Top 100 Books On Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.
Beverly Cleary
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 'Wild at Heart' created a set of expectations maybe, partly, on my part, certainly on my publisher's part, but also in the world out there, that my next books would be as remarkable.
John Eldredge
#19. Well I've been writing books. So that, by its nature, is kind of a solitary occupation. And from time to time I have research help, but mostly I've done those completely on my own.
Caroline Kennedy
#20. 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
#21. I'd forced books on my kids from the day they were born and, as it turned out, it had been completely unnecessary because all of them liked to read. Or maybe they liked to read because I'd read aloud nearly every children's book in print.
Jeff Shelby
#22. Growing maturity is marked by the increasing liberties we take with our travelling ... we made the discovery (some people never make it) that real books can be taken on a journey and that hours of golden reading can so be added to its other delights.
C.S. Lewis
#23. Horror. I can't manage it. I become
well
horrified. Self-help books have a similar effect.
When asked, "Any literary genre you simply can't be bothered with?" - (By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from the NYT Book Review, by Pamela Paul)
Emma Thompson
#24. And one of the reasons that I wrote the cook books was so that I could be at home more than being on the road.
Trisha Yearwood
#25. Usually I decide on what it is I'm writing next by the books I'm reading.
Kate Mosse
#26. I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real. Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth.
Nina Sankovitch
#27. You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don't have, at the back of yourminds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.
Thomas Huxley
#28. 'Walking the Bible' describes the year that I spent retracing the five books of Moses through the desert, and I was actually working on a follow-up, which would look at the rest of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.
Bruce Feiler
#29. I got my iPad, and I'm trying to buy books on that, but I kind of like a book. At the end of my life, when I'm old, I want to have all these shelves full of books. So I'm just gonna do the book thing.
Luke Bryan
#30. The spouses of authors ought to really read their better halves books. What is found amidst those pages may enlighten them to knowing a side of their partner that can only be seen on the written page.
Sai Marie Johnson
#31. The fear of failure is so great, it is no wonder that the desire to do right by one's children has led to a whole library of books offering advice on how to raise them.
Bruno Bettelheim
#32. I'm not big on reading business books. I get copies of all of them, because people want me to put a comment on the jacket. Every once in a while, I'll get interested and read one all the way through.
James Goodnight
#33. A machine condemned to devour books and then throw them , in a changed form , on the dunghill of history .
Karl Marx
#34. I am a really big Harry Potter fan and I've seen all the sets, I've lived Harry Potter and I don't think it's destroyed the books at all, I think it's really spot on.
Rupert Grint
#36. There are lots of big books that have gay characters - or, more commonly, a gay character - in secondary roles, but seldom are their lives, and especially their sexual lives, on center stage.
Garth Greenwell
#37. I grew up on Stephen King, reading the books. I love the small town, 1950s feel to it, that nostalgia, and that old America. What happens when something weird starts happening to all these people, something other-worldly, something demonic?
Alexander Koch
#38. Ah,' said Zultan. 'I, too. I keep many books at my home.' He gestured to the books in the tent. 'These are only a few. Those I think might need on this trip, and those I have yet to read and might want, and those old friends that I cannot bear to leave behind.
T. Kingfisher
#39. 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
#40. No matter how much a man may study, reflect and meditate on all the books in the world, he is nothing more than a minor scribe unless he has read the great book.
Denis Diderot
#41. I read everything. I've always got a book on the go and I'm really nerdy about it, I get through books and don't remember anything about them afterwards. But I read all sorts, from classic to contemporary.
Rebecca Hall
#42. I believe we should spend less time worrying about the quantity of books children read and more time introducing them to quality books that will turn them on to the joy of reading and turn them into lifelong readers.
James Patterson
#43. There weren't any curtains in the windows, and the books that didn't fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a bunch of intellectual refugees.
Haruki Murakami
#44. I love writing books - I really do. If I could just quit everything and work on a book every day, I would love that most.
Donald Miller
#45. I love 'Anna Karenina.' It's in the top five books on my list. Tolstoy is unsurpassed in combining the grand with the trivial, that is, the small details which make up life.
Susan Minot
#46. In my library/study/barn, there is a Ping-Pong table on which I can pile working books and spread maps.
Antony Beevor
#47. A true god surely cannot have been born of a girl, nor died on the gibbet, nor be eaten in a piece of dough ... [or inspired] books, filled with contradictions, madness, and horror.
Voltaire
#48. Pretend you're not spending $3 to read one of my books but buying me a coffee and having a conversation about yourself.
Robin Sacredfire
#49. I read a lot of books. Here are the books I'm using for my 9/11 project. [Wright gestures to three six-foot-long shelves of books.] As I read them I highlight certain passages. Then I have an assistant write down each quote on an index card and note where it came from.
Lawrence Wright
#50. Welcome to my world! I've been through it all, and I often pinch myself to believe my luck. I design jewlery, create cosmetics, perform comedy, act, lecture, write books, travel, have a fabulous daughter, and a phenomenal grandson-and I feel I'm the luckiest woman on the planet.
Joan Rivers
#51. That was the trouble with moving houses; no matter how carefully you packed the books, they never ended up on the new shelves in quite the right place.
Val McDermid
#52. A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.
Henry Miller
#53. As you lay on a summer's day
In a cool and shady place,
Don't look up into the skies;
Instead look down and squint your eyes.
Squint your eyes so very tight,
And if you wish with all your might,
You'll find the land of More-Than-Small.
In this land live buggs
that's all!
Stephen Cosgrove
#54. Men tell stories. Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over.
Kristin Hannah
#55. They'll come back or they won't, Simon thought as he read the back copy on a couple of books and set them aside for himself.
Anne Bishop
#56. the focus one finds in the grammar books is on the wrong forms, on forms detached from the underlying (or overarching) form that must be in place before any technical terms can be meaningful or alive
Stanley Fish
#57. Just imagine if you took all the money you've spent on these things and traveled around the world with it, instead, or bought books and read them. Think about how much you would know about life.
Eustace Conway
#59. Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble.
Peter S. Jennison
#60. I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them
with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.
Eudora Welty
#61. I have a shelf of comfort books, which I read when the world closes in on me or something untoward happens.
Anne McCaffrey
#62. My philosophy has always been if I can learn just one thing from an article or book on writing, it's worth it.
Writer's Digest Books
#63. Because books are alive. They are more alive than you and me. Books live forever. They live on in their own jackets. They live on in their reader's memory. They live on in their writer's minds.
Susan Shultz
#64. What we have in life that we can count on is who we are and where we come from, she thought absently. For better or worse, that is what we have to sustain us in our endevors, to buttress us in our darker moments, and to remind us of our identity. Without those things, we are adrift.
Terry Brooks
#65. I don't sit down with a goal of writing. I read books or magazines. I watch TV. I go to the doctor. I get on airplanes. I live a normal life and sometimes I'll notice something or read things or experience things.
Brian Regan
#66. I don't write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.
Zoe Heller
#67. A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.
Mark Twain
#68. Which meant I spent my spare time learning theory, studying dead languages and reading books like Essays on The Metaphysical by John "never saw a polysyllabic word he didn't like" Cartwright.
Ben Aaronovitch
#69. Only a true reader will understand how lovely it is to read a book on rainy days.
Nicholaa Spencer
#70. There had been a computer he had also built himself on the farthest corner of the room, but he had sold that a couple of months ago to buy me a necklace. I wore it then, it was two silver hearts linked as one. That's what he and I were, we we're one.
Natalie Valdes
#71. I suspect that I'm not alone when it comes to altering my surroundings depending on how I feel at any particular moment: diving into a specific book, immersing inside a particular movie, devouring certain foods or humming to just the right song.
Barbara Brooke
#72. Books are meat and medicine
and flame and flight and flower
steel, stitch, cloud and clout,
and drumbeats on the air.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#73. The expectation was that 'True Confessions' would be my first published book, but that didn't happen. After it was rejected by every publisher in New York and Canada, I shoved it in a closet and went on to write and publish my next three books.
Rachel Gibson
#74. The thing that makes me happy is that I know that on Mars, two hundred years from now, my books are going to be read. They'll be up on dead Mars with no atmosphere. And late at night, with a flashlight, some little boy is going to peek under the covers and read The Martian Chronicles on Mars.
Ray Bradbury
#75. I don't know where everything is going, but I'm pretty confident that people like books - the objects. So I'm going to go on that -they're not going to disappear.
Carol Anshaw
#76. Comedians are innately programmed to pick up oddities like mispronounced words, upside-down books on a shelf, and generally undetectable mistakes in everyday life.
Bob Newhart
#77. 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
#78. Writers are a savage breed, Mr. Strike. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.
Robert Galbraith
#79. The workbench was filled with glassware, books, syringes, tattooing machine parts, plastic bags, tools. Dozens of books on toxins and thousands of downloaded Internet documents,
Jeffery Deaver
#80. In my white room, against my white walls, on my glistening white bookshelves, book spines provide the only color. The books are all brand-new hardcovers - no germy secondhand softcovers for me. They come to me from Outside, decontaminated and vacuum-sealed in plastic wrap. I
Nicola Yoon
#81. There will always be detours in the fascinating game called life. Find the path to your heart's desires, and stay on course.
Elizabeth Parker
#82. There will be birthdays in the next twelve months; books keep well; they're easy to wrap: buy those books now. Buy replacements for any books looking raggedy on your shelves.
Roy Blount Jr.
#83. What a burning shame it is that many of the pieces on the subject of slavery and the slave trade, contained in different school books, have been lost sight of, or been subject to the pruning knife of the slaveholding expurgatorial system!
Robert Purvis
#84. Well, Bradbury's a genius. Fahrenheit 451 is one of my favorite books of all time, and The Illustrated Man as a collection of short stories ranks up there. When you read it you realize how influential it is on so many other stories and people.
Zack Snyder
#85. When you hear the phrase "rescue the financial system," translate it in your mind into "keep the debts on the books." They are trying to find a way for you (and debtor nations too) to keep paying and for the debt to keep growing.
Charles Eisenstein
#86. Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books.
Orson Scott Card
#87. I've been drawing authors and politicians for newspapers for many years. I try to read up on the person; in the case of authors, read one of their books. I watch interviews via YouTube and collect pictures via the Internet.
Siegfried Woldhek
#88. I think Alice Miller's Drama of the Gifted Child is one of the books read by nearly every therapist. Everyone's jaw drops when they read Miller's dead-on description of why we became therapists. (...) I wish more people were familiar with her work.
Ryan Howes
#89. I spend a frightening amount of money on books.
Kevin McCloud
#90. Grown-ups shouldn't finish books they're not enjoying. When you're no longer a child, and you no longer live at home, you don't have to finish everything on your plate. One reward of leaving school is that you don't have to finish books you don't like.
John Irving
#91. Personal tranquility consists in the orderly structuring of the mind, which occurs whenever a person engages in the exquisite practice of contemplating personal experiences, harmonizing time spent with other people, reading great books, and working on self-improvement.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#92. I love words. I crave descriptions that overwhelm my imagination with vivid detail. I dwell on phrases that make my heart thrum. I cherish expressions that pierce my emotions and force the tears to spill over. In essence, I long for a writer's soul sealed in ink on the page.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#93. It'll take a while for all those strange old books that I love to show up on digital: books that aren't current bestsellers but aren't public-domain freebies, either.
Barbara Hambly
#94. Every night, I was read to. Every Friday, we were taken to the library. I always received at least one book for my birthday. I have a few of them yet. Early on, I had my own collection of books. I loved to read. Still do.
Avi
#95. Jesus was always on the front-lines washing dirty feet. Humility soon is shelved in ministry and we start thinking to much of ourselves. It is hard to effectively minister in Christ name when we look down on someone, but if we are washing their feet we look up to them giving them value and worth.
Jonah Books
#96. I get letters from readers who say that they have always hated reading, but somebody suggested one of my books, they actually finished the book and enjoyed it, and they're going on to read another book. I'm thrilled that they have figured out that reading is fun.
Caroline B. Cooney
#97. Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#98. One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bookshelves.
Diane Wakoski
#99. Most people assume I write at night because of the kind of books I write, but I can shut out the light with my mind.
Carla H. Krueger
#100. Reading a book is like going on a great journey. You don't know what'll happen, but something is bound to change. And for me, that change has always been good.
Shannon Hale
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