Top 73 Quotes About Bookshelves
#1. My desk is an antique with bookshelves built into the side. I've turned the drawer over to hold a keyboard. We live in a 100-year-old house, and I work in an apartment above the carriage house.
Jess Walter
#2. Richard's bookshelves weren't alphabetized. He never had time to alphabetize them. He was always too busy- looking for books he couldn't find.
Martin Amis
#3. Her library filled her bookshelves and then overflowed into waist-high stacks of books everywhere, piled haphazardly against the walls. If just one of them moved ... the domino effect could engulf the three of us in an asphyxiating mass of literature.
John Green
#4. I totally ignore the sheer number of bookshelves lining the far wall, even though I'm itching to explore them, because, well, as everyone knows, if the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, the way to a girl's is through a good book.
Julie Johnson
#5. We are still vulnerable to gender-targeted marketing no matter how carefully we edit our children's bookshelves.
Russell Smith
#6. I believe the books we write are the dreams we couldn't find on the bookshelves...
Ty Zeiter
#7. By burning Luther's books you may rid your bookshelves of him, but you will not rid men's minds of him.
Desiderius Erasmus
#8. An extrapolation of its present rate of growth reveals that in the not too distant future Physical Review will fill bookshelves at a speed exceeding that of light. This is not forbidden by general relativity since no information is being conveyed.
David Mermin
#9. As long as you have any floor space at all, you have room for books! Just make two stacks of books the same height, place them three or four feet apart, lay a board across them, and repeat. Viola! Bookshelves!
Jan Karon
#11. I was walking through the woods, thinking about Christ. If He was a carpenter, I wondered what He charged for bookshelves.
Woody Allen
#12. I've taken over the guest room wardrobe too- plus, I've arranged all my shoes on the bookshelves on the landing. (I put the books in boxes. No one ever read them. anyway.)
Sophie Kinsella
#13. Martin was alphabetizing my bookshelves. They used to kill men for sacrilege like that.
Jim Butcher
#14. I will lay it out in black and white, and my tale will contain more truth than the great dead histories on my father's bookshelves. For they say what happened, but not what it was like. They say what happened, but they do not say why.
Beth Underdown
#15. At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.
Lisel Mueller
#16. The lofty bookshelves sag
Under thousands of sleeping souls
Silence, hopeful -
Every time I open a book, a soul is awakened.
Xi Chuan
#17. We can see the film stars of yesterday in yesterday's films, hear the voices of poest and singers on a record, keep the plays of dead dramatists upon our bookshelves, but the actor who holds his audience captive for one brief moment upon a lighted stage vanishes forever when the curtain falls.
Daphne Du Maurier
#18. The thing about books was, the more you read and liked them, the more you wanted to have on hand to read. Before you knew it you needed more bookshelves, and then all of the sudden they filled your house.
Sui Ishida
#19. I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
Anna Quindlen
#20. I sometimes look at my bookshelves today and wonder which volumes my sons will treasure in twenty or thirty years. Which should I be saving for them? Which will fade with time?
Rick Riordan
#21. Bookaholics are the ones who start to feel uncomfortable and uneasy in another person's house, and suddenly realize there are no bookshelves or magazines lying around. People who only own a telephone book and their high school yearbooks scare us.
Robert Lee Hadden
#22. People have libraries at home, they have bookshelves, they have CDs. And they sort of try, people try to bring great artists into their lives, into their physical houses and sort of live with portions of them. But they're not really deeply engaging with them.
Joyce Carol Oates
#23. In Berlin, I worked from home, were the only other women sat sedately on my bookshelves. They were good company, it has to be said, but a little quiet.
Luisa Weiss
#24. Whatever happened to the good old days when books just got along, cozied up together on bookshelves, hanging out, waiting to be read?
Karen Marie Moning
#25. I love gay and lesbian parents. But I think we need a law that says lesbians and gay men have to raise their children together. This way, the kids would not only know how to build bookshelves, but they'd also instinctively know how to decorate them.
Joan Rivers
#26. I remember my life's timeline by the books I read, their covers, the way they looked on my bookshelves, the way they smelled, what they spoke to me about.
Josephine Ensign
#27. I'm a gastronome first and foremost. I have several bookshelves in my home full of cookbooks, foodie magazines and food writer books and I am always on the hunt for a great recipe or local foodie haunt to try.
Karen Walker
#28. Where are the books? All these elegant bookshelves are empty.
Lemony Snicket
#29. On more than one occasion David, in his urge to explore the darker corners of the bookshelves, had found himself wearing strands of spider silk in his face and hair, causing the web's creator to scuttle into a corner and crouch balefully, lost in thoughts of arachnoid revenge.
John Connolly
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. She says I ought to throw out at least two books for every one I buy. I had new bookshelves put up in the cottage after moving in, but already the to-be-read pile is mounting on to floor of the spare room.
Martin Edwards
#33. After all, is a gentleman's library of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves anything more than a vanity?
Billy Collins
#34. Books inviting us to read, on the bookshelves stand.
Piers for bridges that will lead, into Fairyland
Rainer Maria Rilke
#35. Still, there are many things we can toss at them that don't require magic at all. Acid. Hot oil. Bookshelves.
Aprilynne Pike
#36. Go to the bookstore and look at how many bookshelves are filled with books trying to explain how to work the devices. We don't see shelves of books on how to use television sets, telephones, refrigerators or washing machines. Why should we for computer-based applications?
Donald A. Norman
#37. My whole thing is, I collect what I know I want to read, and I have certain bookshelves in my bedroom that contain all the books I haven't read yet.
June Squibb
#38. here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves. Roland saw her black silk skirts, her velvet trains, sweeping compressed between the Fathers of the Church, and heard her firm foot ring on metal among the German poets. Here
A.S. Byatt
#39. Anyone who has ever scanned the bookshelves of a new girlfriend or boyfriend- or peeked inside his or her medicine cabinet- understands this implicitly; you can learn as much - or more - from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face.
Malcolm Gladwell
#40. The crazy thing is that when we go to somebody's house, what's better than looking at their bookshelves? Nobody's ever going to say, "Can I see the index to your Kindle?" It's so depressing and so unsexy. Sure, it's there, but nobody is going to get excited by that.
Jeanette Winterson
#41. The thing with bookshelves, no matter how many you have, you always fill them.
Douglas Coupland
#42. Here Carlyle had come, here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves. Roland could see her black silk skirts, her velvet trains, sweeping compressed between the Fathers of the Church, and heard her firm foot ring on metal among the German poets.
A.S. Byatt
#43. Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it - books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#45. There were books everywhere: on the floors, on the stairs, on furniture both built for that purpose and constructed for other ends entirely. There were bookshelves in the main hallway, in the downstairs rooms, and in the upstairs rooms. There were even bookshelves in the bathroom and the kitchen.
John Connolly
#46. I don't really have a domestic inclination. Even my apartment has a semblance of a storage facility. It's just stacks, there are no bookshelves, just books and piles of stamp collections and weird little sewing and knitting projects.
Sufjan Stevens
#47. My bookshelves were groaning with WW2 books, Hitler's baleful eyes staring out at me from covers and spines for any new visitor (or passing burglar) to wonder if I might be a fan or at least mildly obsessed.
Al Murray
#48. My study is a converted garage which is largely lined with bookshelves and cardboard boxes filled with manuscripts of my film scripts, plays and books.
William Nicholson
#49. And several bulging bookshelves which I really will organize one day.
Jim Butcher
#50. Wouldn't it be wonderful if every home had good books instead of knick-knacks and plastic flowers on the bookshelves? And wouldn't it be great if every child heard good speech and received thoughtful answers to their questions instead of 'be quiet' or 'go to bed'?
Ernest L. Boyer
#51. Ahenny (adj.) - The way people stand when examining other people's bookshelves.
Douglas Adams
#52. Some people lusted after cars, which had never made sense to me. For me, bookshelves could inspire whole spontaneous sonnets, so maybe it was an each to her own scenario.
Megan Crane
#53. Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.
Terry Eagleton
#54. Sumire was so bereft of household goods the place looked deserted. 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 gang of intellectual refugees.
Haruki Murakami
#55. What my wife desires--and what you should have guessed, had you paid attention--is bookcases. And books, of course, to fill them. Not more decorations or useless items. She wants books.
Cynthia Hand
#56. I love to go the library to borrow books. But I also enjoyed buying books to create my sacred library.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#59. He stopped moving among the shelves. She stopped as well and scanned the books around her. 'Such a glorious perfume, these old books.
Beth Cato
#60. A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
[Baffled at a Bookcase (London Review of Books, Vol. 33 No. 15, 28 July 2011)]
Alan Bennett
#61. I love walking into a bookstore. It's like all my friends are sitting on shelves, waving their pages at me.
Tahereh Mafi
#62. Jamie felt a strong desire to go across and see what the open books were, to go to the shelves and run his knuckles gently over the leather and wood and buckrum of the bindings until a book should speak to him and come willingly into his hand.
Diana Gabaldon
#63. On the bookshelf of life, God is a useful work of reference, always at hand but seldom consulted.
Dag Hammarskjold
#64. People with large book collections are almost always diligent learners.
Marie Kondo
#65. A bookshelf is a biography written by others.
Kat Lehmann
#67. Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.
Alberto Manguel
#68. The bookcases were lined with titles, hundreds of books shelved by subject in alphabetical order.-Everything from aberrant behavior to the mysteries of zen.
Tami Hoag
#69. My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closest. Their selves were on their shelves.
Anne Fadiman
#70. A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him.
Walter Mosley
#72. If the Bible is what it claims to be, how can we allow it to remain on a bookshelf?
Steven J. Lawson
#73. This is every reader's catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing. There is no way to finish, and perhaps that shouldn't be the goal.
Pamela Paul
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