Top 100 Good Books For Quotes
#1. In our time, when the literature for adults is deteriorating, good books for children are the only hope, the only refuge.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#2. I think what makes good children's books is putting the same care and effort into it as if I was writing for adults. I don't write anything - put anything in my books - that I'd be embarrassed to put in an adult book.
Louis Sachar
#3. A great book is a homing device
For navigating paradise.
A good book somehow makes you care
About the comfort of a chair.
A bad book owes to many trees
A forest of apologies.
J. Patrick Lewis
#4. Some of the most untidy writers have also been the most productive. Iris Murdoch, for instance, wrote a good 30 books in a house strewn with rubbish.
Craig Brown
#5. This capacity to fold the completely weird into daily life, to make the aliens ourselves, is a quality I look for in a good, weird book.
Jacob Bacharach
#6. It's not just you ... I guess it's been a slow week for news." I laughed. "We're now the hottest story in town."
He smirked at me. "Oh, good, and I was worried that this would be awkward."
Stephens, S.C. (2012-08-16). Effortless (Thoughtless Book 2) (p. 282). Gallery Books. Kindle Edition.
S.C. Stephens
#7. For out of old fields, as men saith, Cometh all this new corn from year to year; And out of old books, in good faith, Cometh all this new science that men learn.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#8. ... because commonsensically speaking, a room full of good books had to better for your health than a room with no books in it at all.
Susan Branch
#9. There's a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them.
Philip Pullman
#10. Read, read, read. Read good books. You will strengthen your understanding of story. Your vocabulary will be the richer for it.
Carmen Agra Deedy
#11. - Amy said that would be an imprudent expense; but as soon as he had got a good price for a book. Will not the publishers be kind? If they knew what happiness lurked in embryo within their foolish cheque-books!
George Gissing
#12. Books are pleasant, but if by being over-studious we impair our health and spoil our good humour, two of the best things we have, let us give it over. I, for my part, am one of those who think no fruit derived from them can recompense so great a loss.
Michel De Montaigne
#13. When you need a good laugh, do you reach for a book? I don't. I expect books to move me deeply and submerge me in another reality. So when a novel makes me roar with laughter, it's always a delightful surprise.
Maria Semple
#14. Kid's books should be just as good as any other books. No. They should be held to a *higher* standard than other literature for the same reason that we take extra care with children's food.
Patrick Rothfuss
#15. See, that's the beauty of books. We get to take what we want out of them and it can be different for everyone. You get a good one, you may even find what you need.
Kristen Ashley
#16. Reading requires actual concentration. If you skipped a paragraph, or even an important sentence, you could lose the entire story. With most TV shows, though, you didn't have to concentrate at all. You could space out for a good ten minutes, then come back and still figure out what was going on.
Daniel Ehrenhaft
#17. Books, bringing people together.' That would make a good slogan for the library.
Kasie West
#18. I like signing books for a living; I do. But you have no idea the panic that sets in. I am not a very good speller. Put me in a stresser situation, and I lose all capacity to recall how to spell the most simple names.
Chelsea Cain
#19. Like a good academic, I thought books were for answers.
Helen Macdonald
#20. At books, or work, or healthy play,
Let all my years be passed;
That I may give for every day
A good account at last.
Isaac Watts
#21. For anyone addicted to reading commonplace books ... finding a good new one is much like enduring a familiar recurrence of malaria, with fever, fits of shaking, strange dreams ...
M.F.K. Fisher
#22. Both types of books - fiction and nonfiction - are a search for story. As a writer and a reader, there's nothing I crave more than a good story!
Susan Campbell Bartoletti
#24. You know, it's about getting out there and having a good time. Not about worrying - all these young books for women are like I'm 29 with a closet full of Prada shoes and I can't get a date. Come on.
Aisha Tyler
#25. We need to actually teach kids that books aren't like broccoli. You don't have to eat every bit on your plate. It's like secret adult's business. It's the secret we never, ever tell our children. No adult ever read a book because it's good for us. We read because it is fun.
Jackie French
#26. What are books good for?"
"Hitting intruders?" Nick mumbled. He rubbed his eyes again. "Doorstops. Insomnia. Special interrogation techniques. Silencing bedmates in the middle of the night.
Abigail Roux
#27. We lusty bibliophiles know that reading, unlike just about anything else, is both good for you and loads of fun.
Kevin Smokler
#28. That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything.
Noam Chomsky
#29. The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell.
Henry David Thoreau
#30. Well, the priest did very well, considering. He got in all the details, and that is a good thing in a local item: you see, he had kept books for the undertaker-department of his church when he was younger, and there, you know, the money's in the details; the more details, the more swag:
Mark Twain
#31. Then there were his education and his reading, the books he bought and borrowed, his knowledge of things that could not be eaten or worn or cohabited with, his interest in poetry and his respect for good writing.
John Steinbeck
#32. Books give us insight into other people, other cultures. They make us laugh. They make us think. If they are really good, they make us believe that we are better for having read them. You don't read a book - you experience it. Every story opens up a new world.
Karin Slaughter
#33. For a highly motivated learner, it's not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you're a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.
Bill Gates
#34. Weak men are the worse for the good sense they read in books because it furnisheth them only with more matter to mistake.
Sir George Savile, 8th Baronet
#35. Some people act as though art that is for a mass audience is not good art, and I think this has been a very negative thing. I know that I have wanted very much to write books that are accessible to the widest audience possible.
Bell Hooks
#36. There's always that discussion about fiction about how do you market it - these are books for boys, these are books for girls, these are books for adults. Actually, they're just stories, and if they're good stories, then they surpass those boundaries.
L.A. Weatherly
#37. If a father buys his child toffees instead of books for school, it may make for a happy child. But does it make a good father?
Chetan Bhagat
#38. Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.
Maya Angelou
#39. Thus proving that books can teach you much, if only to give you a good name for a devilish, smart goat.
Terry Pratchett
#40. I read in one of the gardening books that manure was very good for soil, so I had a shitload delivered.
Kaaron Warren
#41. Children's reading and children's thinking are the rock-bottom base upon which this country will rise. Or not rise. In these days of tension and confusion, writers are beginning to realize that books for children have a greater potential for good or evil than any other form of literature on earth.
Dr. Seuss
#42. It would be good for religion if many books that seem useful were destroyed. When there were not so many books and not so many arguments and disputes, religion grew more quickly than it has since.
Girolamo Savonarola
#43. Lukas would tell them to be good to each other, that there were only so many of them left, and that all the books and all the stars in the universe were pointless with no one to read them, no one to peer through the parting clouds for them.
Hugh Howey
#44. After so many books and so many years of writing, I have a good idea of my strengths and weaknesses. I love the process of writing and, if I allowed myself, I would write far too much every day. One weakness which I've struggled to overcome is my tendency to having my characters ruminate for pages.
Walter Dean Myers
#45. Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You'll find what you need to find. Just read.
Neil Gaiman
#46. Good books that often I would hate to finish because they took me into their lives and let me out of mine, for a while anyway.
Ron McLarty
#47. I started off for home, where I planned to recruit a good book and hide away from the world.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#48. So you're a reader," My mom sighs, as if somehow this elevates Isabel to yet another realm of perfection.
Denis Markell
#49. Do not read good books-life is too short for that-read only the best.
Ernest Dimnet
#50. Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers.
Virginia Woolf
#51. Reciprocal marketing, promotions and links. In public good experiments, behavioral economists have demonstrated that the potential for reciprocal actions by players increases the rate of contribution to the public good, providing evidence for the importance of reciprocity in social situations.
Carl William Brown
#52. In my next life, I want to be tall and thin, parallel park and make good coffee. But for now, I have lots of stuff to work out in my life, but I'll have that until the day I die. I want to write more books.
Paula Danziger
#53. Belle hesitated. "What is this place?" she asked.
"A bit of magic, like all good books," the man replied. "An escape. A place where you can leave cares and worries behind." He smiled. "At least for a chapter or two.
Jennifer Donnelly
#54. Books are good, and I read my share, and TV's okay if you're stuck in a motel room during a rainstorm, but for Jamie Morton, there was nothing like a movie up there on the big screen.
Stephen King
#55. To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.
W. Somerset Maugham
#56. Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#57. The deep division that exists in the human race, regardless of any other more obvious distinction, between those for whom books are an obsession, and those who are prepared, good-humouredly enough, to tolerate their existence.
Antonia Fraser
#58. I don't like the idea of a book being a test or being used for a test. The way - in my opinion - to make good readers is to let kids choose their own books and not test them.
Avi
#59. For me, a good children's book is a good children's book is a good children's book.
LeVar Burton
#60. We do not so much want books for good people, as books which will make bad ones better.
Hannah More
#61. Reading good books spoils you for enjoying bad books.
Annie Barrows
#62. Books Are Good For Lots Of Uses, Not For Dropping In The Toilet.
Frank Zappa
#64. It's a completely powerful and serious book, as good as anything in prose or poetry written by a 'beat' writer, and one of the most alive books written by any American for years. I don't see how it could be considered immoral.
Robert Lowell
#65. I love buying and collecting good books: I am passionate reader. This is my sacred life.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#66. I have a household of good books, and reading tends to take for me the place of experience - or rather to become itself experience concentrated. You will say this is a dull picture, but I cultivate dulness in a world grown too noisy.
Henry James
#67. I grew up reading 19th-century novels and late Victorian children's books, so I try for a good story full of coincidence and error, landscape and weather. However, the world was radically changed during my lifetime, and I tell of that battering as best I can.
Fanny Howe
#68. I'm not a social person. Not that I'm not at ease. I'm pretty good, but it bores me. Not the people, but the whole thing. What for? It's not very productive. I only want to do what I have to do: fashion, photography, books. And that's all.
Karl Lagerfeld
#69. 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
#70. It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound,
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth
'Tis then we get the right good from a book.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#71. Nothing teaches great writing like the very best books do. Yet, good teachers often help students cross that bridge, and I have to say that I had a few extraordinary English teachers in high school whom I still credit for their guidance.
Julia Glass
#72. Buy other authors' books when you go to their events. Even if you aren't going to read it. Even if you are going to give it away. Even if you aren't interested. Not just for the author but for the bookstore. It's karma and just plain good manners.
M.J. Rose
#73. For books are as meats and viands are; some of good, some of evil sub-stance.
John Milton
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. My fondness for good books was my salvation.
S. Tsow
#78. what are inside books may not all that necessarily be different from what are outside books at all
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#79. that I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method; I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries, with small profit, for want of art, order, memory, judgment.
Robert Burton
#80. I am always for getting a boy forward in his learning, for that is sure good. I would let him at first read any English book which happens to engage his attention; because you have done a great deal when you have brought him to have entertainment from a book. He'll get better books afterwards.
Samuel Johnson
#81. Biographies are best when written chronologically. Boring people don't make for good biographies.
Deana J. Driver
#82. ...the sixth [eligible lady] perished miserably after returning to me one of my most cherished books with the leaves dog-eared and the binding cracked. For I hold with the greatest philosophers that she who maltreats a book will never make a good wife.
Roswell Field
#84. For a book to be a good one a reader must have a connection with the characters and identify with them and have the story hold their attention and want more
Brenda Kay Winters
#85. A dozen ... chocolate chip cookies ... a pot of coffee, and a good book are all I will need for the rainy weekend rolling in.
Adriana Trigiani
#86. Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
Alain De Botton
#87. Music makes me alive in a way that nothing quite does. Good art, good film, good books, good dance. Exhibitions, history. Nature makes me feel alive. Georgia in the rain - that makes me feel alive. Compassion makes me feel alive. Hard fought victories for social rights.
Emily Saliers
#88. I've figured out in the course of my life that the one thing I'm good at doing is writing books, and it would be crazy to trade that in for something else.
Francis Fukuyama
#89. One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.
In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#90. Take time for good books; time to absorb the thoughts of poets and philosophers, seers and prophets.
Wilferd Peterson
#91. I am home for good like a tiny shoot. The tiny shoots in my mother's garden. I have a passion for idle chatter about books, language and literature. Preparing a meal together, that can be romantic.
Abigail George
#92. Trust me, never mock a romance book," said Mal with all the zest of a manic street preacher. "You have no idea the amount of good they can do for you between the sheets and on the streets. If you love you girl? Buy her books.
Kylie Scott
#93. One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either.
David Foster Wallace
#94. A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.
Richard Flanagan
#95. I didn't write with a target audience in mind. What excited me was how much I would enjoy writing about Harry. I never thought about writing for children - children's books chose me. I think if it is a good book anyone will read it.
J.K. Rowling
#96. A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about them.
[Life magazine, December 10, 1965]
Rex Stout
#97. I love my bed. It is larger than a desk and better designed to hold books and papers. It is softer than a desk and better designed for naps. It is the center of all good things. And day or night, everyone knows where to find me.
Cathleen Schine
#98. If a man wants to read good books, he must make a point of avoiding bad ones; for life is short, and time and energy limited.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#99. Then there was Mani, the Mighty Good-For-Nothing. He towered above all the other boys of the class. He seldom brought any books to the class, and never bothered about homework. He came to the class, monopolized the last bench, ans slept bravely. No teacher ever tried to prod him.
R.K. Narayan
#100. Nothing ever invented provides such sustenance, such infinite reward for time spent, as a good book.
David McCullough
