Top 100 Books Books Books Quotes
#1. Books, books, books. It was not that I read so much. I read and re-read the same ones. But all of them were necessary to me. Their presence, their smell, the letters of their titles, and the texture of their leather bindings.
Colette
#2. Back in our silences and sullen looks,
for all the Scotch we drink, what's still between us
not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.
Tony Harrison
#4. Books - books - books," said Helen, in her absent-minded way. "More new books - I wonder what you find in them ...
Virginia Woolf
#5. No one can steal your freedom from you. You can only give it away.
Bella James
#6. Across time and generations, books carry the thoughts and feelings, the essence, of the human spirit.
Philip Yancey
#7. Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever, And do not listen to those critics ever Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.
W. H. Auden
#8. Already there are too many books in the world. There are more every day. One man cannot hope to read them all.
Hilary Mantel
#9. The problem of the librarian is that books are multi-dimensional in their subject matter but must be ordered on one-dimensional shelves.
Neal Stephenson
#10. Comic book fans have loved Wolverine, and all the 'X-Men' characters, for more than the action. I think that's what set it apart from many of the other comic books. In the case of Wolverine, when he appeared, he was a revolution really. He was the first anti-hero.
Hugh Jackman
#11. Mary Daheim writes with wit, wisdom, and a big heart. I love her books.
Carolyn Hart
#12. Well, I don't know. It's long, it's longer than both of the other books put together, so it's more ambitious. I think I get under the skin of the people a lot more than in the other books.
Cory Doctorow
#13. Withdrawn into the peace of this desert, along with some books, few but wise, I live in conversation with the deceased, and listen to the dead with my eyes
Francisco De Quevedo
#14. The history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world.
Carl Becker
#15. I went to work in an office and learned, among other lessons, to do things I did not care for, and to do them well. Before I left this office, two of my books had already been published.
Sigrid Undset
#16. I have read only the first 'Harry Potter' book. I thought it excellent, perhaps the best thing written for older children since The Hobbit. I wish the books had been around when my kids were the right age for them.
Gene Wolfe
#17. Books are a weird collaboration between author and reader: You trust me to tell a good story, and I trust you to bring it to good life in your mind.
John Green
#18. Books, I knew then and now, give body to our ideas and imaginations, make them flesh in the world; a bookstore is the city where our fleshed-out inner selves reside.
Lewis Buzbee
#19. Learning from books and teachers is like traveling by carriage, so we are told in the Veda. But, the carriage will serve only while one is on the highroad. He who reaches the end of the highroad will leave the carriage and walk afoot.
Johannes Itten
#20. Can I ask what you're reading?" ... She turned the book so the cover faced me. Wuthering Heights. "Have you read it?" She said. I nodded. I could feel the pulsating beat of my heart behind my eyes. "It's a sad story." "Sad stories make good books," She said. "They do.
Khaled Hosseini
#21. Where we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright. That was where we could go.
Ernest Hemingway,
#22. I think you'd have to literally live in a cave to not know anything about 'Twilight'. I've seen a few of the movies, but I haven't read the books.
Jake Abel
#23. You know, I like to think my life is kind of like the books I read, only I'm the author. I can write the story I want. The future can be anything I want it to be." He moved his head side to side, considering my words. "That works, as long as your story has a blond stud that fucks like an animal.
Adriana Locke
#24. I'm excited about how books work in a digital age. When you read a book, unlike a film, you are decoding symbols in order to 'see' the story, so it is collaborative in a way that a film can never be.
Steven Hall
#25. The fall of the Berlin Wall did more for the progress of freedom than all of the books written by myself or Friedrich Hayek or others.
Milton Friedman
#27. When her mind was discomposed ... a book was the opiate that lulled it to repose.
Ann Radcliffe
#28. When Lafayette met him in 1775, the first volume of Raynal's 1770 History of the Two Indies had already been banned, which is to say it was a popular success, the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books being the unofficial bestseller list of the day.
Sarah Vowell
#30. It's amazing how books change. The chapter you're working on today would not have been the same if you wrote it yesterday or tomorrow.
Raymond Bolton
#31. The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.
Virginia Woolf
#32. Conservatives don't want to read good, smart books. They mostly want to read Fox and talk radio hosts writing about presidents.
Alex Pareene
#34. We love books because they are the greatest escape. That is because our own minds eye is the purest form of virtual reality.
M.R. Mathias
#35. I love the smell of old books, Mandy sighed, inhaling deeply with the book pressed against her face. The yellow pages smelled of wood and paper mills and mothballs.
Rebecca McNutt
#36. His knowledge of books had in some degree diminished his knowledge of the world.
William Shenstone
#37. All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
Zadie Smith
#38. The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.
Stephen King
#39. ... unpacked her books, her sweet delight in happier days, and her soothing resource in the hours of moderate sorrow: but there were hours when even these failed of their effect; when the genius, the taste, the enthusiasm of the sublimest writers were felt no longer.
Ann Radcliffe
#40. I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.
Beverly Cleary
#41. 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
#42. I wanted to badly to be vulnerable over a burger, beer, and bags of free books we find on some stranger's porch. You wanted badly to be touched some thousand miles away and never found the time to write me back.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#43. I hate to think of you stuck here all day every day, doing nothing with that brilliant brain of yours."
"It never was brilliant. Anyway, who keeps these books to see who's used themselves wisely and who's wasted?
Tessa Hadley
#44. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.
Carl Sagan
#45. By the time we were knit in our mothers' wombs, our lives were like open books before Him
every sentence read, every paragraph indented, every chapter titled, every page numbered. He knew it all in advance
all the sin, all the selfishness, every weakness. Yet He chose to love us
lavishly.
Beth Moore
#46. No, Ben. What I'm asking is: Are you the vehicle, and Georgie rides around in you? That is why Ben's the driver, right?
Jonathan Harnisch
#47. 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
#48. Good blurbs are short, sweet, and limited to six. They answer the question Why should I buy this book?
Guy Kawasaki
#49. I just read few books, and this books made a magic in my life.
Deyth Banger
#51. As I inch forward to embrace my life again by being mindful, writing books, and planning adventures, I sense my dad would approve. I know he would want me to be happy.
Lisa J. Shultz
#52. The love of books, the golden key, that opens the enchanted door
Andrew Lang
#54. You shouldn't talk about yourself all the time - most of us aren't for sale. Our books are. Talk about them. It's not a question of whether or not you're fascinating on a personal level - it's that your trivia and trials might not have any connection to the tone, tenor and sense of your books.
M.J. Rose
#55. 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
#56. I was the quiet kid in the corner, reading a book. In elementary school, I read so much and so often during class that I was actually forbidden from reading books during school hours by my teachers.
Cassandra Clare
#57. The expression Jake saw on all the faces, oldest to youngest, was the same: pure joy. Not just that, he thought, and remembered a phrase his English teacher had used about how some books make us feel: the ecstasy of perfect recognition.
Stephen King
#58. Book collecting! First editions and best editions; old books and new books - the ones you like and want to have around you. Thousands of 'em. I've had more honest satisfaction and happiness collecting books than anything else I've ever done in life.
Peter Ruber
#59. A student asked me recently why somebody always dies in my books. I said, because somebody is always dying in my life.
Chris Crutcher
#60. I am no fan of books. And chances are, if you're reading this, you and I share a healthy skepticism about the printed word. Well, I want you to know that this is the first book I've ever written, and I hope it's the first book you've ever read. Don't make a habit of it.
Stephen Colbert
#61. Handsome young men or books? Hmm. The handsome men win every time
Eve Edwards
#62. One reads books in order to gain the privilege of living more than one life. People who don't read are trapped in a mine shaft, even if they think the sun is shining.
Garrison Keillor
#63. I can't divorce myself from my childhood. I try to write as much fiction as I possibly can, but there are so many things that are touchstones of my childhood like being on the swim team and playing soccer and the particularities of sports season and environments that make their way into my books.
Jeff Kinney
#64. All heathen books are poisoned through and through with this striving after praise and honor.
Martin Luther
#65. I was working for Time-Life Books from 1962 to 1970, as a staff writer, and after that, I was a journalist. Eventually, I became an editor at 'The Saturday Review' and 'Horizon.'
Edmund White
#66. Most books reviews aren't very well-written. They tend to be more about the reviewer than the book.
Tibor Fischer
#67. I tend to listen to music more than I read. I need to get into reading a bit more. The stuff I tend to read is usually non-fiction books more than fiction, but I've been trying to power my way through Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment,' and I do enjoy it.
Isaac Hempstead-Wright
#68. What a happy woman I am, living in a garden, with books, babies, birds and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above all my fellows in being able to find happiness so easily.
Rosamunde Pilcher
#69. The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
Malcolm X
#70. I discovered that the real meaning of Christmas has nothing to do with you at all. It is about a very special gift. I want to you tell you about this gift.
Soraya Diase Coffelt
#71. I wrote a book. It sucked. I wrote nine more books. They sucked, too. Meanwhile, I read every single thing I could find on publishing and writing, went to conferences, joined professional organizations, hooked up with fellow writers in critique groups, and didn't give up. Then I wrote one more book.
Beth Revis
#72. In my books and in romance as a genre, there is a positive, uplifting feeling that leaves the reader with a sense of encouragement and hope for a brighter future - or a brighter present.
Debbie Macomber
#73. And yes, there's a simplicity to writing books because you're not a member of a team, so you make all the decisions yourself instead of deferring to a committee.
Bernard Cornwell
#74. I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger.
Oriana Fallaci
#75. It is the glory of London that it is always ending and beginning anew, and that a visitor, with a good eye and indefatigable feet, will find in her travels all the Londons she has ever met in the pages of books, one atop the other, like the strata of the Earth.
Anna Quindlen
#76. Look through the prayer books. You'll see lots of dates. You'll see names of Native Americans remembered. This was an open-sourcing project among so many people.
Shane Claiborne
#77. Sigh. These were my people now that I was a writer, people who didn't understand anything. I mean, they understood perfectly the thing I cared most about - books - but basically were moron-level elsewhere.
Claire Dederer
#78. Books record knowledge,
preserve wisdom,
and disseminate information;
nourishing minds, changing lives.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#79. Unlike baked beans, loaves of breads or Fuji apples, books once consumed, do not disappear.
John Sutherland
#80. Adventure books are my personal favorites. 'The Endurance,' a story about Ernest Shackleton's legendary Antarctica expedition, or 'Into Thin Air,' Jon Krakauer's personal account of the 1996 disaster on Mt Everest, are two notables.
Dean Karnazes
#82. She ate toast in bed, then reread a favorite book, taking comfort from a story where she knew the outcome would be good and just and right.
Sarah Mayberry
#83. You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books? I say 'Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?
Kurt Vonnegut
#84. For someone who made such an enormous contribution to American literature, Mark Twain has been the subject of many books but few major biographies.
Michael Patrick Hearn
#85. The fact people think that when you sell a lot of books you are not a serious writer is a great insult to the readership. I get a little angry when people try to say such a thing.
Isabel Allende
#87. The last time I glanced at the library books on the kitchen shelf they were more than five months overdue, and I wondered whether I would have chosen differently if I had known that these were the last books, the ones which would stand forever on our kitchen shelf.
Shirley Jackson
#88. Thanks for being the kind of person who likes to pick up a book. That's a genuinely great thing. I met a librarian recently who said she doesn't read because books are her job and when she goes home, she just wants to switch off. I think we can agree that that's creepy as hell.
Max Barry
#89. I'm very much to blame for not seeing it before, but who on earth goes about suspecting an impossible outlandish thing like murder? That's something that happens in books, not among people you know.
Mary Stewart
#90. He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world's store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.
Milan Kundera
#91. Crammed among the stacks of books in his room, the author treated literature as if each book were a window in a city of unstable skyscrapers, and he was the window-washer tasked with the impossible job of cleaning them all. - From "Pageturner" in 365 Tomorrows
Joseph Patrick Pascale
#92. You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.
Alan Furst
#93. Damn, I know. I remember your mountains of books. I want to build you a library." Jack lowered his mouth and kissed me.
I swallowed as emotion clogged my throat. He might as well have asked me to marry him.
Natasha Boyd
#94. I think my weakness as a writer is a limited imagination, and I think my strength is a talent for reflecting the world, or sort of curating things out of the world and putting them into books.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#96. Sally was on the first floor reading a book, one that she normally wouldn't read, and she felt quite guilty. Twilight. She knew the series was ridiculous but everyone was going crazy over the books and the movies. She'd finally given in and decided that it wouldn't hurt to just read a little bit.
Anjela Renee
#97. I used to think, 'I'm going to write.' I knew that from quite early on, but I also thought, 'Maybe I'll be an explorer or a spy,' and it all came from books.
Lisa Tuttle
#98. Living your life is a long and doggy business ... And stories and books help. Some help you with the living itself. Some help you just take a break. The best do both at the same time.
Anne Fine
#99. To sit down on a chair and read my books with all my friends at school is my right. To see each and every human being with a smile of happiness is my wish. I am Malala. My world has changed but I have not.
Malala Yousafzai
#100. People think I'm selling feminism in my books, but what I'm really doing is writing advertising copy for expensive private colleges that most women can't afford anyway. Oh, and try to find a job with a major in English literature. No luck? Joke's on you, sucker!
Mary Gordon
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