Top 100 Books That 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. 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
#3. The history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world.
Carl Becker
#4. 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,
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. When her mind was discomposed ... a book was the opiate that lulled it to repose.
Ann Radcliffe
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. The love of books, the golden key, that opens the enchanted door
Andrew Lang
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. '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
#37. That when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them.
(Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)
Arthur Schopenhauer
#38. 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
#39. There are two things that grant a bit of immortality: books and children
Tiziano Terzani
#40. I like to think of my books and the movies of my books living in two separate universes. Each is very nice, but only one is correct - the book. But that doesn't mean you can't enjoy the other versions, and I always do.
Meg Cabot
#41. Sometimes I just want to write a really intense love scene. But I can't do that in my books for teens, or parents will complain - believe me, I've tried.
Meg Cabot
#42. I know that books I have written will still resonate in 50 years - particularly 'My Sister's Keeper.' It has sold three million copies in the States alone. I strongly feel that, as a novelist, you have a platform and the ability to change people's minds.
Jodi Picoult
#43. There I was, clinging to the scraps of happiness that I could finally feel again: coffee and books and an afternoon with my best friend. What right did I have, when he was gone?
Emery Lord
#44. But age is a state of mind that runs the gamut from fashion to catchphrases to books and music and movies.
Suzanne Munshower
#45. I think when you get interested in antiques, the most frustrating thing is that books don't have enough photos. When you go to a flea market or garage sale, you see lots of things you've never seen before and you have no idea what the price is going to be or should be.
Judith Miller
#46. One of the first times that I went into a book store and saw a bunch of my books, my impulse was to put them all under my coat and run away so that no one else could see them, even though, of course, I wanted everyone to see them.
Stacey D'Erasmo
#47. I read books that say if you want to keep sex hot you tell a person what you want. How do you tell 'em you want somebody else?
Elayne Boosler
#48. Like many self-help books, The Deepest Blue is full of horrifyingly simplistic language and some admittedly good advice. Somehow the women in the book learn to say: That's my depression talking. It's not "me."
As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.
Maggie Nelson
#49. 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
#50. The book of Jonah is one of the shortest books in the Bible. Yet, something beneath the surface whispers to us, hinting that there is much more beneath this little book. (page iii)
Michael Ben Zehabe
#51. I hate SF books that think all you need to make a book is cool technology and mind-bending ideas without a decent plot or characters. And I hate when fantasy books are allowed to ramble off into five hundred page diatribes which don't advance the story one bit.
Chris Wooding
#52. He doesn't understand that books don't get used up. I've tried to explain that they aren't like clothes or furniture - that we keep them because we might want to read them again. And because they remind us of how we felt when we read them.
Paula Marantz Cohen
#53. I'm no good at describing my books. 'Holes' has been out now for seven years, and I still can't come up with a good answer when asked what that book is about.
Louis Sachar
#54. Good books are to the young mind what the warming sun and the refreshing rain of spring are to the seeds which have lain dormant in the frosts of winter. They are more, for they may save from that which is worse than death, as well as bless with that which is better than life.
Horace Mann
#55. I have been very interested in the number of kids who have read the Sherlock Holmes books after reading the Mary Russell books. That's great. That's more or less how I rediscovered the Holmes books.
Laurie R. King
#56. 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
#57. I have lived in the East for nearly thirty years now, but many of my books prove that I am never very far away from Ohio in my thoughts, and that the clocks that strike in my dreams are often the clocks of Columbus.
James Thurber
#58. We go to school to learn to work hard for money. I write books and create products that teach people how to have money work hard for them.
Robert Kiyosaki
#59. 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
#60. I certainly wouldn't be writing books if it hadn't been for the feminist blogosphere, and I think that's a really amazing thing.
Jessica Valenti
#61. Neither my mom nor my dad ever bought me any comic books. Certainly not for Christmas. I suspect that doing so would have violated the Parents' Code.
Michael Dirda
#62. 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
#63. It's time that Islam should be redefined by the world based upon, the goodness of all the peace-loving Muslims, instead of the theoretical teachings of some books, be it Quran or the Hadith.
Abhijit Naskar
#64. For me, one of the really cool things about this is that throughout these movies, there have been - and I enjoyed it this way - hints at what S.H.I.E.L.D. is and how they function within this Marvel movie universe which, as you know, is deeply based in the comic books.
Clark Gregg
#65. He had promised Leslie that after Christmas he would stay home and fix up the house and plant his garden and listen to music and read books out loud and write only in his spare time.
Katherine Paterson
#66. I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now
only that place where the books are kept.
John Steinbeck
#67. And when his head slumped forward into his book, she giggled, for she knew that he was hers.
C. Robert Cargill
#68. '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
#69. 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
#70. The good thing about Heavy Books (Ex: The Collected Works of William Shakespeare), is that when you're glue-ing something you can use them for weights.
John Arnold
#71. When people asked me what I was going to do when I grow up, I always said, 'I'm going to be a writer. I'm going to write screenplays. I'm going to write books. I'm going to write plays. That's what I'm going to do.'
Mara Wilson
#72. 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
#73. Was there ever a more horrible blasphemy than the statement that all the knowledge of God is confined to this or that book? How dare men call God infinite, and yet try to compress Him within the covers of a little book!
Swami Vivekananda
#74. I always feel I have made unfilmable books. I even felt that way about a book of mine that was later made into a movie. But my wife, who has made two films, thinks this one would make a very original film. I'm all for original films.
Rick Moody
#75. 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
#76. The thing about Tolkien, about The Lord of the Rings, is that it's perfect. It's this whole world, this whole process of immersion, this journey. It's not, I'm pretty sure, actually true, but that makes it more amazing, that someone could make it all up. Reading it changes everything.
Jo Walton
#77. These young writers nowadays. They spend more time networking to promote their writing careers than writing their books. Maybe that's why there are so few good ones anymore.
Lauren Carr
#78. Therefore it was not pride that took me into the village twice a week, or even stubbornness, but only the simple need for books and food.
Shirley Jackson
#79. I believed God had wired me as a writer for a purpose, and I was squandering that purpose. I finally repented of doing things my way and told God that, in the future, I would only write books that glorified Him. That meant I had to buy back some of my contracts.
Terri Blackstock
#80. He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say.
Alice Hoffman
#81. Books that do a tenth of what Left Behind has done are smashing successes.
Jerry B. Jenkins
#82. I'm running out of things to say.
I've stopped stealing pages out of poetry books, but last week I pocketed a thesaurus and looked for synonyms for you and could only find rain
and more rain
and a thunderstorm that sounded like glass, like crystal, an orchestra.
Shinji Moon
#83. After I won the Newbery Medal for 'From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,' children all over the world let me know that they liked books that take them to unusual places where they meet unusual people.
E.L. Konigsburg
#84. I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.
Kurt Vonnegut
#85. The Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.
Terry Pratchett
#86. I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.
Jim Harrison
#87. He who repeats what he does not understand is no better than an ass that is loaded with books.
Khalil Gibran
#88. You can never learn Sales by reading books and watching videos, you can only get motivated by that.. To learn Sales (telesales) dial 300+ calls daily and (direct field sales) meet at-least 5 clients daily ...
Only customers can teach u sales!
Honeya
#89. Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.
Leonora Carrington
#90. Jessica, falling in love can't always be a happily ever after or a once in a lifetime kind of story. Those happen in books, in movies. This is life and it's real. Life has no script, no outline. We broke the rules of love long ago. All I know for sure is that with you, the rules will never apply.
Kathryn Perez
#91. I'm a sporadic reader. I have moments when I can't stop ... then I kind of forget that I can read. But then I go, 'Oh God, yeah, books!'
Rhys Ifans
#92. You can try reading books that will help you be a leader, like Marshall Rosenberg and Thich Nhat Hanh. Be very humble and say, "I don't know why. I don't feel qualified, but I accept this role that you gave me, and so help me."
Sandra Cisneros
#94. 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
#95. Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize.
Susan Sontag
#96. Oh! No, I only mean what I have read about. It always puts me in mind of the country that Emily and her father travelled through, in The Mysteries of Udolpho. But you never read novels, I dare say?" "Why not?" "Because they are not clever enough for you - gentlemen read better books.
Jane Austen
#97. A writer who wishes to be read by posterity must not be averse to putting hints which might give rise to whole books, or ideas for learned discussions, in some corner of a chapter so that one should think he can afford to throw them away by the thousand.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#98. The Voice
There is a voice inside of you
That whispers all day long,
"I feel this is right for me,
I know that this is wrong."
No teacher, preacher, parent, friend
Or wise man can decide
What's right for you
just listen to
The voice that speaks inside.
Shel Silverstein
#99. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold Bloom
#100. Every library answers a twofold need, which is often also a twofold obsession: that of conserving certain objects (books) and that of organizing them in certain ways
Georges Perec
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