Top 100 Old Book Quotes
#1. Just so you know," I begin, "when they say 'Once upon a time' ... they're lying. It's not once upon a time. It's not even twice upon a time. It's hundreds of times, over and over, every time someone opens up the pages of this dusty old book.
Jodi Picoult
#2. I don't think I've ever read an old book through from start to finish. Not after more than six months after writing it, that is.
Nicholas Mosley
#3. Five minutes in an old book quickly reveals that most of what is being sold today as new insights into human behavior is merely the rediscovery of knowledge we have had for centuries.
Roy H. Williams
#4. The grand old Book of God still stands; and this old earth, the more its leaves are turned over and pondered, the more it will sustain and illustrate the Sacred word.
James Dwight Dana
#5. She was dashing back, an enormous old book in her arms.
"I never thought to look in here!" she whispered excitedly. "I got this out of the library weeks ago for a bit of light reading."
"Light?" said Ron.
J.K. Rowling
#6. Isn't it what all librarians strive toward, at least in the movies and cliches? Silence, invisibility, nothing but a rambling cloud of old book dust.
Rebecca Makkai
#7. She was transcribing names and phone numbers from an old book to a new one. There were no addresses. Her friends had phone numbers only, a race of people with a seven-bit analog consciousness.
Don DeLillo
#8. I like Victorian children's novels extremely a lot. If I would say I collect anything, that's what I'll hunt for now and again at old book stores.
Joss Whedon
#9. OLD, adj. In that stage of usefulness which is not inconsistent with general inefficiency, as an "old man". Discredited by lapse of time and offensive to the popular taste, as an "old" book.
Ambrose Bierce
#10. For the first time, I smelled her. I can't describe the smell. Flowery, yet somehow musty, like a beautiful woman with the soul of an old book.
Caris O'Malley
#11. Of course, of course. Drugs, music, a new age dawning ... and you came for an old book.
Robin Sloan
#13. There are things in the Old Book which I may not be able to explain, but I fully accept it as the infallible Word of God, and receive its teachings as inspired by the Holy Spirit.
Robert E.Lee
#14. You are a half-blood," Zoe Nightshade said. Her accent was hard to place. It sounded old-fashioned, like she was reading from a really old book. "One of thy parents was mortal. The other was an Olympian."
"An Olympian athlete?"
"No," Zoe said. "One of the gods."
"Cool!" said Nico.
Rick Riordan
#15. As Solomon said in the Old Book, if two women squabble over which of them is the mother of a certain infant, the way to solve the problem is to cut the baby in half and share the baby in parts.
Gregory Maguire
#16. Well I'm looking at history," she said, pointing at me. "You used to be a friend, but now you stink as a friend! I came here to give you a second chance and you make me smell the crotch of an old book.
Jack Gantos
#17. Jericho didn't seem to know life beyond the pages of a musty old book, and he didn't seem interested in knowing anything beyond that, either.
Libba Bray
#18. How desperately I wanted to forsake these facts, to open a smelly old book or to go down on a pretty young girl instead. Why couldn't I have been born to a better world?
Gary Shteyngart
#19. I just love the smell of an old book store and the feel of the crisp pages along my fingertips.
Leah Spiegel
#20. When I was twelve, the passage from silent film to the talkies had an impact on me-I still watch silent films. I don't think that there is any such thing as an old film; you don't say, 'I read an old book by Flaubert,' or 'I saw an old play by Moliere.'
Alain Resnais
#21. I don't want to re-write the same old book with the same tired techniques. I'd rather bring something new to the table that's true to me and that people will have a genuine reaction to. That's the whole point, isn't it?
Veronika Carnaby
#22. I write into an old book that smells of dust and whose pages are floppy with damp. Sometimes the ink splodges onto the paper, other times it will barely leave the nib of my pen.
Fennel Hudson
#23. When I was six years old, I fell in love with magic. For Christmas, I got a magic box and a very old book on card manipulation. Somehow, I was more interested in pure manipulation than in all the silly little tricks in the box.
Philippe Petit
#24. You ignorant little rodent! This isn't just an old book. This is the book of Everafter."
"Sorry, I haven't read it. I'm waiting for the movie," Puck said.
Michael Buckley
#25. It's not an old book, or a treasure map. Nope. Staring up at me was a pile of rocks.
Wendy Mass
#26. A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.
Ray Bradbury
#27. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. It
Henry David Thoreau
#28. When a bookmark tumbles out of an old book pristine and unwrinkled, it is like a gasp of breath from another century.
Don Borchert
#29. 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
#30. I have a screened in porch, and it's nice to curl up with a book outside when it's raining, especially an old battered classic like 'Pride & Prejudice & Zombies.'
Amanda Hocking
#31. 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
#32. This particular book felt familiar, like an old friend. The characters drew me into their world, and I blocked out mine for the rest of the afternoon.
Rebecca Raisin
#34. I grew it - sorry, drew it - for this book, if for no other reason than to illustrate the old saying that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
Connor Franta
#35. 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
#36. I think there's a possibility that comic book movies are getting a tiny bit better on the one hand because they're no longer made by executives, who are, you know, ninety-year-old bald tailors with cigars, going, 'The kids love this!'
Joss Whedon
#37. {In the shadows where the ancestors sleep, the bird's song is young, but all else is old. Stillness surrounds me and I breathe softly expecting the unexpected.} from book in progress
Nancy B. Brewer
#38. So here I sit in the early candle-light of old age-I and my book-casting backward glances over out travel'd road.
Walt Whitman
#39. Opening the book, i inhaled. the smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it.
Diane Setterfield
#40. Writing is very good for household tasks. Because you'd rather fix a dripping tap or paint an old wall - you'd rather do almost anything than sit and write. I have to reach a point of obsession in order to write, and so I find starting a book incredibly difficult.
Damon Galgut
#41. The book smelled dusty and old but also carried a sweet tang, a hint of something inviting. She opened to the first page and started to read, pronouncing the words in a reverent whisper.
Shannon Hale
#42. As for my father, few souls are less troubled. He can be simply pleased with us, pleased that we exist, and, from the vantage point of his wondrously serene old age, he contemplates our lives almost as if they were books he can dip into whenever he wants. His back pages, perhaps.
Angela Carter
#43. You know, in the old days, you might be able to slowly sort of build an audience for your work by publishing two, three novels before you hit it big. You know, now, there's much more of an emphasis in the publishing houses on making sure that every book makes money.
Chad Harbach
#44. For the first time in my life, I became actively interested in a book. Me the sports fanatic, me the game freak, me the only ten-year-old in Illinois with a hate on for the alphabet wanted to know what happened next.
William Goldman
#45. I thought at 46 years old, I've been removed from the fashion industry for 10 years. I couldn't possibly write a model's book. That's for a 20-year-old. But I could say what I want to say without chastising the industry.
Iman
#46. I'm not a detective from Baker Street or an old lady who solves crimes while she's knitting in an easy chair. I'm just a book girl. So I can't make a deduction, only take a flight of fancy
er, forget I said that. I meant, I can only take a guess.
Mizuki Nomura
#47. Not all writers are artists. But all of us like the idea of somebody in the year 2283 blowing the dust off one of our books, thumbing through it and exclaiming, Hey, listen to what this old guy had to say back in the twentieth century!
William Attwood
#48. Buy Fable! the book that rejuvenates your soul! makes your belly belly-laugh! turns your cares to dust! ... likewise your moods, woes an wounds! ... turns everything rosy, deflates spleen and bile! pocondria! not just any old work! not just any old words! Fable!
You gotta be categorical.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#49. In our day, computer technology and the proliferation of books on CD-ROM have not affected - as far as statistics show - the production and sale of books in their old-fashioned codex form.
Alberto Manguel
#50. 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
#52. He was tongue-tied in the presence of a fourteen-month-old baby. All the things he thought of saying, like 'Who's Daddy's little boy, then?' sounded horribly false, as though he'd got them from a book. There was nothing to say, nor, in this soft pastel room, anything that needed to be said.
Terry Pratchett
#53. You know I'm finished with the old chess because it's all just a lot of book and memorization you know.
Bobby Fischer
#54. In the great books of India, an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence, which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the questions that exercise us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#55. If you still don't like a book after slogging through the first 50 pages, set it aside. If you're more than 50 years old, subtract your age from 100 and only grant it that many pages.
Nancy Pearl
#56. The Jewish people have been in exile for 2,000 years; they have lived in hundreds of countries, spoken hundreds of languages and still they kept their old language, Hebrew. They kept their Aramaic, later their Yiddish; they kept their books; they kept their faith.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#57. There is no book which tells of a more infamous monster than the Old Testament, with its Jehovah of murder and cruelty and revenge, unless it be the New Testament, which arms its God with hell, and extends his outrages throughout all eternity!
Helen H. Gardener
#58. My advice is this. For Christ's sake, don't write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books.
Terry Pratchett
#59. remember the old adage "You can't judge a book by its cover"? I'm here to tell you that's complete bullshit
Tim Castleman
#60. When I was 11 years old, I thought, 'All I really wanna be able to do is my own comic book,' and I'm doing it. I don't have any other real ambitions. I have nothing to conquer at all.
Chris Ware
#61. When I put magic into a book - whether it's a wizard or a crusty old werewolf - I'm asking a reader to swallow a huge leap that is counter to everything he or she knows. An extra big helping of reality makes that leap go down a lot easier.
Patricia Briggs
#62. Even God had a Welsh name : He spoke to him in the old language; He was to have a peculiar care For the Welsh people. History showed us He was too big to be nailed to the wall Of a stone chapel, yet still we crammed him Between the boards of a black book .
R.S. Thomas
#63. You mean old books?" "Stories written before space travel but about space travel." "How could there have been stories about space travel before
" "The writers," Pris said, "made it up.
Philip K. Dick
#64. I've always thought that very few people grow old as admirably as academics. At least books never let them down.
Margaret Drabble
#65. A big book is a hard thing to manage - I find the computer makes it easier to keep it in order, and to keep the old drafts (which I sometimes go back to) without drowning in paper.
Kate Grenville
#66. You don't fight to protect warships or old men. Like the book says, you fight to save your civilization. And so often it seems that civilization is composed mainly of the things women and children want.
James A. Michener
#67. Thank God for old-fashioned hardcovers. The e-book reader she had at home wouldn't have packed nearly the same punch.
Christine Warren
#68. Many Americans who are not fastened at the temples to a Christian prayer book are offended by politicians who justify their decisions by piously quoting the Old Testament.
Susie Bright
#69. Long before I was a writer, when I was just a haphazard reader and a dreamer of stories, I learnt about an influential book by Harold Bloom. 'The Anxiety of Influence', published in 1973 when I was five years old, is taken up with the terrifying influence of poets on each other.
Andrew O'Hagan
#70. If I ever saw my muse she would be an old woman with a tight bun and spectacles poking me in the middle of the back and growling, Wake up and write the book!
Kerry Greenwood
#71. I don't know how old I was when I started writing books. But, I was born in 1931, and I wrote my first book in 1961.
Ed Emberley
#72. And yet this god, this old god from the Old World, somehow made her feel small. It was only for a moment, but Aphrodite blinked under the weight of his stare - his scrutiny.
Liz Meldon
#73. Books that children read but once are of scant service to them; those that have really helped to warm our imaginations and to train our faculties are the few old friends we know so well that they have become a portion of our thinking selves.
Agnes Repplier
#74. The big publishers want someone they can send on the Jewish book circuit, somebody the old ladies can see marrying their granddaughters.
Joshua Cohen
#75. Everything's digital now, but sometimes I'll buy a paperback if I love the book. I love the smell of them too. Like the first time you open them up, and they're fresh and new. Or old books,
Jay McLean
#76. I had forgotten until I looked up old notes that I sold the film rights of my first book, a life of Mary Wollstonecraft: there was a lunch, a contract, a small sum of money, then nothing.
Claire Tomalin
#77. When I was a teenager, I read the bible cover-to-cover, and I found the Old Testament, it's a pretty bloody history book.
Billy Bob Thornton
#78. I'm kind of old-school and love nothing more than sitting, opening a book, and reading it. But I also love listening to audio books.
Nick Cave
#79. Children are never too young to begin the study of nature's book, and never too old to quit.
~Laura Hecox
Candace Fleming
#80. I didn't read this book
I inhaled it. This a terrific new take on a great old rock n roll story, a clash of the musical titans.
William McKeen
#81. I always say, I'm certain I changed 'Watchmen' less than the Coen brothers changed 'No Country for Old Men.' I'm certain of it. But you don't hear the Cormac McCarthy fans, like, up in arms about it. They should be. It's like an amazing Pulitzer Prize-winning book.
Zack Snyder
#82. I read The Old Curiosity Shop before I began Blackwood Farm. I was amazed at the utter madness in that book.
Anne Rice
#83. By the way, Reb, about the singing. What gives? Walt Whitman sang the body electric. Billie Holiday sang the blues. You sang ... everything. You could sing the phone book. I would call and say how are you feeling, and you'd answer, The old gray rabbi, ain't what he used to be ...
Mitch Albom
#84. Everything has the potential to be extraordinary, whether an old photograph, a book or a life. If you find it ordinary, you simply need to take a closer look.
Claire Cameron
#85. I drew the same things that most boys drew - airplanes and cars and fire engines. Then later on I discovered comic books, and I began to create my own comic stories. I was a comic writer, even when I was five or six years old. I would just make up stories because I thought it was fun.
Floyd Norman
#86. Your name will be in a history book one day, and some bored ten-year-old will memorize it for a test and then forget all about you. You have a job, just like everyone in the world. Stop acting like it makes you more or less than anyone else.
Kiera Cass
#87. When I'm crusty and old, either of these two sentences will be constantly uttered by my wrinkled mouth.
Yes, I was once on the NY Times Best Seller's List,or,Yeah, I wrote that book that only earned a few pennies
Either of the two makes me a writer, and that's what matters.
Vergielyn
#88. In the book, I tell the story of seeing old movies when I was young and acting out scenes at home. Now I get scripts, and I act them out.
Eli Wallach
#89. I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#90. If a book is not alive in the writer's mind, it is as dead as year-old horse shit.
Stephen King
#91. Books are the food of youth, the delight of old age; the ornament of prosperity, the refuge and comfort of adversity; a delight at home, and no hindrance abroad; companions by night, in traveling, in the country.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#92. I remember vividly what it's like to read as a 10-year-old - that passionate inhabiting of a book.
China Mieville
#93. You don't stop the watch when you are afraid of getting old, so don't cut off advertising when you want to save money."
~Madi Preda
Madi Preda
#94. Although I am an old man, night is generally my time for walking.
Charles Dickens
#95. All who have read a few old books have picked up the old tactics of considering every new idea a 'heresy' which must be rooted out.
Lu Xun
#96. I like to walk around my neighborhood, late in the afternoon. I sometimes wind up at the wonderful, old Shell station that's been changed into a coffee shop. Right where Johnny used to change my oil, I have a latte and take out my little book bag. It doesn't sound very austere.
Coleman Barks
#97. Feathers fell from the sky. Like black snow, they drifted onto an old city called Bath.
Stefan Bachmann
#99. You know you're getting old when all the names in your black book have M. D. after them.
Harrison Ford
#100. Let every book-worm, when in any fragrant, scarce old tome, he discovers a sentence, a story, an illustration, that does his heart good, hasten to give it the widest circulation that newspapers and magazines, penny and halfpenny, can afford.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
