Top 100 Books As Quotes
#1. SOMETIMES THE POOL-PAH," Bokonon tells us, "exceeds the power of humans to comment." Bokonon translates pool-pah at one point in The Books of Bokonon as "shit storm" and at another point as "wrath of God.
Kurt Vonnegut
#2. It's true, too, that I'm tired of using books as political bullets and grenades. Books are too precious and wonderful to be used for long in such a fashion.
Yann Martel
#3. Now the tea began to do its work- as it always did- and the world that only a few minutes previously had seemed so bleak started to seem less so.
Alexander McCall Smith
#4. I teach 18- to 21-year-olds - the 'Harry Potter' generation. They grew up as voracious readers, reading books in this exploding genre. But at some point, I would love for them to give Umberto Eco or A.S. Byatt a try. I hope 'A Discovery of Witches' will serve as a kind of stepping-stone.
Deborah Harkness
#5. As an author, I want to write what I'm inspired to write. Not what my readers want me to write. I feel like the books will ultimately be better if my heart is fully into what I'm writing.
Colleen Hoover
#6. I have learned one lesson as a writer ... keep writing and never throw any notes away. Written parts that can't be used today ... may be used for other books tomorrow.
Timothy Pina
#7. For books are as meats and viands are; some of good, some of evil sub-stance.
John Milton
#8. The experience of the race shows that we get our most important education not through books but through our work. We are developed by our daily task, or else demoralized by it, as by nothing else.
Anna Garlin Spencer
#9. I look up at the ceiling, at all the hardcover fiction. So very few people want it. It is operating as insulation rather than stock. The argument rages on about whether it is better to have books or ebooks, but while everyone gets heated about the choices, the hardcover fiction molders quietly away.
Deborah Meyler
#10. I've always loved books. My mother told me that before I could talk, I'd babble in my crib as I turned the pages of my little cloth books, apparently telling stories to go along with the pictures.
JoAnn Ross
#11. I can easily do without people (there are days when I could easily do without myself), and ... in the country of books where I dwell, the dead can count entirely as much as the living.
Adrienne Monnier
#12. I have so little patience with the whole Y.A. book thing. As far as I'm concerned, you either read books for children or you read books for adults.
Richard K. Morgan
#13. Books is our main type of content, but we include user-generated content and will include other verticals such as scientific papers, sheet music, and comic books.
Trip Adler
#14. I could not eat a kangaroo. But many fine Australians do. Those with cookbooks as well as boomerangs Prefer him in tasty kangaroo-meringues.
Ogden Nash
#15. I am never really surprised at the way my books take shape. They are just not as perfect as I'd like them to be.
Chris Van Allsburg
#16. A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes to write about it.
Mary Augusta Ward
#17. From the shelf. Ben's stomach churned as he pulled out Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham. Kenzie would enjoy them, but had Marianna ever read those books before? Not that Dr. Seuss was literature. What
Tricia Goyer
#18. I paused, folding the top corner of the page to keep my place. My dad used to wince every time he saw me do that, but I think books should be loved to pieces. They should be as worn and soft as flannel."
"Chapter 2 Christabel, page 24
Alyxandra Harvey
#19. From the Olympian heights of an executive suite, in an atmosphere where your success is judged by the extent to which you can maximise profits, the overwhelming tendency must be to see people as units of production, as indices in your accountants' books.
Jimmy Reid
#20. In real life, people are integrated into society. That's what happens in my books as well. Minor characters don't just walk in and spout lines, they interact and have an effect on the events. It's not an isolated universe.
Stieg Larsson
#21. I am quite convinced now ... that the actual training of drawing cartoons - which is, of course, my style - led to my producing Spot. Cartoons must be very simple and have as few words as possible, and so, too, must the 'Spot' books.
Eric Hill
#22. I have had my say, as he wished. Now the book belongs, as he points out, to the world he claims to speak for.
Julian Darius
#23. As Carlyle put it - All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been - it is lying in matchless preservation in the pages of books.
Napoleon Hill
#24. And above all, you should not think of writing as a way of earning your living. If you do, your work will smell of your poverty. It will be colored by your weakness and be as thin as your hunger. There are other trades which you can take up: make boots, not books.
Marquis De Sade
#25. When I wrote War Against the Mafia as a Vietnam statement, I didn't expect much to come of it-but quite a bit came and it captured me. I continued the books to feed the obvious hunger that was there for heroic fiction.
Don Pendleton
#26. To his shock, as Saarang turned the first page, the words slowly transformed into small cylinders, except for one-letter words which preferred being spheres, and started rolling toward the vertical edges of the book.
Pawan Mishra
#27. All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people's backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
#28. I'm as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way.
Terence McKenna
#29. There are a lot of things I cannot do, such as eat books and read chicken.
Thom Yorke
#30. The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.
Oliver Goldsmith
#31. The Arcade, and now Peabody's, combined to tell me that there was life in objects, in books. It was all about having eyes to see the true meaning of things. As Pike proved daily, books held a kind of magic, an apparent as well as a hidden value.
Sheridan Hay
#32. As for the largest-hearted of us, what is the word we write most often in our cheque-books? Self.
Eden Phillpotts
#33. As historians, we spend days in archives, gazing at account books. We train would-be historians in the arts of deciphering letters and documents, early Latin, scribal handwriting, medieval French.
Kate Williams
#34. When I go on vacation, I take very few clothes and a whole lot of books. It's the most soothing thing in the world. Reading 'Moby-Dick' is like being in a time machine. I almost feel as excited as the first time I read it and I always find something new.
Nile Rodgers
#35. I have a sort of Christmas-morning sense of the library as a big box full of beautiful books.
Audrey Niffenegger
#36. And as I surveyed the clutter of his study I was pleased to see that he was a man after my own heart. All of his money appeared to have been spent on either books or shelves to hold them.
Ross King
#37. In his books, Tolle repeatedly denigrated the habit of worrying, which he characterized as a useless process of projecting fearfully into an imaginary future. "There is no way that you can cope with such a situation, because it doesn't exist.
Dan Harris
#38. She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her.
Milan Kundera
#39. We were the only customers downstairs in the shop and there were no windows and only two dim bulbs, without shades. There was a pleasant soporific smell, as though the books had stolen most of the air.
Ian McEwan
#40. I make a good living selling hardback books through paper publishers, and I have many friends in the industry who will suffer as it changes, so on a personal level, the transition to digital isn't something I welcome wholeheartedly.
Barry Eisler
#41. It is profound philosophy to sound the depths of feeling and distinguish traits of character. Men must be studied as deeply as books.
Baltasar Gracian
#42. Having reached 451 books as of now doesn't help the situation. If I were to be dying now, I would be murmuring, "Too bad! Only four hundred fifty-one." (Those would be my next-to-last words. The last ones will be: "I love you, Janet.") [They were. -Janet.]
Isaac Asimov
#43. A novel related in a dungeon, in the presence of death, cannot have the same meaning, the same consequences, as it would when read on the beach or in a meadow, in the shade of cherry trees.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
#44. Books are our best friends we say, so can we call 'Paragraphs' as our 'Just Friends'?
Bhavik Sarkhedi
#45. Carnegie Hall is as good as they say it is. It's not like Stonehenge which looks great in books but then you go there and it's a pile of rocks next to a highway. There's actually a highway right next to it, but you don't see that in pictures.
Bill Burr
#46. Reading and writing are solitary activities that increase a person's capacity for concentration, awareness, and conceptual thought as the person weaves immediate information with stored memories.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#47. When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]
Jorge Luis Borges
#48. As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.
Avijeet Das
#49. As far as 'Birdsong' is concerned, I think the television program made a very honorable attempt at it, but the truth of the matter is that adaptations of long, ambitious books very seldom transfer well to the screen, and why would they?
Sebastian Faulks
#50. For a moment, he rested his hand on the pitchfork, breath ragged. Strands of hair escaped the ponytail and fell over his eyes, making him look wild, untamed. He'd changed so much from that quiet boy. He'd had to, growing up with monsters as playmates.
Megan Shepherd
#51. There is no remedy so easy as books, which if they do not give cheerfulness, at least restore quiet to the most troubled mind.
Mary Wortley Montagu
#52. Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards.
Martin Amis
#53. All books are hyggelig, but classics written by authors such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Leo Tolstoy, and Charles Dickens have a special place on the bookshelf. At the right age, your kids may also love to cuddle up with you in the hyggekrog and have you read to them. Probably not Tolstoy.
Meik Wiking
#55. I walked to the bookcase and examined the storybooks inside. As a girl, I had dreamed of having stacks of books at my disposal
stories to get lost in, other worlds to live in when mine was so bleak.
Sarah Jio
#56. The summer passed quietly. I busied myself as best I could, reading a good deal.
Michael Cox
#57. It's always been clear to me, as it was to Michel Thomas himself, that learning to speak a new language is like learning to swim or dance - you don't start with books or notes on swimming or dance. You get into the water, or on the dance floor, with a good coach, and get on with it.
Akshay Bakaya
#58. I've always thought that very few people grow old as admirably as academics. At least books never let them down.
Margaret Drabble
#59. as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. The nineteenth century
Oscar Wilde
#60. Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.
Dan Simmons
#61. Normally, banks record profits on loans only as they are repaid, whether they securitize the loans or hold them on their books.
Alex Berenson
#62. I always loved horror, but I read all sorts of books. My favourite as a child was 'The Secret Garden' which has a big influence on Lord Loss, believe it or not!
Darren Shan
#63. There is not one text reference to characteristic Protestant religious life in these books ... The dominant theme is the denial of religion as an actual part of American life.
Paul Vitz
#64. The attraction of reading is that it allows you to live, for a few hours, as someone else - grants you access to their head, their thoughts, their secrets.
Alessandra Torre
#65. USAGE, n. The First Person of the literary Trinity, the Second and Third being Custom and Conventionality. Imbued with a decent reverence for this Holy Triad an industrious writer may hope to produce books that will live as long as the fashion.
Ambrose Bierce
#66. I'm not as well read as I was when I was younger - I just devoured books.
Pete Wentz
#67. As with a love affair, the battered heart needs time to recover from a good work of fiction.
Michael Dirda
#68. I've read every one of Donald Goines' books. So as soon as I heard there was an opportunity for one of his novels to be turned into a movie, I jumped at the opportunity.
DMX
#69. I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
#70. How mean to buy only as many books as one will actually have time to read.
Alain De Botton
#71. He pointed the scepter around the library and had an instant input of all of the books that were there into his brain, as if he had read them all at once.
Kaza Kingsley
#72. Many of my books come from what if questions that I can't answer, things that I'm worried about as either a woman, a wife, a mom, an American.
Jodi Picoult
#73. The Labor Party has always - always been praised as leaders. In fact, there's probably more books written about ALP leaders and the ALP people than the Libs or anyone else in Australian's history, but there was substance to it.
Warren Mundine
#74. His books are kept on freestanding shelves hung at different angles on a sea-green wall. They defy gravity, as good books should.
David Levithan
#75. I grew up thinking that I would become a fighter pilot and was fascinated by aircrafts as I had grown up around that. But my father encouraged me to not become an Air Force person, given the varied interests I had, be it books, movies, sports or fighter flying.
Kapil Sharma
#76. He trailed off as he saw the books. Piles and stacks of them beside the sofa, another stack on the coffee table, a sea of them on her dining table.
Jesus Christ, Dane, you need treatment.
Nora Roberts
#77. I've read some scripts, but I don't read as many books as I should.
Stephen Dorff
#78. Faces are as legible as books, only with these circumstances to recommend them to our perusal, that they are read in much less time, and are much less likely to deceive us.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#79. For years (decades even), I genuinely believed that world would beat a path to my books and stories, but eventually, as everything I wrote went rapidly out of print and stayed there, I wised up and started assembling them in e-format editions.
Scott Bradfield
#80. The paradox of the English country house is that its state of permanent decline, the fact that its heyday is always behind it, is part of the seduction, just as it is part of the seduction of books in general.
Lev Grossman
#81. Reader, if thou intendest to go any farther, I would entreat thee to stay here a little. If thou art, as many in this pretending age, a sign or title gazer, and comest into books as Cato into the theatre, to go out again, - thou hast had thy entertainment; farewell!
John Owen
#82. Her room is full of books by people who have radio hours. It's the gospel according to Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, and Aimee Semple McPherson - American dynamism gilded onto a platform of individual redemption. It's religion as detergent.
Carlene Bauer
#83. We do not consider our principles as dogmas contained in books that are said to come from heaven. We derive our inspiration, not from heaven, or from an unseen world, but directly from life.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
#84. 'Just looking at pictures' used to be considered cheating. No longer. The graphic novel is booming. Comics, heavily illustrated texts, books with no words are now accepted as reading.
Jon Scieszka
#85. I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.
Virginia Woolf
#87. The vital accessories to my work are my reference books, such as the complete Shakespeare and a prayer book, and a large refuse bin.
Beryl Bainbridge
#88. I treated the first few books as a very long journalistic exercise. I thought of every chapter as an article that needed to be finished.
Jane Green
#89. Any time, every time, you can damn the Prime Minister and so long as it is not a lie and a criminal lie, nothing happens to you. You can say a lot of things. You can write books about him, damning him. So long as it is not a libel, go ahead.
Lee Kuan Yew
#90. No book, however good, should ever be read as a task. If you do so read a book, it is very likely that you will not only get nothing out of it but that you will have toward the book and its author a repugnance that is unwarranted.
Burton Rascoe
#91. Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors that they are ready to repeat their lessons as often as we please.
Robert Chambers
#92. I want to write such things as compel the admiring acclamation of the world at large, such things as are written but once in years, things subtle but distinctly different from the books written every day.
Mary MacLane
#93. eight books sounds (and feels!) like a lot, but it isn't as if they'll last me all week.
Jo Walton
#94. I think publishing's strength is also its weakness. It's got such a rich and celebrated history as an industry. For the most part, publishing people are incredibly creative, business is done based on the strength of relationships, and the product being peddled is books.
Jennifer Gilmore
#95. People ask me, 'Why are you still writing books?' Like I'm still only writing to make money and as soon as I have enough I'll quit and go fishing? I like to write books. It's the most satisfying thing I do.
Elmore Leonard
#96. The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#97. I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.
Helen Keller
#98. She walked to the rear door and took out a bobby pin from her pocket. Hugo watched as she fiddled with the pin inside the lock until it clicked and the door opened. "How did you learn to do that?" asked Hugo. "Books," answered Isabelle.
Brian Selznick
#99. The gospel truth of our time-space reality is that you absolutely can do, be, have, create or experience whatever you want - as long as you first decide that you are worthy of it. And that decision is yours alone.
Debbianne DeRose
#100. I was always working. Maybe you weren't aware of the movies I was making, or the television I was doing, or the shows I was creating, or the books I was writing; there have been thirty. But I have always been solidly at work, running as fast as I can.
William Shatner
