Top 100 Quotes About Old Books
#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. 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
#3. She smelled like sweet tea and old books, like she had always been here.
Kami Garcia
#4. Opening the book, i inhaled. the smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it.
Diane Setterfield
#5. Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books.
C.S. Lewis
#6. It'll take a while for all those strange old books that I love to show up on digital: books that aren't current bestsellers but aren't public-domain freebies, either.
Barbara Hambly
#7. Providence has delivered me of every worldly passion, save this one; the desire to acquire books, new or old books of any kind, whose charms I cannot persuade myself to resist.
John Henry Newman
#8. Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#9. You hold me very tight in under my clothes, and if there's a library anywhere near then someone just removed its roof, the shelves just flooded with the sun and all the old books just remembered what it means to be bound in skin and to have a spine.
Ali Smith
#10. I am something of an aficionado of thrift stores. In my youth, I regularly searched their shelves for old books.
Michael Dirda
#11. A house on the park. He'd seen it a million times. And now was in it. It smelled of man sweat and spaghetti sauce and old books. Like a library where sweaty men went to cook spaghetti.
George Saunders
#12. old books -- little tombstones of ideas and history
Amy Tan
#13. 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
#14. There are three things that grow more precious with age; old wood to burn, old books to read, and old friends to enjoy.
Henry Ford
#15. The Foundation has secrets. They have books, old books - so old that the language they are in is only known to a few of the top men. But the secrets are shrouded in ritual and religion, and may use them.
Isaac Asimov
#16. 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
#17. I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me.
Margaret Atwood
#18. Old books exert a strange fascination for me
their smell, their feel, their history; wondering who might have owned them, how they lived, what they felt.
Lauren Willig
#19. My wife was of slight stature and weighed no more than a box of old books. Folded as she was, she fitted snugly into the trunk.
Stephen Livingston
#20. In the December rain, the vicarage was especially damp and soggy, with an aura of boiled eggs and old books - a perfect setting for our encounter: dark, brooding, and simply reeking of secrets and tales told in an earlier time. Cynthia,
Alan Bradley
#21. Dirty Freds ... I love this filthy old place. I love the dust and the dirt, the crappy old books and the objects of art.
Alan C. Martin
#22. I love everything that's old, - old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine.
Oliver Goldsmith
#23. 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
#24. He smells the same - peppermint and cedar and a hint of old books.
Cath Crowley
#26. Strange thoughts brew in your heart when you spend too much time with old books
Aravind Adiga
#27. I will come,' the priest answered, 'for I have read in old books of these strange beings which are neither quick nor dead, and which lie ever fresh in their graves, stealing out in the dusk to taste life and blood.
Francis Marion Crawford
#28. The bookstore had no musty "old books" smell, and instead it had a nice oaky aroma, similar to the way Laurence imagined the whiskey casks would be before you put Scotch into them for aging. This was a place where you would age well.
Charlie Jane Anders
#30. Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.
William Temple
#31. There is a camaraderie that grows up among those who work with old books and old papers, largely, I suspect, because we understand that we are at odds with the rest of the world: we are travelling backwards, while all those around us are still moving forward.
Peter Ackroyd
#32. Ereaders were a great convenience, but nothing could beat the smell of a library and old books.
Kate Evangelista
#34. In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.
Anne Fadiman
#35. Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity.
Marilynne Robinson
#36. Did you never wonder why the old books are so full of dragons chasing after maidens? The serpents think the girls are orphans, and long to get them away in a lair so that they may grow up strong and tall.
Catherynne M Valente
#37. She had a lined, weathered face that put Roh in mind of the creased leather spines of old books.
Kameron Hurley
#38. Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.
Bernard Baruch
#39. He loved the smell and feel of old books. To hold them was to touch the past.
Martin Edwards
#40. Some will read only old books, as if there were no valuable truths to be discovered in modern publications: others will only read new books, as if some valuable truths are not among the old. Some will not read a book because they know the author: others ... would also read the man.
Benjamin Disraeli
#41. I prefer old books and find them more relevant. I dislike new books. It's like drinking wine that's not ready.
Jonathan Lethem
#42. Jake went in, aware that he had, for the first time in three weeks, opened a door without hoping madly to find another world on the other side. A bell jingled overhead. The mild, spicy smell of old books hit him, and the smell was somehow like coming home.
Stephen King
#43. Half the charm in old books is the marks of living they acquire;
Erika Swyler
#44. I love everything that is old; old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines.
Oliver Goldsmith
#45. Typically, a book is published and gets one season in the sun. Eventually, you write another book, and maybe your old books get a bump, but my books seem to keep being discovered and recommended to new people of all ages.
Raina Telgemeier
#46. Death: I know, or I think I know that death will only be nothingness, but I don't want oblivion yet. I want to smell honeysuckle in the dark, I want to hear my cat greet me with her special purring. I want to smell old books
Ann Kelley
#47. I shall conclude with a saying of Alponsus, surnamed the Wise, King of Aragon - that among so many things as are by men possessed or pursued in the course of their lives, all the rest are baubles, besides old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to converse with, and old books to read!
William Temple
#49. The fragrance of rain mixes with the smell of old books. It is heavenly - that combination of threat and safety.
Trudy Wallis
#50. In my home country, there was a little shop with old books, but it was really in the countryside. You couldn't find English books. I found this very avant-garde American art book that had information about Georgia O'Keeffe. I was very much impressed by her.
Yayoi Kusama
#51. We hate old friends: we hate old books: we hate old opinions; and at last we come to hate ourselves.
William Hazlitt
#53. Would a writer know how to behave himself with relation td posterity? Let him consider in old books what he finds that he is glad to know, and what omissions he most laments.
Jonathan Swift
#54. People sometimes think that I bring home all these old books because I'm addicted, that I'm no better than a hoarder with a houseful of crumbling newspapers.
Michael Dirda
#55. a light that made me think of long hours in dusty libraries, and old books, and silence.
Donna Tartt
#56. I keep to old books, for they teach me something; from the new I learn very little
Voltaire
#57. I'm still old-fashioned. I love dusty old books and libraries.
Harper Lee
#58. Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers.
Alberto Manguel
#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. 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
#61. I know that don't sound senseful, but yarns 'bout Old-Un Smart an' flyin' dwellin's an' grown' babbits in bottles an' pictures zoomin' cross the Hole World ain't senseful neither but that's how it was, so storymen an' old books tell it.
David Mitchell
#62. The aroma of tea mixed with the scent of old books, leather chairs, and wool from the carpet in a soothing fusion.
Faith Hunter
#63. Be interested in everything. You don't have to adore it. I don't adore hip-hop, I don't think it's great music, but I'm interested, I listen. I watch a lot of new films, I see everything. I still read, I like books, whether they are old books, new books. I'm interested - you gotta stay interested!
Mel Brooks
#64. Are you kidding me? The woman leaves priceless Ming vases and Picassos lying about like they came off a sale rack at some discount store and she fills a hidden safe with musty old books?
Alexandra Ivy
#65. I don't spend much on clothes. I buy old books. I tell myself I ought to save - it's the classic Northern work ethic. I like good holidays, though. I'm a big fan of cruises. I love unpacking once and having the scenery change every day.
Alan Titchmarsh
#66. Old clothes, old friends, old books. One needs constants in a traveling life.
Dorothy Gilman
#67. Old books, old wine, old Nankin blue;-
All things, in short, to which belong
The charm, the grace that Time
makes strong,
All these I prize, but (entre nous)
Old friends are best!
Henry Austin Dobson
#68. There was the smell of old books, a smell that has a way of making all libraries seem the same. Some say that smell is asbestos.
Scott Douglas
#69. Where shadows dim with shadows mate,
in caverns deep and dark.
Where old books dream of bygone days,
when they were wood and bark ...
Walter Moers
#70. I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end.
Richard Brautigan
#71. I love old books. They tell you stories about their use. You can see where the fingerprints touched the pages as they held the book open. You can see how long they lingered on each page by the finger stains.
Jack Bowman
#72. The only customers they'd get on a day like this were lunatics
well, lunatics and hopeless romantics with a fetish for the smell of dusty old books, which in their eyes probably amounted to the same thing.
Katherine Pine
#73. In a second-hand bookshop head to the back, find the old books with dust undisturbed and worn off covers for these clothe true treasures.
Rachel Hall
#74. The Facts were right there waiting for me,hidden in old books written by people who weren't afraid to be honest
Ernest Cline
#75. I jealously guard my research time and I love fully immersing myself in those dusty old books and papers. It's one of the most enjoyable parts of my job.
Sara Sheridan
#76. Usually I read several books at a time - old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything - and when the bedside heap of a dozen volumes or so has dwindled to two or three, which generally happens by the end of one week, I accumulate another pile.
Vladimir Nabokov
#77. Often she had seemed to herself to be moving among those vanished figures of old books and pictures, an invisible ghost among the living, better acquainted with them than with her own friends. she very nearly lost consciousness that she was a separate being, with a future of her own.
Virginia Woolf
#79. Where books had been a comfort before, they became a necessity, old books best of all: thick heavy tomes with stories that spread and twisted through other worlds, where he could walk like a ghost in the footsteps of other lives.
Alexia Casale
#80. The notebook smelled the way old books do, like dust and unrealized potential.
Alex Flinn
#81. Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings.
Gerald Durrell
#82. Scent of old books a mystery; a secret port of the dreamers.
China Cancio
#83. He who studies old books will always find in them something new, and he who reads new books will always find in them something old.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
#84. I discovered news of old horrors in old books; read intelligence of old atrocities in old periodicals; always in the back of my mind, every day a bit louder, I heard the seashell drone of some growing, coalescing force; I seemed to smell the bitter ozone aroma of lightings-to-come.
Stephen King
#85. He remembered Bertolt Brecht: I would also like to be wise. In the old books it says what wisdom is: To shun the strife of the world and to live out Your brief time without fear All this I cannot do.
Madeleine Thien
#86. 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
#88. 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
#89. I grew up on Stephen King, reading the books. I love the small town, 1950s feel to it, that nostalgia, and that old America. What happens when something weird starts happening to all these people, something other-worldly, something demonic?
Alexander Koch
#90. Ah,' said Zultan. 'I, too. I keep many books at my home.' He gestured to the books in the tent. 'These are only a few. Those I think might need on this trip, and those I have yet to read and might want, and those old friends that I cannot bear to leave behind.
T. Kingfisher
#91. Montrose decided then and there that a full library, one made of old-fashioned paper books with bindings, the kind that cannot be electronically re-edited by anonymous lines of hidden code, was just as much a necessity for a free man as a shooting iron or a printing press.
John C. Wright
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. Reading is my passion and my escape since I was 5 years old. Overall, children don't realize the magic that can live inside their own heads. Better even then any movie.
Eckhart Tolle
#95. The air was heavy with the smell of leather and dust, of old parchment and binding glue. It smelled of secrets.
Patrick Rothfuss
#96. For some reason, when people meet me and find out I'm a writer they always ask if I write children's books. Um ... please don't let your kids read my books. Well, unless your kids are in their 30s or something ... then yeah, they're old enough. LOL
Michelle M. Pillow
#97. [Censors] rake through the entrails of many an old good author, with a violation worse than any could be offered to his tomb.
John Milton
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
