piece of Music, or a Book Can Make a Difference. It can Change the World." Alan Rickman
• "If only life could be a little more tender and art a little more robust." Alan Rickman
• "It's an ancient need to be told stories. But the story needs a great storyteller." Alan Rickman
• "Talent is an accident of genes - and a responsibility." Alan Rickman
• "[The English language is] so rich and cruel and beautiful, like a fireworks display, and yet it can be so subtle and so crude. Marry that to the stage and something mysterious happens. Don’t ask me what. It’s magical." "The more we're governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible. Or, what's impossible? What's a fantasy?" Alan Rickman 
• "I read because books are a form of transportation, of teaching, and of connection! Books take us to places we’ve never been, they teach us about our world, and they help us to understand human experience." Madeleine Riley, Top Shelf Text
  
• "Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading!" Rainer Maria Rilke
• "Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." Rainer Maria Rilke
• "With some cards, you pay interest. With library cards, your interest pays you." Susan Rinehart
• "Good fiction creates its own reality." Nora Roberts
• "Reading takes us away from home, it finds homes for us everywhere." Hazel Rochman 
• "MYTH: Romance readers are obsessed with wine, chocolate and Pride and Prejudice. FACT: You say that like it's a bad thing." Maya Rodale, Huffington Post
• "When a new book is published, read an old one." Samuel Rogers
• "A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people." Will Rogers
• "There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves." Will Rogers 
• "Books, too, had hearts, though they were not the same as people’s, and a book’s heart could be broken: she had seen it happen before. Grimoires that refused to open, their voices gone silent, or whose ink faded and bled across the pages like tears." Margaret Rogerson, Jane Sorcery of Thorns
  
• "Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book." Jim Rohn
• "The book you don't read, won't help." Jim Rohn
• "In my world there would be as many public libraries as there are Starbucks." Henry Rollins
• "The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself." Eleanor Roosevelt 
• "Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die." Franklin D. Roosevelt
• "I am part of everything that I have read." Theodore Roosevelt
• Theodore Roosevelt read an average of one book per day. Even on days when he was busy being the President.
• "Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery." A. S. W. Rosenbach
  
• "When you read a book, the neurons in your brain fire overtime, deciding what the characters are wearing, how they're standing, and what it feels like the first time they kiss. No one shows you. The words make suggestions. Your brain paints the pictures." Meg Rosoff 
• "The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television." Andrew Ross
• "It takes a great reader to make a great book". Orna Ross
• "Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing." Philip Roth
• "I always read. You know how sharks have to keep swimming or they die? I'm like that. If I stop reading, I die." Patrick Rothfuss
• "It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story." ♥ Patrick Rothfuss ♥ The Name of the Wind 
• "The world of reality has its limits, the world of imagination is boundless." Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  
• "The library is the temple of learning and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history." Carl T. Rowan
• "To really be a nerd, she’d decided, you had to prefer fictional worlds to the real one." Rainbow Rowell 
• "Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out." J.K. Rowling
• "I don’t believe in the kind of magic in my books. But I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book." J.K. Rowling
• "If you don't like to read, you haven't found the right book." J.K. Rowling
• "I will defend the importance of bedtime stories to my last gasp." J.K. Rowling
• "There's always room for a story that can transport people to another place." J.K. Rowling
• "When in doubt, go to the library." J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
• "Wherever I am, if I've got a book with me, I have a place I can go and be happy." J.K. Rowling
• I think there is an increasing danger of novels becoming too streamlined, domesticated. When you read Vasily Grossman or the big Russian novels, they are wild and unwieldy, but now there's a way in which literature is being commodified and packaged - is it romance, is it a thriller? Commercial? Literary? What shelf should we put it on?" Arundhati Roy
  
• "It's one of the ultimate escapes. You can forget where you are and who you are. There have been times I've gone to Middle-earth and Hogwarts and Narnia in my head just to survive… Everyone should have that blessed escape." Ruby
• "Read more books than status updates. Look into more eyes than screens. Hold more hands than devices. Love more than you judge." Dulce Ruby 
• "People who say they don't have time to read simply don't want to." Julie Rugg
• "Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it’s an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day." Carlos Ruiz Zafón
• "Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you." Carlos Ruiz Zafón
• "Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens." Carlos Ruiz Zafón in "La Sombra del Viento" (The Shadow of the Wind)
• "Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens." Carlos Ruiz Zafón
• "Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader than the first book that finds its way to his heart." Carlos Ruiz Zafón
• "I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel." Carlos Ruiz Zafón 
• "I leafed through the pages, inhaling the enchanted scent of promise that comes with all new books, and stopped to read the start of a sentence that caught my eye." Carlos Ruiz Zafón
• "In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend." Carlos Ruiz Zafón 
• "I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and Magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling." Carlos Ruiz Zafón, "The Angel's Game"
• "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." Carlos Ruiz Zafón
• "That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn’t matter to anyone changed my life." Carlos Ruiz Zafón
• "There are worse things than a prison of words." Carlos Ruiz Zafón
• "Books crow-bar the world open for you." Katherine Rundell  
• "The main effort of arranging your life should be to progressively reduce the amount of time required to decently maintain yourself so that you can have all the time you want for reading." Norman Rush
• "A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it or offer your own version in return." Salman Rushdie 
• "A book worth reading is worth buying." John Ruskin
• "Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book." John Ruskin
• "Poetic language is a way of giving the sense of an answer, just a sense of one, that the story itself is unable to provide." Emily Ruskovich
• "He who destroys a good book, kills reason itself." Rutherfurd, Edward, New York 
  
• "There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it." Bertrand Russell
• "There’s nothing to match curling up with a good book when there’s a repair job to be done around the house." Joe Ryan
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• "The thing is - those books made my days bearable. " Aisha Saeed, Amal Unbound
• "By elevating your reading, you will improve your writing - or at least tickle your thinking." William Safire
• "Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path." Carl Sagan
  
• "One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time." Carl Sagan
• "One of the greatest gifts adults can give - to their offspring and to their society - is to read to children." Carl Sagan 
• "What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."  Carl Sagan
• "If only you'd remember before ever you sit down to write that you've been a reader long before you were ever a writer." J.D. Salinger 
• "What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it." J.D. Salinger
• "He liked to read with the silence and the golden colour of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him." James Salter, All That Is
• "A library is thought in cold storage." Herbert Samuel
• "TSUNDOKU: Leaving a book unread after buying it, typically piled up together with other unread books." Japanese. From "Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Catalog of Beautiful Untranslatable Words from Around the World" by Ella Frances Sanders.
• "Whenever a party tells you national identity matters more than anything else in politics, that nationalism can sort out all the other problems, then watch out, because you’re on a road that can end with fascism." C.J. Sansom in "Dominion"
  
• "A child educated only at school, is an uneducated child." George Santayana
• "Novels aren’t just happy escapes; they are slivers of people’s souls, nailed to the pages, dripping ink from veins of wood pulp. Reading the right one at the right time can make all the difference." Brandon Sanderson
• "Books are the weapon against someone's lament that 'everything is forgotten in the end'."  Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair
• "Read a book to find out why we go to war, to experience what it is that drives us to violence" Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair
• "Best therapy money can buy … or borrow for free with a library card. Reading helps me sleep, helps me forget about the day, and helps me relax in general." Sarah 
• "Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we’re someone else, disrupting the delusion that we’re permanent and at the centre of the universe. Suddenly (we’re saved!) other people are real again, and we’re fond of them." George Saunders
• "There's a web of people who've put reading at the center of their lives because they know from experience that reading makes them more expansive, generous people." George Saunders
• "Literature is frightening when it reaches the heart, gut and mind of the reader." Roberto Saviano
  
• "Books… are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with ’em, then we grow out of ’em and leave ’em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development." Dorothy L. Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
  
• "I'm not interested in creating a book that is read once and then placed on the shelf and forgotten. I am very happy when people have worn out my books, or that they're held together by Scotch tape." Richard Scarry
• "Literature is the immortality of speech." August Wilhelm Schlegel
• "Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere." Mary Schmich
  
• "Boredom is why God invented books." Julie Schumacher 
• "Gossip is living history. History is petrified gossip." A.O. Scott
• "I Love Books. I love that moment when you open one and sink into it you can escape from the world, into a story that's way more interesting than yours will ever be." Elizabeth Scott, Bloom
  
•  "The best cinema in the world is the brain, and you know it when you read a good book." Ridley Scott
• "Do you know what they call people who hoard books? Smart." Lisa Scottoline
• "In reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another's toughts." Arthur Schopenhauer
• "Reading is an adventure that never ends." Charles M. Schulz  
• "The nicest thing about a book is no commercials" Charles M. Schulz, The Peanuts 
• "Reading is a means of thinking with another person's mind; it forces you to stretch your own." Charles Scribner Jr. 
• "Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, a duty. It should be offered as a gift." Charles Scribner jr.   
• "I don't like to be alone, but I do cherish the moment that I'm alone with a good book." Vin Scully
• "When separated, flour, salt, yeast and water do not possess the unique properties of bread." Lyndon W. Seaross and John E. Readence
• "Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river." Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
  
• "I’ve never known any trouble that an hour’s reading didn’t assuage." Charles de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu, "Pensées Diverses"
• "A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking." Jerry Seinfeld 
• "If I'm going to bother to read a book I don't want it to end quickly. I don't binge. I like to sip." Jerry Seinfeld
• "Literacy is one of the greatest gifts a person could receive." Jen Selinsky 
•  "Books are the training weights of the mind" Seneca
  
• "There is no such thing as a child who hates to read, there are only children who have not found the right book." Frank Serafini
• "All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes - characters even - caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you." Diane Setterfield, "The Thirteenth Tale"
• "Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so." Diane Setterfield, "The Thirteenth Tale"
• "Reading can be dangerous." Diane Setterfield, "The Thirteenth Tale"
• "Be awesome! Be a book nut!" Dr Seuss
• "Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope." Dr. Seuss  
• "Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks." Dr Seuss
• "The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go." Dr Seuss
• "You can find magic wherever you look. Sit back and relax, all you need is a book." Dr Seuss
• "You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child." Dr Seuss
• "That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you onto another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book." Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Society
  
• "Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books." Mary Ann Shaffer 
• "This above all: To thine own self be true …" William Shakespeare, Hamlet
• "Ordinary performers have giant TVs. Extraordinary performers have huge libraries." Robin Sharma
• "Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself." George Bernard Shaw
• "You use a glass mirror to see your face. You use works of art to see your soul." George Bernard Shaw
• "I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?" Irwin Shaw
• "All evidence points to the seemingly illogical conclusion that the faster most people read, the better they understand." Harry Shefter
• "Libraries store the energy that fuels the imagination. They open up windows to the world and inspire us to explore and achieve, and contribute to improving our quality of life. Libraries change lives for the better." Sidney Sheldon
• "Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write a book so when the reader gets to the end of the chapter, he or she must turn one more page." Sidney Sheldon
• "A part of learning is done through reading, and the other part, which is likely more important, is talking with bright minds from different fields." Neil Shen
• "The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead." Clarence Shepard Day
• "Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve." Carol Shields, "The Republic of Love" 
•  "Stories are one thing that will be constant in life. Whether told, written, reenacted they are a fundamental part of human nature." Jessica Shirvington 
• "Reading centers on finding yourself in a book." Anita Silvey
• "Children don't read to find their identity, to free themselves from guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion or to get rid of alienation. They have no use for psychology.... They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.... When a book is boring, they yawn openly. They don't expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish illusions." Isaac Bashevis Singer 
• "When you stand in the darkness, when you have lost all hope, when you can't see any path to walk ahead, read; reading will act as the lantern to show you the path. It might not take you to the destination, but it will keep on guiding you towards a resolution." Neelabh Pratap Singh
• "If you haven’t stayed up until the early hours of the morning reading with your eyes itching and burning with tiredness and your vision blurred as you fight to stay awake to finish the book, you haven’t lived at all." Sinnerlikedamon
• "We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading." B.F. Skinner
• "Through literacy you can begin to see the universe. Through music you can reach anybody. Between the two there is you, unstoppable." Grace Slick 
• "Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines - it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits". Robin Sloan
• "Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book." Jane Smiley
• "No furniture is so charming as books." Sydney Smit
• "The world was hers for the reading." Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
• "...paradise is a world where everything is a sanctuary & nothing is a gun..." Danez Smith, Don't Call Us Dead: poems "
  
• "Some people say that life is the thing... but I prefer reading." Logan Pearsall Smith
• "This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication." Logan Pearsall Smith  
• "What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers." Logan Pearsall Smith
• "There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book." Patti Smith
• "No furniture is so charming as books." Sidney Smith
• "What you don’t know would make a great book." Sydney Smith
• "The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer." Zadie Smith
• "It is most likely that I will die next to a pile of books I was meaning to read." Lemony Snicket
• "Keep anyone with whom you can read in silence." Lemony Snicket
• "Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them." Lemony Snicket
• "No matter who you are, no matter where you live, and no matter how many people are chasing you, what you don’t read is often as important as what you do read." Lemony Snicket
• "They're book addicts." Lemony Snicket, The Miserable Mill
  
• "Wicked people never have time for reading. It's one of the reasons for their wickedness." Lemony Snicket
• "I know that I know nothing." Socrates
• "Look around you - there are people around you. Maybe you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn't make use of the opportunity to ask him questions. And the less you talk, the more you'll hear." Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 
  
• "Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. Use your memory! Use your memory! It is those bitter seeds alone which might sprout and grow someday." Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
  
• "We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil and burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future." Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 
• "The only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you." W. Somerset Maugham
• "There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are." W. Somerset Maugham  
• "To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life." W. Somerset Maugham  
• "A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It's creator of inwardness." Susan Sontag
• "Literature is Freedom." Susan Sonntag
• "My library is an archive of longings." Susan Sontag
• "Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth." Wole Soyinka
• "Nothing will ever replace the human contact between learner and teacher" Wole Soyinka
  
• "Our story has three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end. And although this is the way all stories unfold, I still can't believe that ours didn't go on forever." Nicholas Sparks, Dear John
  
• "Comics are a gateway drug to literacy." Art Spiegelman  
• "Only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers." Steven Spielberg
• "Read good authors, that you may know what English is. You will find it to be a language very rarely written nowadays and yet the grandest of all human tongues." C.H. Spurgeon
• "Every book you read may not save your life but some of them will." Adam Stanley
• "It's better to have your nose in a book than in someone else's business." Adam Stanley
• "And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good." John Steinbeck, East of Eden
• "I guess there are never enough books." John Steinbeck
  
• "I nearly always write, just as I nearly always breathe." John Steinbeck 
• "A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders." John Steinbeck
  
•  "Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity." George Steiner
• "A good book is an event in my life." Stendhal
• "A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produced the sound is the reader's soul." Stendhal
• "I often derive a peculiar satisfaction in conversing with the ancient and modern dead, - who yet live and speak excellently in their works. My neighbors think me often alone, - and yet at such times I am in company with more than five hundred mutes - each of whom, at my pleasure, communicates his ideas to me by dumb signs - quite as intelligently as any person living can do by uttering of words." Laurence Sterne 
• "Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life." Robert Louis Stevenson 
• "I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in." Robert Louis Stevenson
• "As the hours crept by, the afternoon sunlight bleached all the books on the shelves to pale, gilded versions of themselves and warmed the paper and ink inside the covers so that the smell of unread words hung in the air." Maggie Stiefvater, Shiver
• "Read. Read. Read. Just don’t read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different style." R.L. Stine
• "Wasn’t that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought." Kathryn Stockett, The Help  
  
• "There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books." Irving Stone
• "Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little." Tom Stoppard
• "Time has become quite flexible inside the library. (This is true of most places with interesting books. Sit down to read for twenty minutes, and suddenly it’s dark, with no clue as to where the hours have gone.)" Jonathan Strahan
  
• "From the reader’s view, a poem is more demanding than prose." Mark Strand
• "A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading." William Styron
• "Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay." William Styron  
• "One of the advantages of reading books is that you get to play with someone else’s imaginary friends, at all hours of the night." Dr. SunWolf
• "Non-fiction books matter because we are what we read." Daniel Susskind   
• "Every book is judged by its cover until it is read." Agatha Swanburne, founder of Swanburne Academy
  
• "Book's are time travel. True readers all know this. But books don't just take you back to the time in which they were written; they can take you back to different versions of yourself." Peter Swanson, Eight Perfect Murders
• "Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death hath no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever." J. Swartz
• "You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend." Paul Sweeney
• "Books: the children of the brain." Jonathan Swift
• "We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another." Jonathan Swift  
  
• "What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while..." Jonathan Swift
•  "I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised." Wisława Szymborska
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• "The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence." Rabindranath Tagore
• "Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction." Donna Tartt 
• "When I cannot read, when I cannot think, when I cannot even pray, I can trust." J. Hudson Taylor
• "I love bookshelves, and stacks of books, spines, typography, and the feel of pages between my fingertips. I love bookmarks, and old bindings, and stars in margins next to beautiful passages. I love exuberant underlinings that recall to me a swoon of language-love from a long-ago reading, something I hoped to remember. I love book plates, and inscriptions in gifts from loved ones, I love author signatures, and I love books sitting around reminding me of them, being present in my life, being. I love books." Laini Taylor 
• "We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature." Sonya Renee Taylor
• "If we didn't have libraries, many people thirsty for knowledge would dehydrate." Megan Jo Tetrick, age 12
• "Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us." Paul Theroux
• "Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy." Thích Nhất Hạnh   
• "What’s the point of having a voice if you’re gonna be silent in those moments you shouldn’t be?" Angie Thomas "The Hate U Give"
• "My home is where my books are." Ellen Thompson
• "I think books are like people, in the sense that they'll turn up in your life when you most need them." Emma Thompson
• "I'm a word freak. I like words. I’ve always compared writing to music. That’s the way I feel about good paragraphs. When it really works, it’s like music." Hunter S. Thompson
• "A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint.... What I began by reading, I must finish by acting." Henry David Thoreau
• "Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature is dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill." Henry David Thoreau 
• "Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations." Henry David Thoreau
• "Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution - such call I good books." Henry David Thoreau  
• "How many a man/woman has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book." Henry David Thoreau, Walden
  
• "I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society." Henry David Thoreau, Walden
• "Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all." Henry David Thoreau
• "If I'm going to be stranded, I hope it's inside a bookstore." Tere Arigo aka Thresca
• "Let your bookcases and your shelves be your gardens and your pleasure-grounds. Pluck the fruit that grows therein, gather the roses, the spices, and the myrrh." Judah Ibn Tibbon 
• "Reading makes me feel like I’ve lived a thousand lives in addition to my own." Arlaina Tibensky 
• "A library is a hospital for the mind." Alvin Toffler 
• "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." Alvin Toffler
• "Literature has no borders. There is one literature, and it uses different languages as its tools." Olga Tokarczuk
• "Literature is its own republic where people can live and work together and, maybe more than anything, communicate perfectly - in depth, empathetically, morally, intellectually and in a revolutionary spirit." Olga Tokarczuk
  
• "The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity." There is nothing to be added. Leo Tolstoy 
• "There's a lot of poetry written nowadays, but there's not a scrap of good in any of it." Leo Tolstoy
• "The best book is not one that informs merely, but one that stirs the reader up to inform himself." A.W. Tozer, Man The Dwelling Place Of God
• "A good education and a kind heart will serve you well throughout your entire life." Alex Trebek, The Answer is ...
• "Every time we read to a child, we're sending a 'pleasure' message to the child's brain. You could even call it a commercial, conditioning the child to associate books and print with pleasure." Jim Trelease 
• "The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don't tell you what to see." Alexandra K. Trenfor
• "That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing." Anthony Trollope
• "The habit of reading is the only enjoyment I know in which there is no alloy. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will be there to support you when all other resources are gone. It will be present to you when the energies of your body have fallen away from you. It will last you until your death. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Anthony Trollope   
• "What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?" Anthony Trollope
• "Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers." Harry S. Truman
• "There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?" Marina Tsvetaeva
• "Books are the carriers of civilization ... They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print." Barbara W. Tuchman
• "Books are the carrier of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill." Barbara Tuchman
• "Reading is the difficulty to populate a country of strange fantasies with your own thoughts." Kurt Tucholsky
• "A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever." Martin F. Tupper
• "The bookshop has a thousand books, all colours, hues, and tinges, and every cover is a door that turns on magic hinges." Nancy Byrd Turner
  
• "Write what should not be forgotten." Isabel Allende  
• "Too little information and you're blind, too much and you're blinded." Stuart Turton
  
• "A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read." Mark Twain
• "Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint." Mark Twain 
•  "Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else." Mark Twain
• "'Classic' - a book which people praise and don't read."  Mark Twain
  (I strongly disagree, Mr. Twain.)
• Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."  Mark Twain
• "If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed."  Mark Twain
• "In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them."  Mark Twain
• "My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine - everybody drinks water." Mark Twain 
• "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them."  Mark Twain, attributed
•  "Books are open doors to other dimensions where everything is possible and nothing is forbidden." Danny Tyran  
• "Give a kid a book and you change the world and, in a way, even the Universe." Neil de Grasse Tyson
•  
• "Reading ... is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction." David L. Ulin in "The Lost Art of Reading" 
• "Literacy arouses hopes, not only in society as a whole but also in the individual who is striving for fulfilment, happiness and personal benefit by learning how to read and write. Literacy... means far more than learning how to read and write... The aim is to transmit... knowledge and promote social participation." UNESCO Institute for Education, Hamburg, Germany
•  
• "A book is a door, you know. Always and forever. A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world." Catherynne M. Valente
  
• "She sounds like someone who spends a lot of time in libraries which are the best sorts of people." Catherynne M. Valente
• "I read books because I love them, not because I think I should read them." Simon Van Booy 
• "You are the books you read, the films you watch, the music you listen to, the people you meet, the dreams you have, the conversations you engage in. You are what you take from these. You are the sound of the ocean, the breath of fresh air, the brightest light and the darkest corner. You are a collective of every experience you have had in your life. You are every single second of every single day. So drown yourself in a sea of knowledge and existence. Let the words run through your veins and let the colours fill your mind." Jac Vanek
• "Un enfant qui lit sera un adulte qui pense." Flore Vasseur (A child who reads will be an adult who thinks.)  
• "I was reading a book, 'The History of Glue'. I couldn't put it down." Tim Vine 
• "Let us read and let us dance, these two amusements will never do any harm to the world." Voltaire
  
• "The multitude of books is making us ignorant." Voltaire
  
• "By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle." Kurt Vonnegut
• "Educate yourself, welcome life’s messiness, read Chekhov, avoid becoming an architect at all costs." Kurt Vonnegut
• "I go on many thrilling adventures and wondrous, profound escapades through books." Kurt Vonnegut
• "War is Murder"  Kurt Vonnegut
  
• "I like liking things. It's just that there are more books to like than anyone can ever read. Which, granted, is an uptown problem, but a problem nonetheless." Sarah Vowell   
•  
• "A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counsellor, a multitude of counsellors." Henry Ward Beecher 
• "A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never." Henry Ward Beecher
• "A little library, growing larger every year, is an honourable part of a man's history. It is a man's duty to have books. A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessities of life." Henry Ward Beecher
• "Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house." Henry Ward Beecher
• "Men must read for amusement as well as for knowledge." Henry Ward Beecher
• "There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs." Henry Ward Beecher 
• "Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?" Henry Ward Beecher
• "Nothing is worth reading that does not require an alert mind." Charles Dudley Warner
• "Collect books: nothing is more important than an unread library." John Waters
• "I'm always amazed at friends who say they try to read at night in bed but always end up falling asleep. I have the opposite problem. If a book is good I can't go to sleep, and stay up way past my bedtime, hooked on the writing. Is anything better than waking up after a late-night read and diving right back into the plot before you even get out of bed to brush your teeth?" John Waters, Role Models
• "It wasn’t until I started reading and found books they wouldn’t let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else." John Waters 
• "I would never want to live anywhere but Baltimore. You can look far and wide, but you'll never discover a stranger city with such extreme style. It's as if every eccentric in the South decided to move north, ran out of gas in Baltimore, and decided to stay." John Waters, Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste
•  "You have to remember that it is impossible to commit a crime while reading a book." John Waters 
• "What I like best is staying home and reading. Being rich is not about how many homes you own. It’s the freedom to pick up any book you want without looking at the price and wondering whether you can afford it." John Waters  
• "You should never read just for 'enjoyment'. Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends' insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick 'hard books'. Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. And for god’s sake, don't let me ever hear you say, 'I can’t read fiction. I only have time for the truth.' Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of 'literature'? That means fiction, too, stupid." John Waters  
• "When I get hold of a book I particularly admire, I am so enthusiastic that I loan it to someone who never brings it back." Edgar Watson Howe  
• "I like books that aren't just lovely but that have memories in themselves. Just like playing a song, picking up a book again that has memories can take you back to another place or another time." Emma Watson  
• "Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book." Bill Watterson 
• "Talking over the things which you have read with your companions fixes them on the mind." Isaac Watts
• "There is something incomparably thrilling in first opening a brand new book." Evelyn Waugh     
• "Being surrounded by books was the closest she’d ever gotten to feeling like the member of a gang. The books had her back, and the nonfiction, at least, was ready to fight if necessary." Abbi Waxman, The Bookish Life of Nina Hill
•  "Owning a book is a third of the goal. The others are actually reading it and applying it." Israel Wayne 
• "...bookshops are magic, and books are the road maps by which misfits find each other." Wendy Welch, The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap  
  
•  "I write as straight as I can just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there." H.G. Wells
  
• "Any room in our house at any time in the day was there to read in or to be read to." Eudora Welty
• "For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading." Eudora Welty  
• "I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them ... with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself." Eudora Welty
• "I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end." Eudora Welty
• "Don't give up on reading just because you tried one or two books that didn't do it for you. Keep trying, and I'm sure you will find your niche or genre. When you do, you'll be so glad you did!" Wes   
• "Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures." Jessamyn West
• "My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs." Tara Westover, Educated  
  
• "An hour spent reading is one stolen from paradise." Thomas Wharton
• "Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time." E.P. Whipple
• "A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people - people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book." E.B. White
• "A library is many things, but particularly it is a place where books live, and where you can get in touch with other people, and other thoughts, through books… Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had." E.B. White  
• "All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world." E.B. White
  
• "What isn't said is as important as what is said." Colson Whitehead  
• "Books are the glass of council to dress ourselves by." Bulstrode Whitlock
• "Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul." Walt Whitman
• "You want weapons? We're in a library! Books! The best weapons in the world!" Dr. Who
• "A book was a powerful thing. It could take her away from all her incessant worries for whole minutes at a time." Susan Wiggs, The Lost and Found Bookshop
  
• "You're never alone when you're reading a book." Susan Wiggs
• "Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere." Elie Wiesel  
  
• "I am so clever that sometimes I do not understand a single word of what I am saying." Oscar Wilde
• "I am too fond of reading books to care to write them." Oscar Wilde  
• "If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all." Oscar Wilde
• "In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody." Oscar Wilde
• "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
• "The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame." Oscar Wilde  
• "There are no such things as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written." Oscar Wilde
• "What you read when you don't have to determines what you will be when you can't help it." Oscar Wilde 
• "With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?" Oscar Wilde  
• "In each book was a possibility of joy: a magical place to visit, a hero or heroine to meet, or a new friend to make." Janis Wildy, The English Bookshop
  
• "If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave." Mo Willems, Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs
• "Books had instant replay long before televised sports." Bern Williams 
• "It’s one of the greatest gifts that reading can give a person: easy access to peace inside, even when the world outside is in shambles." Jennifer Williamson
• "Old books exert a strange fascination in me, their smell, their feel, their history, wondering who might have owned them, how they lived, what they felt." Lauren Willig
• "A first book has some of the sweetness of a first love." Robert Aris Willmott
•  "No two persons ever read the same book." Edmund Wilson
• "I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it." Woodrow Wilson
• "O for a Booke and a shadie nooke, eyther in-a-doore or out;
  With the grene leaves whisp’ring overhede, or the Streete cryes all about.
  Where I maie Reade all at my ease, both of the Newe and Olde;
  For a jollie goode Booke whereon to looke is better to me than Golde."
  John Wilson
• "Reading is a way for me to expand my mind, open my eyes, and fill up my heart." Oprah Winfrey 
•  "Some women have a weakness for shoes. I can go barefoot if necessary. I have a weakness for books." Oprah Winfrey
• "Books have a responsibility to teach". De'Shawn Charles Winslow
• "Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate, it is not a hobby ..." Jeanette Winterson
• "Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world." Jeanette Winterson
• "Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space." Jeanette Winterson
• "Every book [is] a message in a bottle." Jeanette Winterson
• "Reading is a life-long collision with minds not like your own." Jeanette Winterson
• "Read. Everything you can get your hands on. Read until words become your friends. Then when you need to find one, they will jump into your mind, waving their hands for you to pick them. And you can select whichever you like, just like a captain choosing a stickball team." Karen Witemeyer
• "Never read a book through merely because you have begun it." John Witherspoon
• "The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it." Thomas Wolfe
• "What holy cities are to nomadic tribes - a symbol of race and a bond of union - great books are to the wandering souls of men: they are the Meccas of the mind." G.E. Woodberry
• "But I just shrug, not knowing what to say. Can I explain to anyone that stories are like air to me, breathe them in and let them out and over again?" Jacqueline Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming 
  
• "Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners." Virginia Woolf
•  "I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure." Virginia Woolf
• "Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river." Virginia Woolf
• "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
• "Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading." Virginia Woolf 
• "Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart." William Wordsworth
• "No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. She will not want new fashions, nor expensive diversions, or variety of company, if she can be amused by an author." Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
• "Choose an author as you choose a friend." Sir Christopher Wren
• "The book of the moment often has immense vogue, while the book of the age, which comes in its company from the press, lies unnoticed; but the great book has its revenge. It lives to see its contemporary pushed up shelf by shelf until it finds its final resting-place in the garret or the auction room." Hamilton Wright Mabie
• "I just got out of the hospital. I was in a speed-reading accident. I hit a book mark and flew across the room." Steven Wright 
• "Someone asked me, if I were stranded on a desert island what book would I bring ... 'How to Build a Boat'." Steven Wright
•  
• "Books are like medicine, good reading can cure a fool." Liu Xiang 
•  
  
• "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." W. B. Yeats 
• "Sorrows that she's but read of in a book weigh on her mind as if they had been her own." W.B. Yeats
• "If you read a book which does not make you wonder, ponder!" Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
• "Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up." Jane Yolen
• "Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood." Jane Yolen
• "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 
• "Extremists have shown what frightens them most: a girl with a book." Malala Yousafzai
• "I thought that words and books and pens were more powerful than guns." Malala Yousafzai
• "Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world." Malala Yousafzai   
• "Pens and books are the weapons that defeat terrorism." Malala Yousafzai
• "We must believe in the power and strength of our words. Our words can change the world." Malala Yousafzai 
• "Reading is dreaming with open eyes." YoYo
• "The wise man reads both books and life itself." Lin Yutang
• 
  
• "There are books of the same chemical composition as dynamite. The only difference is that a piece of dynamite explodes once, whereas a book explodes a thousand times." Yevgeny Zamyatin, A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin
• "People tell boring lies about politics, God, and love. You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?", Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
• "You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favourite book?" Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
  
• "We buy books because we believe we are buying the time to read them." Warren Zevon
• "If you love to read, you can learn anything you really want to know." Zig Ziglar
• "Every book is a different hood, a different country, a different world. Reading is how I visit places and people and ideas. And when something rings true or if I still have a question, I outline it with a bright yellow highlighter so that it’s lit up in my mind, like a lightbulb or a torch leading the way to somewhere new. It’s usually enough to make me forget I’ve barely left Bushwick." Ibi Zoboi, Pride
  
• "I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right." Markus Zusak in "The Book Thief"
• "I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I even simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant ... I AM HAUNTED BY HUMANS." Markus Zusak, "The Book Thief"
• "She gathered books like clouds and words poured down like rain." Markus Zusak
•  "Sometimes you read a book so special you want to carry it around with you for months after you've finished ... just to stay near it." Markus Zusak

If anyone can tell me the originator of any of these quotes, I'd be very thankful and would happily include the names.

• "If you can read this, thank a teacher." Anonymous Teacher 
• "He who lends a book is an idiot. He who returns the book is more of an idiot." Arab proverb (I don't really agree with this, I lend my books to my friends all the time.)
• "Reading a book is looking into someone else's life, and you're damn lucky to experience so many lives in your lifetime." www.bookishelf.com 
  
• "A book is like a garden carried in the pocket." Chinese Proverb
• "After three days without reading, talk becomes flavourless." Chinese proverb
• "The candle lights up the room, the book lights up the heart."  Chinese Proverb 
  
•  "To read a book for the first time is to make the acquaintance of a new friend; to read it a second time is to meet an old one." Chinese Proverb 
• "By eating we overcome hunger; and by study ignorance." Chinese Proverb
• "A wicked book is the wickeder because it cannot repent." English Proverb 
• "Coming into a bookstore when it's raining is like grocery shopping when you're hungry." Overheard in a Harvard Book Store
•  "Blindur er bóklaus maður." - "Blind is a man without a book." Icelandic proverb
• "If you believe everything you read, you better not read." Japanese proverb 
• "Reading books removes sorrows from the heart." Moroccan proverb
• "Books are hindrances to persisting stupidity." Spanish Proverb
• "In a good book the best is between the lines." Swedish Proverb
• "A book is like the Tardis - it's bigger on the inside." N.N. 
• "A child who reads will be an adult who thinks." N.N.
• "A good book makes you want to live in the story. A great book gives you no choice." N.N.
• "A good book not only brings a new world to you, it brings you into a new world. It allows you to see and to experience things that never actually happen to you, and to learn from events that take place only in the realm of imagination." N.N.
• "A good book on your shelf is a friend that turns its back on you and remains a friend." N.N.
• "A home without books is like a tree without birds." N.N.
• "A library is a hospital for the mind." N.N.
•  "A little reading is all the therapy a person needs sometimes." N.N. 
• "Always look on the bright side of life. Otherwise it'll be too dark to read." N.N.
• "An apple a day is good for your body. A chapter a day is good for your mind." N.N.
• "Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book." N.N.
• "A true friend is like a good book, the inside is better than the cover." N.N.  
  
• "Bookish Problem: You actually have to step back, take a moment, and admire your bookshelves every time you add a new book." N.N.
• "Book lovers never go to bed alone." N.N. 
• "Books are like little immortal treats that I get to eat over and over again." N.N.
• "Books are my solace and true escape from life. I wish I could spend all my time reading." N.N. 
• "Books are the answer. What was the question?" N.N. 
• "Books are the easiest things to pick up and the hardest things to put down." N.N. 
•  "Books are the gateway to the world and the escape from it." N.N.
• "Books aren't made of pages and words. They are made of hopes, dreams and possibilities." N.N.
• "Books breed like rabbits, bookcases breed like elephants." N.N.
• "Books can make your imagination go beyond limits" N.N.   
• "Books cause dangerous thoughts." N.N. 
• "Books don't just go with you, they take you where you've never been." N.N.
• "Books give me an escape from reality even if it’s only for a few minutes." N.N.  
• "Books have a way of making you homesick for a place you've never been to." N.N.
• "Books let you fight dragons, meet the love of your life, travel to faraway lands and laugh alongside friends, all within the pages. They're an escape that brings you home." N.N.  
• "Books make your mind sharper. Life more exciting. Spirits higher. Stress levels lower. Heart more compassionate." N.N.   
• "Buying books is immensely comforting. Maybe I won’t read them immediately, but they make me feel so much better whenever I’m sad and blue. Just their presence, it’s like having more to look forward to." N.N.
• "Buying me books is a good way to win over my heart. Reading them, and discussing them with me, you might as well propose." N.N.
• "Do books belong to me or do I belong to books? That is the question. N.N.   
• "Closing a good book before it's finished is like pressing stop in the middle of the best part of your favourite movie." N.N. 
• "Each time you open a book and open it, a tree smiles knowing there's life after death." N.N.
•  "Every book contains a life. The more we read the more we live." N.N.
• "Every book you've ever read is just a different combination of the same 26 letters." N.N.
• "Every person has a book, and every book has a cover, but behind every cover is a different story. So don't judge a person by the cover of their book." N.N.
• "Friend: What’s that book about? Me: *handing my friend the book* Here, read it." N.N. 
• "Good children's literature appeals not only to the child in the adult, but to the adult in the child." N.N. 
• "Happiness is reading a quotation and thinking: Yes! Exactly!" Happiness No. 4521 N.N.
• "Humans make art, but art makes us human." N.N.
  "I always read books twice. The first time you appreciate the story. The second time you appreciate the writing." N.N.
• "I'd rather write about this world than live in it and I'd rather play music all day and wander around bookstores and watch humans but not be one of them." N.N.
• "If I'm ever stranded, I hope it's in a bookstore." N.N. 
  
• "If I'm not reading a book I'm normally talking about them!" N.N.
• "If I put my book down, the characters might do something without me." N.N.  
• "I found comfort through literature, I loved getting lost in things as marvelous and as wonderful as books. They made me forget about my own troubles, like a submarine and the sea, they submerged me so perfectly." N.N. 
• "If the world teaches me how to cry, reading teaches me how to shine" N.N.
•  "If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into what you believe? The things most worth reading are precisely those that challenge our convictions." N.N.
• "If you think reading is boring, you're doing it wrong." N.N. 
• "I like big books and I cannot lie." N.N.
• "I like the feeling when I completely forget who I am while reading." N.N.  
• "I love books because I don’t have to wait for the commercials to be over to find out what happens." N.N. *
• "I love that you can safely entrust yourself to books," she said, "though you may be torn in two, in the end your heart will be returned - more whole than when you gave it away at the first page." N.N.
• "I love to read. That doesn't mean I don't have a life. It doesn't mean I'm a nerd. I only love the feeling that ... even when you're back in reality you still feel like you're in a different world." S.A.
• "I'm a bookaholic on the road to recovery. Ha, not really. I'm on the road to the bookstore." N.N.
• "I'm outdoorsy in that I like reading on the beach." N.N.
  
• "In life, it's important to know when to stop arguing with people … and simply let them be wrong." N.N. 
• "In my dream world, books are free and reading makes you thin." N.N.
  
• "I read old books because I would rather learn from those who built civilization than those who tore it down." N.N. 
• "I stockpile books like extreme couponers stockpile groceries." N.N. 
• "It's impossible to walk through a book store and be in a bad mood at the same time." N.N.
•  "It’s us the readers who bring the text to life with our viewpoint." N.N. 
• "It takes a library to raise a child." N.N. 
• "I've traveled the world twice over,
  Met the famous; saints and sinners,
  Poets and artists, kings and queens,
  Old stars and hopeful beginners,
  I've been where no-one's been before,
  Learned secrets from writers and cooks
  All with one library ticket
  To the wonderful world of books." N.N.
• "I will never cease to be amazed by books. Seriously. Just think about it: thousands of people read the same book but in each one’s mind the characters look different and the setting changes and we’re all reading the same thing but it’s so unique to each of us. That is insanely cool." N.N. 
• "Knowledge is free at your library. Just bring your own container." N.N. 
• "Libraries are not a destination. They are the transportation. The Grand Central Station of every great city and town." N.N. (found at The Great Read)
• "Library doors are a gateway to anywhere." N.N.  
• "Life is like a book. Some chapters are sad, some are happy, and some are exciting. But if you never turn the page… you will never know what the next chapter holds." N.N.
• "Literature is a fiction that tells a greater truth." N.N.
• "Love, Compassion, Virtue, Philosophy, Law, Science, Medicine, Beauty, The Sun and The Moon and The Stars, The Ocean and The Wind, The Colours and The feel of Velvet... You can find it all in a Book." N.N.
• "Medicine for the soul." Inscription over the door of the Library at Thebes 
• "My version of a haunted house is one with no books." N.N. 
• "One does not stop buying books just because there is no more shelf space." N.N.
• "Paperbacks are for reading hardbacks for collecting" N.N. 
• "People who hate to read scare me. Good books have kept me alive." N.N. 
• "People who say that I'm hard to shop for must not know where to buy books." N.N.  
• "Reading a book is like dreaming. You can't control what's going to happen, but it takes you into a different world." N.N.
• "Reading for at least thirty minutes a day can help you live almost two years longer." N.N.
• "Reading is a medicine that does nor need a prescription … and has no limit on dosage." N.N. 
  
• "Reading is powerful. Words truly have the power to change our perspective and transport us to another place and time. Books can change our lives." N.N. 
• "Reading takes me places and makes me feel things I’d never get to experience otherwise. Reading fills me up and empties me out, ready for the next adventure." N.N.  
• "Reading. That place where you're by yourself but you're never alone." N.N.
• "Seeing someone reading a book you love is seeing a book recommending a person." N.N.
• "Simple tips to gain my friendship:
  Have books.
  Tell me about your books.
  Invite me over to see your books.
  Be a Book.
  Books." N.N
• "Sometimes you just need to lay on the couch and read for a couple of years." N.N.
• "The cure to boredom is books. There is no cure for books." N.N.
• "The food we eat feeds our body but the novels we read feed our mind." N.N.  
• "The great thing about a library is that it's large enough to fit the entire world inside, yet small enough to fit in your town." N.N.
• "The problem with reading a good book is that you want to finish the book but you don't want to finish the book." N.N.
• "There is a space on everyone's bookshelves for books you have outgrown but can't give away. They hold your youth between their pages, like flowers pressed on a half-forgotten Summer's day." N.N.
• "The road to knowledge begins with the turn of a page." N.N.
• "The smells of books, whether they're new and old, are enjoyable and pair well with tea or coffee. People who are loathe to read are missing out on smell-o-vision." Ian 
• "They say you are what you read. Therefore, I am an archer, a debutante, a vampipre, a detective, a spy, an empath, a dragon, a sniper, a werewolf, a profiler, a pyromaner, a dancer ..... In other words, readers kind of rock." N.N.
• "This book has been used but its words are still good". N.N.
  
• "Those books you know you'll love forever even before you start them. And after reading it for the x-th time, you smile to yourself about how right you were." N.N.
• "To become smart you need to read just ten books, but to find those ten, you need to read thousands." N.N. 
• "Too much of anything is bad, but too many books is barely enough." N.N.
  
• "To you it might be a cheap notebook, but to me, it’s my best friend, which listens to me and reminds me when I need it the most." N.N.
  
• "TV. If kids are entertained by two letters, imagine the fun they’ll have with twenty-six. Open your child’s imagination. Open a book." N.N. 
• "We lose ourselves in books, we find ourselves there, too." N.N.  
• "We settle to read any work of fiction with the same anticipation that primitive folk felt as they gathered closer to the fire and the storyteller began the tale." N.N.
• "What is a bookshelf other than a treasure chest for a curious mind?" N.N.
  
• "When a library is open, no matter its size or shape, democracy is open, too." N.N.
• "When I want to travel, I don't need an airplaine, a train or a bike. Just give me a comfortable seat, a cup of tea and a really good book." N.N.
• "When people say, 'I have so many books to read! Look at my To Be Read pile!' and it's like 8 books, I want to say, 'That's adorable. I have a TBR bookcase." N.N.
•  "When reading, we don't fall in love with the characters' appearance. We fall in love with their words, their thoughts, and their hearts. We fall in love with their souls." N.N. 
• "When we open our favourite books, we do so to spend time with our best friends." N.N. 
• "When we read, we paint new worlds with our imaginations." N.N.  
• "When you're a reader, nobody can call you spineless." N.N. 
• "Whoever said Diamonds are a Girl's best Friend forgot about BOOKS." N.N.  
• "With books I am never alone." N.N.
• "You know you're a bookworm when your house is one book away from being considered a library." N.N. (I think I've passed that step a long long time ago.) 
• "You mean to tell me librarians don't live at the library?" N.N.

If I read a book by or about a person whose quote I mention here, I have added a link to one of their books.