Reading is wonderful.“Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work,” Jennifer Egan once said.ANNPortal collected these amazing book quotations with pictures from all over the world.
“It starts so young, and I’m angry about that. The garbage we’re taught. About love, about what’s “romantic.” Look at so many of the so-called romantic figures in books and movies. Do we ever stop and think how many of them would cause serious and drastic unhappiness after The End? Why are sick and dangerous personality types so often shown a passionate and tragic and something to be longed for when those are the very ones you should run for your life from? Think about it. Heathcliff. Romeo. Don Juan. Jay Gatsby. Rochester. Mr. Darcy. From the rigid control freak in The Sound of Music to all the bad boys some woman goes running to the airport to catch in the last minute of every romantic comedy. She should let him leave. Your time is so valuable, and look at these guys–depressive and moody and violent and immature and self-centered. And what about the big daddy of them all, Prince Charming? What was his secret life? We dont know anything about him, other then he looks good and comes to the rescue.”
― Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming
“A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.”
― C.S. Lewis
“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
“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
“Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.”
― Francis Bacon
“You get a little moody sometimes but I think that’s because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides
“Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
― Augustine of Hippo
“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?”
― Henry Ward Beecher
“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.
Then fill the shelves with lots of books.”
― Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
“Books may well be the only true magic.”
― Alice Hoffman
“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”
― Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel
“That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake
“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 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
“Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out.”
― J.K. Rowling
“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
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World
“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”
― William Styron, Conversations with William Styron
“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
“Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel
“Be careful about reading health books. Some fine day you’ll die of a misprint.”
― Markus Herz
“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“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 my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“… a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
“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, Pride and Prejudice
“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
“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, An Abundance of Katherines
“One must always be careful of books,” said Tessa, “and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel
“′Classic′ – a book which people praise and don’t read.”
― Mark Twain
“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison
“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. That doesn’t happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“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
“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
― Groucho Marx
“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
― Oscar Wilde
“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
“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.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges
“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx
“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, Coraline
“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa
The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain
“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”
― Mortimer J. Adler
“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
“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
“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 foolin’ a soul.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods
“We live for books.”
― Umberto Eco
“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
“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
― Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts
“Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.”
― Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizard
“I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.”
― Jorge Luis Borges
“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.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot
“The world was hers for the reading.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
“There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.”
― Christopher Morley, Pipefuls
“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
“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, Inkspell
“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
“If a book about failures doesn’t sell, is it a success?”
― Jerry Seinfeld
“I do things like get in a taxi and say, “The library, and step on it.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country
“Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.”
― Dave Eggers
“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 like An Imperial Affliction, which you can’t tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like betrayal”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
“It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle
“There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.”
― Irving Stone, Clarence Darrow for the Defense
“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
― Philip Pullman
“but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.”
― Jane Austen
“A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”
― Madeleine L’Engle
“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 go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em!”
― John Waters
“I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.”
― Orhan Pamuk, The New Life
“I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone around the World
“From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.”
― Groucho Marx
“One can never have enough socks,” said Dumbledore. “Another Christmas has come and gone and I didn’t get a single pair. People will insist on giving me books.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
“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
“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. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys
“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
― Franz Kafka
“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.”
― Annie Dillard, The Living
“Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka
“There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.”
― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
“Science and religion are not at odds. Science is simply too young to understand.”
― Dan Brown, Angels & Demons
“My Best Friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read.”
― Abraham Lincoln
“In a way, it’s nice to know that there are Greek gods out there, because you have somebody to blame when things go wrong. For instance, when you’re walking away from a bus that’s just been attacked by monster hags and blown up by lightning, and it’s raining on top of everything else, most people might think that’s just really bad luck; when you’re a half-blood, you understand that some devine force is really trying to mess up your day.”
― Rick Riordan, The Titan’s Curse
“When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book.”
― Margaret Walker