Top 92 Bookish Quotes
#1. I spent a lot of time at the New York Public Library, the main branch. I was one of those people. If you ever spend a good amount of time there, you realize there are people who spend the entire day there. They're bookish homeless people.
Lisa Yuskavage
#2. I've always been the bookish type, and I've never really hidden that about myself.
Molly Ringwald
#3. Bookish people, who are often maladroit people, persist in thinking they can master any subtlety so long as it's been shaped into acceptable expository prose.
Carol Shields
#4. All witches who'd lived in her cottage were bookish types. They thought you could see life through books but you couldn't, the reason being that the words got in the way.
Terry Pratchett
#5. You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.
Junot Diaz
#6. An introverted, bookish child, with a mass of complexes and her head full of crazy ideals and a childish faith in the beautiful prince who was searching for and would surely find her.
Sergei Lukyanenko
#7. My writing works best when I remember that bookish child who adored reading and gear the work toward him.
Bruce Coville
#8. Why, he was so handsome and brave that no one would ever have suspected that he was bookish!
Gerald Morris
#9. Contemplative and bookish men must of necessity be more quarrelsome than others, because they contend not about matter of fact, nor can determine their controversies by any certain witnesses, nor judges. But as long as they go towards peace, that is Truth, it is no matter which way.
John Donne
#10. For those of us with a bookish bent, reading is a reflexive response to everything. This is how we deal with the world and anything that comes our way. We have always known that there is a book for every occasion and every obsession. When in doubt, we are always looking things up.
Diane Schoemperlen
#11. I'm a very private person, a very bookish person. The social world of Hollywood I know nothing about because I choose not to take part.
John Logan
#12. Like those proverbial bookish men who could not even tell types of grains apart, they do not labor with their hands, and know nothing practical. They
Liu Cixin
#13. Back home I was considered a bookish girl because I had read eight or nine books. But when I came to the UK I met girls who had read hundreds. Now I realize I've read hardly anything at all, and I want to read all those hundreds of books.
Malala Yousafzai
#14. I will end up with someone in the arts. I am positive. I eat, breathe and sleep acting. And I'll end up with someone who is happy staying at home and having me cook supper. But I also really need to be intellectually challenged and stimulated. I want someone bookish, and someone who is passionate.
Ginnifer Goodwin
#15. Knowledge gained through experience is far superior and many times more useful than bookish knowledge.
Mahatma Gandhi
#16. No funny stuff in here tonight, you understand?"
Dash said, "I assure you I could not contemplate any of your so-called funny stuff seeing as how I have no idea why I'm even here."
Mark scoffed. "You bookish little pervert."
"Thank you, sir!" Dash said brightly.
David Levithan
#17. I've always gone for the more sensitive, bookish guy, totally. The jock boys, the sporty guys, I don't know ... they just didn't do it for me.
Laura Ramsey
#18. Lawyers know life practically. A bookish man should always have them to converse with.
Samuel Johnson
#19. One cliche attached to bookish people is that they are lonely, but for me books were my way out of being lonely.
Matt Haig
#20. He liked being big and strong. It gave him an identity. He'd been a shy, quiet, bookish kid, and that had been painful; now he was a big dumb guy, and nobody expected him to be able to do anything more than move a sofa into the next room on his own. Nobody until Laura, anyway.
Neil Gaiman
#21. The existence of true religion is predicated on the practice of goodness. Goodness is Godliness. There is nothing else. Religion lies in practice, not in bookish theories.
Abhijit Naskar
#22. He is clearly bookish. I did not follow a single word of their conversation at dinner last night, not one jot of it. He must be bookish.
Gail Carriger
#23. I was called a bookish child. Mother sent me to a ballet teacher in Cincinnati when I was nine years old. I guess I was an awkward child and the family wanted me to be graceful. When I found out I liked to dance and people seemed to like to watch me, I was determined to go places.
Vera-Ellen
#25. And yet he had loved her. A Bookish girl heedless of her beauty, unconscious of her effect. She'd been prepared to live her life alone but from the moment he'd known her he'd needed her.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#26. I was ignorant at first of bookish subjects, but in his atmosphere, if one were no student, and didn't even try to keep up, or forge ahead, they would absorb much through association.
Gene Stratton-Porter
#28. I'm not an academic; I'm just a bookish Joe who gets passionate about certain writers and suddenly wants to read everything they've ever written and find out why they wrote it.
Blake Bailey
#29. He'd been a shy, quiet, bookish kid, and that had been painful; now he was a big dumb guy, and nobody expected him to be able to do anything more than move a sofa into the next room on his own.
Neil Gaiman
#30. We clung to each other, as bookish young people often do, while waiting out the years until our real lives could begin. At
Molly Crabapple
#31. And so we became who we are: gentle and bookish and ever so slightly confused. It is not a bad way to be, when all is said and done.
Bill Richardson
#32. There hasn't been a lot written about it in the Western media. But in the Arab world, and Western Asia as a whole, Baghdad was always known as a famously bookish, intellectual city. There's an old saying that Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads.
Annia Ciezadlo
#33. I grew up in a bookish family, so I read very widely. I was omnivorous, really.
Guy Gavriel Kay
#34. Fellow almost damn'd in a fair wife; That never set a squadron in the field, Nor the division of a battle knows More than a spinster; unless the bookish theoric, Wherein the toged consuls can propose As masterly as he: mere
William Shakespeare
#35. May intelligent, bookish ladies sometimes be reformed?" he asked her.
She thought about it.
"I suppose it may be within the bounds of possibility," she said, "even if not of probability.
Mary Balogh
#36. Yes, he had to admit to himself, he liked dating bookish girls who didn't give him any trouble. And he found girls who read a lot had wonderful imaginations too, which certainly didn't hurt in the sack.
Sharon Hamilton
#37. I was very bookish and shy. I didn't have playmates, ever.
Bobbie Ann Mason
#39. Being a Boy Scout saved my life. I was a bookish, introverted kid, shy and withdrawn, unhappy and easily bullied. I was also gay, although I didn't know it yet. I should've been miserable. But being a scout got me out of myself and into the world.
Christopher Bram
#40. Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love.
Jack Kerouac
#41. Sometimes, the only way to learn something really well is to revert to the state of mind of a novice and reawaken to the raw observations that you have accumulated instead of relying on the conclusions you have reached from the exogenous premises absorbed through teaching and bookish learning.
Erik Naggum
#43. So is that why you're hanging out here? To seduce bookish chicks?"
"I don't know. Maybe. Is it working?
Elizabeth Brown
#44. The pleasure of this sort of life-bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life- had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing.
Louise Erdrich
#45. I was studious and bookish. Not just as a child but also as a teenager. I took myself too seriously.
Nicola Sturgeon
#46. Here I am, this smart, bookish girl, and I have this biker-chick name.
Tawni O'Dell
#47. I was horribly bookish, to the point of coming right out and saying it, which I knew was not socially acceptable. I particularly loved the adjective bookish, which I found other people used about as often as ramrod or chum or teetotaler.
David Levithan
#48. I was this weird little bookish giant.
Aisha Tyler
#49. As a bookish adolescent, I sopped up texts as if I were blotting paper and they were fluid.
Will Self
#50. We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.
Virginia Woolf
#51. There have always been literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well. The Greeks had a name for such a mixture of learning and folly which might be applied to the bookish but poorly read of all ages. They are all sophomores.
Mortimer J. Adler
#52. No doubt much will be said elsewhere by the armies of bigotry and punditry. Let them volley and thunder. I'll speak of bookish things.
Salman Rushdie
#53. I was a very quiet child, quite introverted, really. Independent, yes; I didn't need a lot of supervision. Less so than I did when I got older, maybe. But I was a bookish child, not surprisingly. I could sit quite happily in a corner for hours and entertain myself with books.
John Boyne
#54. Your understanding and interpretation of [a novel] is undoubtedly unique ... and that is the real beauty of the relationship that joins readers, books and writers together in a literary trinity - a bookish triumvirate.
Briar Kit Esme
#55. I do as much bookish research as I can but when I sit down to write, often I think, 'Wait, I was there.' That is one of the great advantages of having wandered around the world and lived in so many places and met such fascinating people.
Simon Winchester
#56. She decided at once that she and the boy were cut of the same bookish cloth, and could quite possibly become co-conspirators.
Jordan Stratford
#57. The not-so-bookish librarian was half angel, half she-devil, so sayeth the rumor mill.
Ellen Hopkins
#58. This cult seems like it might have been designed specifically to prey on bookish old people - Scientology for scholarly seniors.
Robin Sloan
#59. I went to something like six different schools before the age of 12, so I was always the new girl and had to make friends quickly. It was difficult at the start because I was very bookish - I was literally sat in the corner reading books, with no friends.
Isla Fisher
#60. I was always the kid at the side of the playground, looking at the other kids. I didn't know how to get into the group. I was quiet and bookish, a bit of a geek. I was into orienteering when my friends were out clubbing.
Richard Coyle
#61. And yet he could also be very charming, in a bookish, infinitely apologetic way.
Paula McLain
#62. As a bookish child, I would come to see the one-child policy as one of the most fascinating and bizarre things about the land of my ancestors, equal parts Aldous Huxley and King Herod.
Mei Fong
#63. The offspring of two bookish parents, I made up my mind as a boy that I would be as unlike them as I could. I was determined not, as an adult, to look up from a book with that confused, abstracted, disappointed expression that my parents shared when jolted out of book life into real life.
Richard Russo
#64. That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations.
Archibald MacLeish
#65. A husband willing to fund a library for his bookish wife is not so easy to obtain; most would see it as a pointless expense. You might, however, find one willing to share his library.
Marie Brennan
#66. I was shy. Bookish. The kind of 13-year-old girl who, instead of having a boyfriend, would have a crush on a dead, 19th-century author!
Natalie Merchant
#68. In the hands of thinking humanity, the purpose of the tool of Divinity or Religion is not the service of bookish doctrines, but the realization of the self.
Abhijit Naskar
#69. In my own work, I don't have favorite characters, but I have characters that I relate to the most. And I relate the most to Simon from 'The Mortal Instruments,' and also Tessa from 'The Infernal Devices.' They're more sort of bookish and shy characters.
Cassandra Clare
#70. The thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people.
Andy Miller
#71. It is when we are faced with death that we turn most bookish.
Jules Renard
#72. He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.
Zadie Smith
#73. I was bookish and dorky in high school, so the best part of this movie was getting to be on the other side.
Piper Perabo
#74. There are bookish dreams here, sir, there is a heart chafed by theories;
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#76. I think of an intellectual as just being bookish, being interested in history books, utopian ideas, that kind of thing.
Richard Rorty
#77. Mom, I feel good. This dress makes me feel like someone I didn't know I could be. I've never owned anything like it. But if when you see this - when you see me- you think it's a pity, that it's a shame I didn't lose a few, then screw you, Mom. Try harder.
Julie Murphy
#78. Whenever one of us introduced an old favorite, we savored the other's first delight like a shared meal eaten with a newly acquired gusto, as if we'd never truly tasted it before.
Pamela Paul
#79. She was a poetry book with the wrong dust jacket, shelved in the Reference section.
Joyce Rachelle
#80. I'll have enough books when they fill my room like the stars fill the sky.
E.V. Fairfall
#81. If you try to walk in my shoes, you'll end up in a bookstore.
Anonymous
#82. They were just so different, and she kept wondering if he'd realize this was a mistake at some point; if, once she stopped being the novelty, the random American, he would recognize who she really was -- a nerdy bookworm, a happy loner -- and move on.
Jennifer E. Smith
#83. Love gives insight, Maggie, and insight often gives foreboding. Listen to me, let me supply you with books; do let me see you sometimes, be your brother and teacher, as you said at Lorton. It is less wrong that you should see me than that you should be committing this long suicide.
George Eliot
#84. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.
George Eliot
#85. To whom do books belong? The books we read and the books we write are both ours and not ours. They're also theirs.
Pamela Paul
#86. Books gnaw at me from around the edges of my life, demanding more time and attention. I am always left hungry.
Pamela Paul
#87. Well, you know what they say, the reader is the final contributor. Cheers for doing the heavy lifting.
Brian K. Vaughan
#88. Something significant, magical, and
inspiring happens with each word you read in the pages of a book. You explore new lands, meet new people, feel new emotions, and are no longer the same person you were one word prior to reading it.
Martha Sweeney
#89. Here in the realm of books she's self-assured. She has some of the control she doesn't have anywhere else.
Tim Tharp
#90. An author writes only half the book. The rest is written by readers.
Joseph Conrad
#91. Sitting in the brightly lit library, surrounded by books, in total silence, that was ma personal zenith.
Irvine Welsh
#92. 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
