Quotes About Words And Books

#1. One can live with the thought of one's own death. It is the thought of the death of the words and books that is terrifying for that is the deeper extinction.

Lance Morrow

#2. Her soul belongs to words and books. Every time she reads, she is home.

Anonymous

#3. Imagine what our culture would be like if Americans sold ideas, words, and books with the same creativity we use to sell designer jeans, shampoo, and rock stars. Why, we might end up with people whos attention span for the printed word is longer than the time it takes to read a T-shirt.

Jim Trelease

#4. I thought that words and books and pens were more powerful than guns.

Malala Yousafzai

#5. I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real. Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth.

Nina Sankovitch

#6. Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore.

Edgar Allan Poe

#7. You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don't have, at the back of yourminds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.

Thomas Huxley

#8. My mother had been a Latin teacher, and she was always very fascinated with words. She and I shared books and responded to them.

Jean Fritz

#9. Words move, turning over like tumbling clowns; like certain books and like fleas, they possess activity. All men equally have the right to say, 'This word shall bear this meaning,' and see if they can get it across. It is a sporting game, which all can play, only all cannot win.

Rose Macaulay

#10. I was reading this James Bond book, and right away I realized that, like most books, it had too many words.

Dave Barry

#11. Our existence has always and everywhere been tragic, but man has converted these numberless tragedies into works of art. I know of nothing more astonishing or more wonderful than this transformation.

Maxim Gorky

#12. Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble.

Peter S. Jennison

#13. Alone in the worn mahogany paneled library surrounded by hundreds of books that filled every shelf and lined every wall from floor to ceiling, Lady Butler contemplated, How odd it is that a room filled with millions of words can be so silent.

Lance Taubold

#14. 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

#15. Comedians are innately programmed to pick up oddities like mispronounced words, upside-down books on a shelf, and generally undetectable mistakes in everyday life.

Bob Newhart

#16. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own - the place where we live - and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves.

Cesare Pavese

#17. Roger Bacon held that three classes of substance were capable of magic: the herbal, the mineral, and the verbal. With their leaves of fiber, their inks of copperas and soot, and their words, books are an amalgam of the three.

Matthew Battles

#18. I am quite convinced now ... that the actual training of drawing cartoons - which is, of course, my style - led to my producing Spot. Cartoons must be very simple and have as few words as possible, and so, too, must the 'Spot' books.

Eric Hill

#19. I love words. I crave descriptions that overwhelm my imagination with vivid detail. I dwell on phrases that make my heart thrum. I cherish expressions that pierce my emotions and force the tears to spill over. In essence, I long for a writer's soul sealed in ink on the page.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#20. We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.

George Eliot

#21. Television isn't inherently good or bad. You go to a bookstore, there are how many thousands of books, but how many of those do you want? Five? Television's the same way. If you're going to show people stuff, television is the way to go. Words and pictures show things.

Bill Nye

#22. The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.

Marguerite Yourcenar

#23. Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader's imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.

Anthony Browne

#24. There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.

Alberto Manguel

#25. Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.

John Green

#26. He claimed he had read the book so many times that the words had fallen out of it and the pages were all blank so he had to read the book to put the words back in or the book would be forlorn and naked.

Brian Doyle

#27. To his shock, as Saarang turned the first page, the words slowly transformed into small cylinders, except for one-letter words which preferred being spheres, and started rolling toward the vertical edges of the book.

Pawan Mishra

#28. The words of musicals were the moral codes that I lived by. I found meaning and messages in musicals that I didn't find in churches or school books and it really made me come alive in a way.

Rosie O'Donnell

#29. In the sea of words, the in print is foam, surf bubbles riding the top. And it's a dark sea, and deep, where divers need lights on their helmets and would perish at the lower depths.

Jonathan Lethem

#30. Yes! I'm me! I am careful and logical and I look up things I don't understand! When I hear people use the wrong words, I get edgy! I am good with cheese. I read books fast! I think! And I always have a piece of string! That's the kind of person I am!

Terry Pratchett

#31. There are truths found in books or films when some writer puts exactly the right words together and it's like their pen turned sword and pierced you right through the heart.

Susan Juby

#32. I don't think music affects what words I choose to type in what order, within what punctuation, at this point, because I'm rereading and editing each sentence, at this point, in my published books, probably 100-150 times each, on average, and listening to probably 20-60 different songs in that time.

Tao Lin

#33. There wasn't a place I could think of that was more magical than a building bursting with books and stories and words ...

Lindsay Eland

#34. After all, everything in here is just pieces of paper with words and lines on them. They're not even very valuable.
Pieces of paper with words and lines on them have the ability to change the world ... They always have.

Elizabeth Camden

#35. When people want to sound smart, they add syllables to words, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to books. They try to make up in quantity and complexity what they lack in quality. That's bullshit! They're just hiding their bullshit!

Robert McKee

#36. I like the sounds of words. Words are very enjoyable. I like words because they are ... seductive. And I like words because they can contain ... fantasies.

James Lusarde

#37. When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]

Jorge Luis Borges

#38. I listened as the words became sentences and the sentences became pages and the pages became feelings and voices and places and people.

Jennifer Donnelly

#39. There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you've read only once can't.

Gail Carson Levine

#40. Well, I am becoming doddering and old but I have - I'm writing two books a year now. It's like 220,000 words or something like finished, and, honest to God, I can't do that. I really do need the help of, you know, other people working with me.

John Sandford

#41. They left no books , Memorial to their lonely thought In grey parishes: rather they wrote On men's hearts and in the minds Of young children sublime words Too soon forgotten. God in his time Or out of time will correct this.

R.S. Thomas

#42. I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.

Anita Brookner

#43. Every word the right one and exactly where it should be. That's basically the highest compliment I can give.

Gabrielle Zevin

#44. He set down his chili dog, and after a pondering moment of silence, he replied with words of wisdom I'd never forget: "Fuck women. Fuck school. Fuck money. Go write some books, get a good agent, lift weights, get tattoos, and never do a film with Keanu Reeves.

Jon Konrath

#45. As a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight.

Jose Luis Borges

#46. My writing legacy would be my true depiction of life; exploring the entire colorful spectrum of people, both good and bad, capturing it in words and exposing it to all cultures in a respectful manner - In a way that would stand the test of time.

Diane Martin

#47. Hrough the act of reading my words, the patterns that form your thoughts become an imitation of the patterns that once formed mine. And in that way I live again, through you.

Ted Chiang

#48. What excites me about picture books is the gap between pictures and words. Sometimes the pictures can tell a slightly different story or tell more about the story, about how someone is thinking or feeling.

Anthony Browne

#49. Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.

Samuel Butler

#50. The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.

Max Lerner

#51. We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.

Vladimir Nabokov

#52. He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page.

Robert Cormier

#53. And in a way I have always thought that words are alive a little, for they can whisper sweet nothings and roar dragon flame with equal efficiency.

Lyndsay Faye

#54. Whatever emotional state you're in while you're parenting conveys more to your child than the content of what you're doing with them, no matter how perfect your intervention looks "on paper." In other words, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, "your emotional state is the message.

Michael Y. Simon

#55. I've always loved words. I ate up all the books I could get my hands on, and when I couldn't get books, I read candy wrappers and labels on cereal and toothpaste boxes.

Judy Holliday

#56. The past but lives in written words: a thousand ages were blank if books had not evoked their ghosts, and kept the pale unbodied shades to warn us from fleshless lips.

Francois Fenelon

#57. The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.

Ross Macdonald

#58. To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one's life becomes very small.

Paul Auster

#59. They were old, their covers cracked and their bindings frayed, but as far as Gwendolyn was concerned that only made the words cocooned between their musty pages more precious.

Teresa Medeiros

#60. Books are not fixed objects: they transmit words and ideas. Their effect on each reader is unique. They put pictures in our minds. They take root. You

John Connolly

#61. Book! You lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts.

Herman Melville

#62. Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

Hermann Hesse

#63. If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn't write a single word, but that would be tragic.

Dejan Stojanovic

#64. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment; they express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#65. Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.

Bohumil Hrabal

#66. I did the traditional thing with falling in love with words, reading books and underlining lines I liked and words I didn't know. It was something I always did.

Carrie Fisher

#67. Never stop reading, Luke. The words from the pages make me feel like I'm right there, like I can smell the sea and hear the wind. It's my one regret that I didn't read much over the years. How can you learn about all the things happening in the world if you don't read?

Lea Davey

#68. I explore the full boxes, mostly brimming with battered, dog-eared, highlighted books. The pages are worn, well-read, and I skim through them. I wonder if it's possible to know someone through the words they loved.

Michelle Hodkin

#69. I adore forgotten words, long lost folk tales, and books with pages soft and crumbling. I am a collector of scents and memories. The things that others bury are the things I hold most dear.

Nichole McElhaney

#70. Learning to decipher words had only added to the pleasures of holding spines and turning pages, measuring the journey to the end with a thumb-riffle, poring over frontispieces. Books! Opening with a crackle of old glue, releasing perfume; closing with a solid thump.

John Crowley

#71. Remember the good hours when the words are flowing well. And never mind the bad hours; there is no life without them.

Herman Wouk

#72. I think the reason I'm a writer is because first, I was a reader. I loved to read. I read a lot of adventure stories and mystery books, and I have wonderful memories of my mom reading picture books aloud to me. I learned that words are powerful.

Andrew Clements

#73. Then I realize that words like "optimism" and "hope" which appear in all those self-help books that claim they'll make us more confident and better to cope with life, are just that: words.

Paulo Coelho

#74. Realisation danced across his face; she saw the hurt in his eyes. And a twisted, darker piece of her almost enjoyed it. The air in the room, stale with blood and sweat, and pure horror, hummed in the aftermath of her words. And finally, Ella knew what had to be done.

Shona Moyce

#75. As I read you I fell in love with the holes between your words and I loved you most on the days you could not love yourself.

Jenim Dibie

#76. The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.

Mary Karr

#77. Not so, however, with books, for books cannot change. A thousand years hence they are what you find them to-day, speaking the same words, holding forth the same cheer, the same promise, the same comfort; always constant, laughing with those who laugh and weeping with those who weep.

Eugene Field

#78. Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.

Elizabeth Von Arnim

#79. In books, that which is most generally interesting is what comes home to the most cherished private experience of the greatest number. It is not the book of him who has travelled the farthest over the surface of the globe, but of him who has lived the deepest and been the most at home.

Henry David Thoreau

#80. In books, you can just wallow in dialogue, and you can just wallow in written words. In screenplays, every line has to serve the purpose of the line that's implied before it and the line that's implied after it. Maybe five lines have to do the work of fifty lines.

Chuck Palahniuk

#81. Under the pretext of study we spent our hours in the happiness of love, and learning held out to us the secret opportunities that our passion craved. Our speech was more of love than of the books which lay open before us; our kisses far outnumbered our reasoned words.

Peter Abelard

#82. Write for joy. It is the *only* reason to write. Whatever happens to your books afterward, just write for joy. Send your current one out when it's done and forget it, start another, and keep on writing for joy. Words I now live by. Welwyn Wilton Katz

Welwyn Wilton Katz

#83. I thought about words - like words in books - and how just saying them made things real.

Andrew Smith

#84. To some extent the shorter the writing assignment is, the harder it is to accomplish, and a blurb is 200 words max. Blurbs are meaningless, and actual people who are buying the books don't care about them at all.

Emily Gould

#85. Yet it was . . . Asahel who knew those books secretly by heart, and read, as laboriously as he did everything else, any scrap of paper with printing on it, poring hungrily over the magic of words.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

#86. It seems that if our species ever eradicates itself through war, it will not be because it was written in the stars but because it was written in our books; it is what we do with words like 'God' and 'paradise' and 'sin' in the present that will determine our future.

Sam Harris

#87. Tiff needed the words on the page to become the voice in her head, her own voice, or an approximation of it, and she needed the paper and the sound of the scratch of her chapped fingertips against it as she fiddled with each page.

Timothy Schaffert

#88. Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head.

Orhan Pamuk

#89. What are you reading? isn't a simple question when asked with genuine curiosity; it's really a way of asking, Who are you now and who are you becoming?

Will Schwalbe

#90. In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

Jeanette Winterson

#91. Producing words isn't a problem for me. And I usually write two books at a time. When one horse gets winded, you jump on the other.

Don Winslow

#92. I loved words that filled your mouth, and sounded as if you were used to books.

Gene Stratton-Porter

#93. I've always had a fondness for language ... English. Not that I use it correctly but I like words. I like books and I like poetry.. I like the written word ... and the sung word.

Joel Plaskett

#94. I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I even simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant ... I AM HAUNTED BY HUMANS.

Markus Zusak

#95. And then I keep reading, anyway - but not just because I like the story. I like knowing that I'm touching her with my words. That they're crawling in her ears as she sleeps.

Colleen Oakley

#96. [He] was always here to offer cups of good clear Walden Pond, or shout down the deep well of Shakespeare and listen, with satisfaction, for echoes. Here the lion and the hartebeest lay together, here the jackass became a unicorn.

Ray Bradbury

#97. A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.

Richard Flanagan

#98. I'm not wise at all. I told you, I know nothing. I know books, and I know how to string words together
it doesn't mean I know how to speak about the tings that matter most to me."
"But you're doing it now
in a way."
"Yes, in a way
that's how I always say things: in a way.

Andre Aciman

#99. What would make me happiest is if kids read these books [ Bink & Gollie] and think: there is so much to love in the world; and words are so much fun.

Kate DiCamillo

#100. My books already threatened to take over my part of the room and keep on going ... whatever cargoes of words I could lay my hands on I gave safe harbor.

Ivan Doig