Top 100 Book Once Quotes
#1. It should be possible to exist with only a short shelf of books, to read and give away. After all - we may not open a book, once read, for ten years or more. But the act of reading has made it part of us - to relinquish it would be to lose an extension of our being.
Pam Brown
#2. Reading is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.
Ann Patchett
#3. For an author nothing is as dead as a book once it is written.
Rumer Godden
#4. He wondered if burned books made a special kind of smoke that clung to the world forever, in the same way that a book, once read, clings to its reader forever.
Suzanne Selfors
#5. The influence of 'Hidden Fortress' comes up a lot because it was printed in a book once. The truth is, the only thing I was inspired by was the fact that it's told from the point of view of two peasants, who get mixed up with a samurai and princess and a lot of very high-level people.
George Lucas
#6. Well, that is another hope gone. My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes. That's a sentence I read in a book once, and I say it over to comfort myself whenever I'm disappointed in anything.
L.M. Montgomery
#7. But not so odd a name, after all, if you've ever read through the phone directory, with its Hyman Diddlebockers and Sasparilla Greenleafs. I read through the phone book once, never mind when, and it satisfied a deep need in me to realize how many people aren't called Smith.
Sylvia Plath
#8. The Epic?" Raylynn raised her eyebrows. "You actually read through it?" "Of course." Vhalla couldn't fathom who wouldn't finish a book once they'd started.
Elise Kova
#9. I read this book once that said we meet the people we need to meet when we're ready for them. Maybe that's why we met. To try and help each other figure out who we are now.
Holly Jacobs
#10. For a dyed-in-the-wool author, nothing is as dead as a book once it is written. She is rather like a cat whose kittens have grown up.
Rumer Godden
#11. Character, I think, is the single most important thing in fiction. You might read a book once for its interesting plot - but not twice.
Diana Gabaldon
#12. I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I've never been able to believe it. I don't believe a rose WOULD be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage.
L.M. Montgomery
#13. Maybe if you would bother reading a book once in a while instead of hurling them about every chance you get, you would have put the pieces together yourself by now
William Ritter
#14. The ways in which a book, once read, stays (and changes) in the reader's mind are unpredictable.
Julian Barnes
#15. you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that. Harry, promise me that you will never lend that book to any one. It does harm.
Oscar Wilde
#16. I read this book once where the girl yelled 'cat' right before they were about to get some bow-chicka-bow-wow,' I told him. 'It was high-larious.
J. Lynn
#17. I took out the book once more. Snails can sleep for three years without eating. Snail comas. Welcome to my world.
Shelly Crane
#18. You and I will always be friends."
"Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that.
Oscar Wilde
#19. Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.
Paul Theroux
#20. I never want to deal with a book once I'm finished writing.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#21. Every leaf of the tree becomes a page of the book, once the heart is opened and it has learnt to read.
Saadi
#22. But mostly I had books - so many books, and they were mine; I would not have to part with them. It had always been a dream of mine to just own a lot of books, to never part with a book once I had read it.
Jamaica Kincaid
#23. I was carried away, swept along by the mighty stream of words pouring from the hundreds of pages. To me it was the ultimate book: once you had read it, neither your own life nor the world you lived in would ever look the same.
Dai Sijie
#24. Newland never seems to look ahead,' Mrs. Welland once ventured to complain to her daughter; and May answered serenely:
'No; but you see it doesn't matter, because when there's nothing particular to do he reads a book.
Edith Wharton
#25. Once you've written a book, it belongs to everyone, and they are all allowed to have opinions, and the spectrum of opinions is the spectrum of humanity.
Neil Gaiman
#26. Some cleric putting a match to her. /Neither of them looks happy about it. /Once lit, she'll burn like a book, /like a book that was ever finished, /like a locked-up library.
Margaret Atwood
#27. I once wrote deduceable instead of deducible in a book, though nobody then or since has taken me up on it. A small point as they go, perhaps, but Rule I of writing acceptably is to get everything right as far as you can, and in this case I had neglected to.
Kingsley Amis
#28. When anything goes digital, let alone something as immaterial as a book, there is a tendency to see it as just in the air to be taken, and to lose the sense that somebody once made it.
Graham Swift
#29. Duty. Honor. He yearns to write his name large across the book of history, to get away from his wife, or both. Perhaps he just wants to be warm for once in his life.
George R R Martin
#30. Once we visit death, once we see the beauty waiting for us, our fear's gone. Used to be never a book written, of our experience with dying. Now there are shelves, waiting to be read. The beliefs, the experiences of so many others, now.
Richard Bach
#31. It would absolutely suck if you paid a few bucks for a book only to find that on the first page it said, 'Once upon a time they all lived happily ever after' and the rest of the book was blank.
Simon Travaglia
#32. If enough people openly engage in conduct once considered reprehensible, we rewrite the rule book and assume that God, as a good democrat, will go along.
James L. Buckley
#33. In a sense, the artwork is the most important thing in getting somebody to buy a book. The person probably won't buy a book if he doesn't like the artwork. Once you buy it for the artwork, you hope that the story will also be good.
Stan Lee
#34. When I start, I have a feeling for the characters, and maybe the shape of the story. Sometimes I might even have the last sentence in mind. But, no book I've ever written has ever ended the way I thought it would. Characters disappear, others come forward. Once you start writing, everything changes.
Paul Auster
#35. Once you read a classic, you will start loving even the smell of the books.
Aman Jassal
#36. What I had come to love about book club (besides the fabulous desserts and free liquor) was how in hearing so many opinions about the same book, your own opinion expanded, as if you'd read the book several times instead of just once.
Lorna Landvik
#37. Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.
Sarah Dessen
#38. I once read Updike after writing a first draft, and I wanted to put my own book on the fire. I've since learned to read utter crap while I'm writing: pulp is the thing.
John Niven
#39. I think once you sort of cross over and you realize what books can be - and if they mean something to you - there's just no stopping you.
Molly Ringwald
#40. Trump tried to book Penn & Teller once in Vegas at one of his casinos, but we were priced out of his budget.
Penn Jillette
#41. I've gotten more and more cut off from the regular comic-book world, from straight comics and stuff like that. Once in a while, I'll take a look at something.
Harvey Pekar
#42. The worst part? Knowing that since a book this moving, this enthralling and enveloping comes along, as I said, only every once in a while, it will be many, many moons until we see its like again. - Sara Nelson
Amazon Books Editors
#43. I once read a book by a former alcoholic where she described giving oral sex to two different men, men she'd just met in a restaurant on a busy London high street. I read it and thought, I'm not that bad. This is where the bar is set.
Paula Hawkins
#44. They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds. I put this book here for you, who once lived So that you should visit us no more.
Czeslaw Milosz
#45. I'm always working on a few different stories at once, so there's always some really big coffee table book I'm carrying around.
Mo Rocca
#46. I remember once asking Grandma about a book she was reading, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and how she answered me: this was the first conversation of my life that concerned a book, and 'the life of the mind' - and now, such subjects have become my life.
Joyce Carol Oates
#47. Sometimes people have too much history together, history of the wrong kind, and people cannot tear pages from the book of their life. Once something is written there it is permanent.
Ryan David Jahn
#48. Just so you know," I begin, "when they say 'Once upon a time' ... they're lying. It's not once upon a time. It's not even twice upon a time. It's hundreds of times, over and over, every time someone opens up the pages of this dusty old book.
Jodi Picoult
#49. We got up and smiled at each other. His eyes were lovely, and I was reminded of a line in a book I read once, that God exists in the spaces between people.
Susan Juby
#50. It all goes back to this idea of ownership again. Once I published that book and my words became a commodity, something broke between us.
Lily King
#51. It is easy to destroy a book, but an idea once implanted has roots no man can utterly destroy.
Louis L'Amour
#52. I once wrote a book on courage and what made people courageous. I found it was a strength of belief matched by a strength of willpower.
Gordon Brown
#53. Stranger, pause and look; From the dust of ages Lift this little book, Turn the tattered pages, Read me, do not let me die! Search the fading letters finding Steadfast in the broken binding All that once was I!
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#54. A writing teacher once told me that the most successful movies and books were simple plots about complex characters. You should be able to articulate your concept in a couple of lines.
James Scott Bell
#55. Fallon and I were a lot like them. Only I didn't love her, and she didn't love me. I was infatuated with her once - and loved that she let me take my pubescent urges out on her - but we weren't in love.
Penelope Douglas
#56. Reading has made me more open, has improved my understanding, and has made me a better artiste, but it also makes me live in my own bubble. My mom keeps asking me, 'What do you read in that room the whole day?' Once I am into a book, I will finish it.
Sonam Kapoor
#57. What I love about 'The Walking Dead' is it's a human story, which is to me what makes the comic book so good, but once you jump from the pages of the book to the screen, the gore and the zombies have to look great.
Scott Ian
#58. Plus, research shows that being a part of a group that meets just once a month will give you the same increase in happiness as doubling your salary.
Rachel Bertsche
#59. My mom would always read a book to me at night from when I was three. Now, I can't go to sleep without reading a book. At the same time, once I read, it's difficult for me to go to sleep, as I have an overactive imagination and I start thinking.
Sonam Kapoor
#60. [Why] should not the Bible regain the place it once held as a school book? Its morals are pure, its examples captivating and noble. The reverence for the Sacred Book that is thus early impressed lasts long; and probably if not impressed in infancy, never takes firm hold of the mind.
Fisher Ames
#61. I once stole a book. It was really just the once, and at the time I called it borrowing. It was 1970, and the book, I could see by its lack of date stamps, had been lying unappreciated on the shelves of my convent school library since its publication in 1945.
Hilary Mantel
#62. I knew Chloe LOVED to read, but I was in the middle of a MAJOR life crisis! For once, couldn't she just try focusing on ME instead of her stupid book characters?! Then
Rachel Renee Russell
#63. I once gave my friend his braille book to him upside down and I got a punch in the shoulder. He was aiming for my face but I guess him being blind makes his accuracy terrible.
Haresh Daswani
#64. My books don't seem to belong to me after I have once written them; and I find myself delivering opinions about them as if I had nothing to do with them.
George Eliot
#65. My first book is really comparable to what I do now, where it's pretty surreal and strange at moments, but that being my first book - I wrote that when I was 22; it came out when I was 24 - and it was just really overwritten. I just didn't trust myself as a writer to say something once.
Joe Meno
#66. The stupid and dishonest accountants allowed the genie of totally inappropriate accounting to descend on derivatives books. And once this has happened - people get status, etc. - it's impossible to get it back into the bottle.
Charlie Munger
#67. The Software You will have to buy Microsoft Office, which contains PowerPoint, or you can download the freeware OpenOffice, which contains Impress. Once you understand the basics of how to use these programs to create the book cover, you may prefer to use some other presentation software. Both
Jimmy Clay
#68. I feel like a divorced wife once my book is published and has left me, and hate to be brought back into intimate contact!
Freya Stark
#69. Papa grinned and pointed at the girl. "Book, sandpaper, pencil," he ordered her, "and accordion!" once she was already gone. Soon, they were on Himmel Street, carrying the words, the music, the washing.
Markus Zusak
#70. 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
#71. Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#72. I've always viewed myself as a brand. When I started 10 years ago, that was very controversial. 'Marketing' and 'PR' were dirty words for the literary world, but that has changed. Once the book is finished, I want as many people as possible to read it.
Camilla Lackberg
#74. Once I opened a book, I felt compelled to finish it. I was drawn into a world, and I had to know what would happen, how it would end.
Marissa Moss
#75. Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.
Ray Bradbury
#76. We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once.
Ali Smith
#77. For, to a child, the oddest of things, and the most richly coloured picture-book, is that his mother was once a child also.
J.M. Barrie
#78. Television captures the mind but does not liberate it. A good book at once stimulates and frees the mind.
Bruno Bettelheim
#79. Who among us - if it means letting go of the insanity, the mystery, the totally useless beauty of the million once-possible New Yorks - is ready even now to give up hope? BOOK
Garth Risk Hallberg
#80. Once I fell in love with books, I fell in love completely.
Stephen King
#81. Yeah, when you're making a film, the book is a good tool, but once you have the script and you're making a movie, you have to let go of the book.
Jennifer Lawrence
#82. Once I had opened a book and read its pages, those characters could never be taken away from me. Even if the books were burned, they would still live on in my mind.
Jennifer Wilson
#83. My ambition was to embrace those general qualities that Ernest Hemingway, a former newspaperman, once said should be present in all good books: 'the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.'
Pete Hamill
#84. Once I was condemned to three months' absolute silence. As I could not speak, I wrote a book.
Nana Mouskouri
#85. Those who say 'you only live once' have never read a book.
John Hughes
#86. Once he gave her a Rothko book - an interesting choice, since like Elliott, Rothko also attended Lincoln High School in Portland (as had poet Gary Snyder and Simpsons creator Matt Groening). The
William Todd Schultz
#87. The cool thing about having a book is that it takes on its own life. Once it's in the world, you can't follow it. You'd have to have a pretty fantastic surveillance system to track its migration.
Cate Marvin
#88. These guys are tough, this world is crazy and the wind here is crazy strong! However if I want a normal life for once I have to try harder! Angel - From Revenge of the Gloobas. Coming soon!
Angel Ramon Medina
#89. You cannot simply tap your creative nature once and then expect to be done with it. It is a lifelong process: a continual commitment to being open to possibility, trusting your instincts, experimenting, taking risks, and revising.
Fran Sorin
#90. Considering Adrian had once gotten bored while reading while reading a particularly long menu, I had a hard time imagining he'd read the Hugo book in any language.
Richelle Mead
#91. As we cast our frightened eyes around for something that is real and true and enduring, we are turning once more to this ancient Book [the Bible] that has given consolation, comfort, and salvation to millions in the centuries past.
Billy Graham
#92. I tried to start a gang once.
It turned into a book club.
- MEME
Darynda Jones
#93. Books that children read but once are of scant service to them; those that have really helped to warm our imaginations and to train our faculties are the few old friends we know so well that they have become a portion of our thinking selves.
Agnes Repplier
#94. But once that question popped out there, it couldn't be ignored. You couldn't put toothpaste back in the tube; once you'd seen Waldo, you might as well throw the book away.
R. Lee Smith
#95. I said once that if they gave me enough money to read the phone book, I'd do it. I live in a total state of non-expectation. I don't expect things, and I keep my expectations very low about everything
Anthony Hopkins
#96. Pellerin used to read every available book on aesthetics, in the hope of discovering the true theory of Beauty, for he was convinced that once he had found it he would be able to paint masterpieces.
Gustave Flaubert
#97. You know, a documentary is only interesting once in a while. If you look at a whole book of Dorothea [Lange]'s where she has row after row of people bending over and digging out carrots - that can be very tedious. And so it's only once in a while that something happens that is worth doing.
Imogen Cunningham
#98. Once upon a time, a girl fell in love with a boy who existed only in the pages of a book.
KaraLynne Mackrory
#99. The book is like the wheel - once invented, it cannot be bettered.
Umberto Eco
#100. Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.
John Green
