Quotes About Reference Books

#1. There are times when I think that the ideal library is composed solely of reference books. They are like understanding friends - always ready to meet your mood, always ready to change the subject when you have had enough of this or that.

J. Donald Adams

#2. I have a memory of my fourth-grade self wanting to be the first woman president of the United States, but I think that has a lot more to do with my love of world records and reference books than a love of serving my country.

Elizabeth McCracken

#3. Old reference books are like tree rings. Without them, there'd be no way to know what a tree had lived through.

Jill Lepore

#4. I like to give people novels I think they would like, on no particular occasion - just when we're in a bookstore together. I like to receive reference books on my birthday.

Daniel Handler

#5. There was no Internet, not even many cookbooks except the old reference books. So we would sit down at night, a group of six chefs, and we'd exchange recipes and each talk about how we were doing things. It was the only way to learn new ideas.

Daniel Boulud

#6. I love reference books, especially collections of memorable quotations, world almanacs, and atlases. Facts to me are like candy or popcorn, small, tasty delights, and I like to gorge on them now and then.

Walter Kirn

#7. Oh, I collect facts and quotes when I can't write, and I can't write most of the time. I do a little chance operation sometimes where I flip through outdated reference books to see if anything will strike me as beautiful or momentous. Library roulette, I call it.

Jenny Offill

#8. Where once his grandparents put up crucifixes and images of the benediction on their walls, he and Reine-Marie put up books on theirs. History books. Reference books. Biographies. Fiction, nonfiction. Stories lined the walls and both insulated them from the outside world and connected them to it.

Louise Penny

#9. The vital accessories to my work are my reference books, such as the complete Shakespeare and a prayer book, and a large refuse bin.

Beryl Bainbridge

#10. Not to alarm you or anything, but I think you just made a deal with a Mexican gang. I've read Simone Elkeles books. I know how this whole garage as a front thing works.

Tammy Blackwell

#11. Maybe some love was guaranteed. Maybe it fit inside you and around you like skin and bones.

Alice Hoffman

#12. A lot of my time is spent reading antique or out-of-print books of reference.

John Hodgman

#13. Nerd herd, focus. You're here to help the fledglings. Dour One and Dour Two aren't important," said Aphrodite.
"Dr. Seuss reference. I like it," Stark said, giving me a check-me-out-I've-always-read-books hottie grin.
Aphrodite frowned at him.
"I said focus, not flirt.

P.C. Cast

#14. We call love what binds us to certain creatures only by reference to a collective way of seeing for which books and legends are responsible.

Albert Camus

#15. The first draft of a story is the writer's clay.

Bruce Coville

#16. A book is judged, not by its reference to life, but by its reference to other books.

Stephen Fry

#17. I was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Bern when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me: "If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight." I was startled. This simple thought made a deep impression on me. It impelled me toward a theory of gravitation.

Albert Einstein

#18. I have the greatest aversion to being a candidate on a ticket with a man whose record as an upright public man is to be in question
to be defended from the beginning to the end.

Rutherford B. Hayes

#19. Lewis Carroll. He was an odd one. Real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Completely denied having anything to do with the Alice books. Daft as a brush. You'd have liked him!

Mike Tucker

#20. She was a poetry book with the wrong dust jacket, shelved in the Reference section.

Joyce Rachelle

#21. Do not ever read books about versification: no poet ever learnt it that way. If you are going to be a poet, it will come to you naturally and you will pick up all you need from reading poetry.

A.E. Housman

#22. Time spent laughing is time well spent.

J.C. Phillipps

#23. I mean I think children love the idea that there are different viewpoints and different words for things and different worlds. And the more that they pretend to be other people, the harder it is for them to hate them and misunderstand them when they grow up.

Samuel West

#24. I wasn't an academic looking in books for ideas. But I educated myself about historical work that was similar to mine, to provide a frame of reference that wasn't the usual frame of reference of the New York art world and Europe.

Michael Heizer

#25. Chess is not a game, but a disease.

Henry Campbell-Bannerman

#26. I don't give a damn about you now, but it was a new experience for me and I felt a little dizzy for a while.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#27. Understand that nothing happens
unless it is God's will and
do what you like.
What can be simpler than that?

Ramesh S Balsekar

#28. In the 1920s, we thought the problems associated with alcohol could be solved by police and jails. Prohibition taught us we were wrong. The strategy of the present drug war is Prohibition redux.

Rodney S. Quinn

#29. I read a lot, that's my main hobby. I've got an iPad which I store books on and I read voraciously. I'm a slow reader but I'm obsessive. I make references, underline things, cross-reference. I'm an autodidact.

Anthony Hopkins

#30. Surrealism, then, neither aims to subvert realism, as does the fantastic, nor does it try to transcend it. It looks for different means by which to explore reality itself.

Michael Richardson

#31. There is not one text reference to characteristic Protestant religious life in these books ... The dominant theme is the denial of religion as an actual part of American life.

Paul Vitz

#32. Big changes don't happen at the battlefield; they are made in closed rooms where very powerful people decide in which direction things should go.

Henning Mankell

#33. During the first five years that I was writing the series, I made plans and wrote small pieces of all the books. I concentrate on one book at a time, though occasionally I will get an idea for a future book and scribble it down for future reference.

J.K. Rowling