Top 100 Old Book Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. {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
#10. 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
#11. Opening the book, i inhaled. the smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it.
Diane Setterfield
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. You know I'm finished with the old chess because it's all just a lot of book and memorization you know.
Bobby Fischer
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. I've always thought that very few people grow old as admirably as academics. At least books never let them down.
Margaret Drabble
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Thank God for old-fashioned hardcovers. The e-book reader she had at home wouldn't have packed nearly the same punch.
Christine Warren
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. The big publishers want someone they can send on the Jewish book circuit, somebody the old ladies can see marrying their granddaughters.
Joshua Cohen
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Children are never too young to begin the study of nature's book, and never too old to quit.
~Laura Hecox
Candace Fleming
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. I read The Old Curiosity Shop before I began Blackwood Farm. I was amazed at the utter madness in that book.
Anne Rice
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. If a book is not alive in the writer's mind, it is as dead as year-old horse shit.
Stephen King
#66. 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
#67. I remember vividly what it's like to read as a 10-year-old - that passionate inhabiting of a book.
China Mieville
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Although I am an old man, night is generally my time for walking.
Charles Dickens
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. Feathers fell from the sky. Like black snow, they drifted onto an old city called Bath.
Stefan Bachmann
#77. You know you're getting old when all the names in your black book have M. D. after them.
Harrison Ford
#78. 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
#79. The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.
William Faulkner
#80. The wonderful thing about books is you never run out of them, you can just keep going. So I'm always finding new writers, or old writers that I just happen not to have read.
Molly Ringwald
#81. He scanned the page looking for an entry that read, "Help! I'm Almost Thirteen Years Old and I Still Have the Muscles of a Third-Grader!" but apparently Robert's condition was so freakish and rare, the authors of the book didn't even bother to include it.
Charles Gilman
#82. To stand in a great bookshop crammed with books so new that their pages almost stick together, and the gilt on their backs is still fresh, has an excitement no less delightful than the old excitement of the second-hand bookstall.
Virginia Woolf
#83. You see, everyone thinks they're too good for day-old pastry, like one-third off is charity or something. The world is full of snobs. Snobs and slobs. I ought to write a book.
Wally Lamb
#84. The most enjoyable part in writing a series is being able to visit a world I have created and revisit old friends. The challenges are making the book fresh and new for readers who have started from the beginning while still adding old information for new readers.
Christine Feehan
#85. The America that never cared or felt guilty about portraying us as undignified people on their television screen, or in some old history book that never stated truthfully the facts of our invasion or the cruelty we had to endure for generations.
Leonard Peltier
#86. When I first started dating my husband, I had this weird fascination with the circus and clowns and old carnival things and sideshow freaks and all that. About a month after we started dating, he bought me this amazing black-and-white photo book on the circus in the 1930s, and I started sobbing.
Christina Hendricks
#87. I found a great book called 'Slang Through the Ages' by Jonathon Green. It's basically a thesaurus of historical slang, and had lots of great old uses.
Scott Westerfeld
#88. In an age when all that was old seems new again, Bernard DeVoto's The Hour couldn't have made a more timely reappearance. This book reminds me of one of the joys of being an adult-cocktail hour!
Graydon Carter
#89. When the first book out my sister-in-law read it and we were chatting at 5 o'clock in the afternoon and she said, "Oh my God, chapter six, sex and a murder," and her five year old wandered into the kitchen and said, "Sixty hamburgers?
Sara Sheridan
#90. 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
#91. When I re-read, I know what I'm getting. It's like revisiting an old friend. An unread book holds wonderful unknown promise, but also threatens disappointment. A re-read is a known quantity.
Jo Walton
#92. 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
#93. A book is a wonderful present. Though it may grow worn, it will never grow old.
Jane Yolen
#94. You must take a year off, one of these days, before you're old and tired and weighed down by responsibility. Go away somewhere, and read. Read all the important books. Educate yourself, then you'll see the world in a different way.
Helon Habila
#95. I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book - in short, it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention.
Jennifer Weiner
#96. I love the process of cracking the spine for the first time and slowly sinking into a book. That will soon seem old-fashioned, I'm sure, like the time of illuminated manuscripts.
Edwidge Danticat
#97. My judgement is not good when I am on a book tour. I am not thinking about it that much. What happens is I will go back home. I have a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old and a wife who is now taking care of them who is wondering where her husband is.
Michael Lewis
#98. Writers tell stories better, because they've had more practice, but everyone has a book in them. Yes, that old cliche.
Tanith Lee
#99. Mrs. Cheerson, our old teacher? She gave us an essay to write over the holiday. It was on To Kill a Mockingbird, which I read and it was good, and I think it's stupid to spoil a good book by writing an essay on it. So I didn't do it.
Jaclyn Moriarty
#100. There are no taboos. Every topic is open, however shocking. It is the way that the topics are handled that's important, and that applies whether it is a 15-year-old who is reading your book or someone who is 55.
Robert Cormier
