Top 90 Book Shelf Quotes
#1. My father always said, 'Never trust anyone whose TV is bigger than their book shelf' - so I make sure I read.
Emilia Clarke
#2. Never trust anyone whose TV is bigger than their book shelf
Emilia Clarke
#3. But every living soul is a book of their own history, which sits on the ever-growing shelf in the library of human memories.
Jack Gantos
#4. Vegan With A Vengeance is on my kitchen shelf. This fun and creative book is delicious for people like me, who don't eat pets.
Joan Jett
#5. Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.
David Quammen
#6. CUSTOMER: Do you have security cameras in here? BOOKSELLER: Yes. CUSTOMER: Oh. (customer slides a book out from inside his jacket and places it back on the shelf)
Jen Campbell
#7. In seventh grade ... I found a place on the [library]shelf where my book would be if I ever wrote a book, which I doubted.
Beverly Cleary
#8. I marveled at how they were all closed up, asleep with their secrets unseen until you reached up and took the book down from the shelf.
Deborah Lawrenson
#9. Some people are happy when they are at the sea; I'm happy when I'm standing in front of a shelf of books. It feels like the known place and also the beginning of a new adventure. It has that simultaneous paradoxical effect of making me feel absolutely calm and very excited.
Jeanette Winterson
#10. There is something shameful about the death of a play. It does not die with pity, but contempt. A book may fail, but who is there to know it? It dies and is buried, and is decently interred on the bookseller's shelf; but the play dies to laughter, to scorn and disdain.
Mary Roberts Rinehart
#11. His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.
Ray Bradbury
#12. Flora had also learned the degraded art of 'tasting' unread books, and now, whenever her skimming eye lit on a phrase about heavy shapes, or sweat, or howls or bedposts, she just put the book back on the shelf, unread.
Stella Gibbons
#13. Since I was trying so hard to make books lead my life, I didn't want to read them and then just put them back on the shelf and say, "good book," as if I was patting a good dog. I wanted books to change me, and I wanted to write books that would change others.
Jack Gantos
#14. This is the corpse road, she said, aligning her body with the invisible path. As she did, she could feel something inside her begin to hum agreeably, a sensation very much like the satisfaction that came from aligning book spines on a shelf.
Maggie Stiefvater
#15. There's something called the 'Washington Read,' which is the habit of many locals to go into a bookstore, pull a book off the shelf, rifle through the index to see if they're in there.
Mark Leibovich
#17. You see? I know where every single book used to be in the library.' She pointed to the shelf opposite. 'Over there was Catch-22, which was a hugely popular fishing book and one of a series, I believe.
Jasper Fforde
#18. A long time ago, I heard a piece of advice that went something like "write the book you wish you could find on the shelf but can't." And that's what I do...
Maggie Stiefvater
#19. In our household, the Bible, the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology
Barack Obama
#20. On the analogy of 'Dictionary Johnson,' we call Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the just-published Yale Book of Quotations (well worth the $50 price), 'Quotationeer Shapiro.' ... Shapiro does original research, earning his 1,067-page volume a place on the quotation shelf next to Bartlett's and Oxford's.
William Safire
#21. It is the nature of those books we call classics to wait patiently on the shelf for us to grow into them.
Erica Jong
#22. Whatever a writer gets paid for his book, it's never enough. I think that's true. It's hard work. But in the end, you wrote a book. It's something real and tangible that sits on a shelf forever.
Jim Gaffigan
#23. It's not even so much about publicity, it's more just letting people know that things are available, because books aren't a flash in the pan thing. It's more like: "It took 20 years for this book to be done and now it'll be on a shelf for 20 years until the right person finds it."
Ian Christe
#24. The shelf life of the average trade book is somewhere between milk and yogurt.
Calvin Trillin
#25. It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.
Annie Dillard
#26. If you want to live a top shelf life then you need to stand on the books you have read. Never stop learning, never stop growing.
Jim Rohn
#27. But don't you think there some stories that are more alive than that? When you put certain books back on the shelf, don't you feel as if the people inside are going on with their lives after the story is over?" Lucy felt that way about most of the books she loved.
Kristin Kladstrup
#28. He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#30. My Lamb, you are so very small, You have not learned to read at all; Yet never a printed book withstands The urgence of your dimpled hands. So, though this book is for yourself, Let mother keep it on the shelf Till you can read. O days that pass, That day will come too soon, alas!
E. Nesbit
#31. I simply believe that a book has a journey to make, and should not be condemned to being stuck on a shelf ... Let's leave our books free to travel, then, to be touched by other hands, and enjoyed by other eyes.
Paulo Coelho
#32. When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.
Haruki Murakami
#33. She's not a cookie, or a book, or a record on a shelf. You can't just play with her and then put her back.
Kathleen Glasgow
#34. One of the maddening ironies of writing books is that it leaves so little time for reading others'. My bedside is piled with books, but it's duty reading: books for book research, books for review. The ones I pine for are off on a shelf downstairs.
Mary Roach
#35. We each take up one virtual space per title ... Virtual shelf life is forever. In a bookstore, you have anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to sell your title, and then it gets returned. This is a big waste of money, and no incentive at all for the bookseller to move the book.
J.A. Konrath
#36. He could judge with reasonable accuracy the amount of use a book had had. The first item to show any sign of wear was the dust jacket at the top and bottom of the spine. Little tears or cracks in the paper appeared here if a book had been taken off a shelf as much as three or four times.
Leonard Holton
#37. I just read everything I could get my hands on. I taught myself to read or my mother taught me. Who knows how I learned to read? It was before I went to school, so I would go to the library and just take things off the shelf. My mother had to sign a piece of paper saying I could take adult books.
Joan Didion
#38. Write the book you've always wanted to read, but can't find on the shelf.
Maggie Stiefvater
#39. If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you'd never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn't just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea.
Joshua Foer
#40. Buying a book is not enough ... You must absorb the knowledge it contains. Your personalized knowledge is not what's on your shelf, but how much you put into yourself!
Israelmore Ayivor
#41. A book in hand is worth ten on the shelf
Anonymous
#42. Don't buy books for your shelf, buy them for yourself.
Saji Ijiyemi
#43. A book which is left on a shelf is a dead thing but it is also a chrysalis, an inanimate object packed with the potential to burst into new life.
Susan Hill
#45. I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.
Thornton Wilder
#46. Computers will never take the place of books. You can't stand on a floppy disk to reach a high shelf.
Sam Ewing
#47. The book is warm. The book is handy. The book is handsome to the eye. The book occupies the shelf of the owner and is a reflection of him or her or, actually, me. The book is always there, to be reached for, to be thumbed and, too often I admit, to wonder about: Why did I buy this?
Richard Cohen
#48. I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf.
Patti Smith
#49. Sometimes when I pick up a book off the shelf, when I'm buying a new book to read, I'll look at all of them and they all have the exact same words inside, but I'll think that one is meant to go home with me. I'll never pick the first thing off the shelf, I'll always go one behind.
Jennifer Carpenter
#50. copy instead of finding the book on the shelf. And the finding is half the fun. Browsing on either side, above and below, that is the joy of it.
Mary Jane Hathaway
#51. Happy," said Thomas. "When I grow up, I am going to be happy."
Mrs. van Amersfoort was about to pull a book from the shelf, but turned in surprise. She looked at Thomas with a smile and said, "That is a damn good idea. And do you know how happiness begins? It begins with no longer being afraid.
Guus Kuijer
#52. I figured the process of someone standing at a shelf and deciding what juice to buy is going to be very different than someone sitting at the computer clicking through a bunch of different books or CDs-until I actually looked at the data, and it turned out that the patterns were remarkably similar.
Peter Fader
#53. As part of my research for An Anthology of Authors' Atrocity Stories About Publishers, I conducted a study (employing my usual controls) that showed the average shelf life of a trade book to be somewhere between milk and yoghurt.
Calvin Trillin
#54. The average trade book has a shelf life of between milk and yogurt, except for books by any member of the Irving Wallace family - they have preservatives.
Calvin Trillin
#55. The nice thing about programming at the RDF level is that you can just say, I'll ask for all the books. You can ask for all the shelves. You can ask for a given shelf whether a book was on it. And you're not worrying so much about the underlying syntax.
Tim Berners-Lee
#56. The library at home when she was child had been her refuge. She gravitated to it. When she was anxious, just taking a book of a shelf calmed her. Opening the cover, feeling the paper's smoothness, smelling the sheets, the leather, even sometimes the ink, centered her.
M.J. Rose
#57. There is a universe behind and before him. And the day is approaching when closing the last book on the last shelf on the far left; he will say to himself, now what?
Jean-Paul Sartre
#58. In the morning he would sit down to work, finish his allotted task, then take the little lamp from the hook, put it on the table, get his book from the shelf, open it, and sit down to read. And the more he read, the more he understood, and the brighter and happier it grew in his heart.
Leo Tolstoy
#59. I pulled a book by Robinson Jeffers off the shelf one day. It was powerfully moving. Tears ran down my face. That's when I became a poet.
William Everson
#60. You plant a garden one flower at a time ... You write a book one word at a time, clean a closet one shelf at a time, run a marathon one step at a time. If you feel defeated by some large task, get your spade and dig the first hole.
Jeanne Marie Laskas
#62. My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them.
Jorge Luis Borges
#63. The shelf number for the book would be inked in beside it, but each shelf contained about fifty books, so you had to hang there on the ladder and read every spine of every one until you came across yours.
Let it be said that nothing was ever accomplished in haste at Iverson.
Shana Abe
#64. There's no reason to keep a piece of furniture in your house that is so sacred and rare that you can't put your feet up on it and a dog can't jump up on it. Likewise, a book that sits on a shelf like a piece of porcelain, only to be admired, never to be read again, is a dead book.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#65. A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.
Henry Miller
#66. I have a beautiful address book a friend gave me in 1966. I literally cannot open it again. Ever. It sits on the shelf with over a hundred names crossed out. What is there to say? There are no words. I'll never understand why it happened to us.
Jerry Herman
#67. 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
#68. Seeing one's books on the shelf tells you so much about the way somebody has, over the years, put together their private library, which is a reflection of their minds and their selves.
Jeanette Winterson
#69. The reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.
Anne Fadiman
#70. A civilization without retail bookstores is unimaginable. Like shrines and other sacred meeting places, bookstores are essential artifacts of human nature. The feel of a book taken from the shelf and held in the hand is a magical experience, linking writer to reader.
Jason Epstein
#71. For people like me, books are something solid and real, whereas digital stuff is a bit more ethereal. I like the trophy on my shelf, the presence in my home. A nice book is just as valuable as a decoration as a beautiful porcelain urn - and, let's face it, a hell of a lot more useful.
John Romaniello
#72. As a former English major, I am a sitting duck for Gift Books, and in the past few years I've gotten Dickens, Thackeray, Smollet, Richardson, Emerson, Keats, Boswell and the Brontes, all of them Great, none of them ever read by me, all of them now on a shelf, looking at me and making me feel guilty.
Garrison Keillor
#75. Which is the woman, which the child? The joyous laugh that opens doors, steals sugared moments from the shelf? Or the dreamer mixing metaphors with tears to make a book of self To read aloud in winter's rooms When summer's sounds have ceased to bloom?
Katie Louchheim
#76. Think how quiet a book is on a shelf, he said, just sitting there, unopened. Then think what happens when you open it.
Ali Smith
#77. When I started writing 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid,' I was trying to write the type of book you might enjoy, put back on your shelf, and rediscover a few years later. I hope that the book finds its way into the bathroom of every kid in America.
Jeff Kinney
#78. A book from a nearby shelf tumbled to the ground and the pages rustled a moment before settling. I bit my lip, debating. If this was a horror movie, I would be yelling at the stupid girl to run - but I ignored my own advice and walked towards the book.
Lani Woodland
#79. It's true that this is not a book you stick on a shelf. This is a story you will instead always carry in your heart.
Terry Goodkind
#80. Write the book you wish you could find on the shelf but can't.
Maggie Stiefvater
#81. I used to have weird practices in crowded used-book stores in New York where I'd go in and just stomp my foot and see what fell from the shelf. And of course, because it's an unexpected encounter, there's always some magic that comes from it.
Saul Williams
#82. For years I have been coming to this library, and I explore it volume by volume, shelf by shelf, but I could demonstrate to you that I have done nothing but continue the reading of a single book.
Italo Calvino
#83. She needed a break from me. Well, real ones anyway. Fictional men were fine: they knew their place. You could just pick up a book, flick through to the right page, take your fill of your favorite hero and then return them to the shelf. Job done.
Victoria Connelly
#84. Will bounded up onto one of the ladders and yanked a book off the shelf. "I'll find you something else to read. Catch." He had let it fall without looking and Tessa had to dart forward to seize it before it hit the floor. - Clockwork Angel
Cassandra Clare
#85. I'm not interested in creating a book that is read once and then placed on the shelf and forgotten.
Richard Scarry
#86. Sometimes you buy a book, powerfully drawn to it, but then it just sits on the shelf. Maybe you flick through it, the ghost of your original purpose at your elbow, but it's not so much rereading as re-dusting. Then one day you pick it up, take notice of the contents; your inner life realigns.
Hilary Mantel
#87. A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book on a shelf; and, decades after we have read it even twenty times, it can open us up, by cut or caress, to a new truth.
Andre Dubus
#88. If I have to wait, I read; if I wake in the night, I feel along the shelf for a book. Swelling, perpetually augmented, there is a vast accumulation of unrecorded matter in my head.
Virginia Woolf
#89. So you go in a library, and you pull a book off the shelf, and you open it, and what are you looking for? A mirror. All of a sudden, a mirror is there and you see yourself.
Ray Bradbury
#90. No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.
Charles Dickens
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