52 Book Quotes

Books have the power to transport us to different worlds, ignite our imaginations, and offer profound insights into the human experience. Within the pages of many beloved books lie gems of wisdom, humor, and emotion—captured in quotes that resonate deeply with readers. In this post, we present a curated collection of the top 52 book quotes, each selected for its ability to encapsulate the essence of its narrative or the depth of its characters. Join us as we dive into these memorable lines that have left a lasting impact on literature and the hearts of readers around the world.

1. “Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.” - Gustave Flaubert

2. “The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.” - Joseph Joubert

3. “All books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hours, and the books of all Time.” - John Ruskin

4. “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.” - C.S. Lewis

5. “I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.” - Octavia E. Butler

6. “Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

7. “Ordinarily my mom just sunk deeper into her corner of the couch and ignored it. She had succesfully ignored a quarter of a century of entropy and decay, had sat peacefully crunching popcorn and drinking soda while the house fell down around us. If I had to guess the number of books she read during that time, I would place the number at somewhere in the neighborhood of forty thousand.” - Haven Kimmel

8. “No one knows as well as I how much nonsense is printed in books.” - Julia Quinn

9. “I have never been able to resist a book about books.” - Anne Fadiman

10. “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. Voila! Bookshelves!” - Jan Karon

11. “Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.” - Paul Auster

12. “In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.(Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.)” - Thomas A. Kempis

13. “Tis the good reader that makes the good book.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

14. “A book,a book fullof human touches,of shirts,a bookwithout loneliness, with menand tools,a bookis victory.” - Pablo Neruda

15. “Learning became her. She loved the smell of the book from the shelves, the type on the pages, the sense that the world was an infinite but knowable place. Every fact she learned seemed to open another question, and for every question there was another book.” - Robert Goolrick

16. “The e-reading revolution may have reached our shores this year but it has yet to reckon with Australia's summer holidays. Intense sunlight plays havoc with screens and the sand invades every nook and cranny, so as convenient and sexy as your new iPad may be, the battered paperback, its pages pocked and swollen from contact with briny hands, will likely remain the beach format of choice for a few years yet.” - Geordie Williamson

17. “That's my point: if you own thirty or more books, or you are reading any book at this moment, you may protest all you want, but you were born on the wrong continent.” - Thomas Geoghegan

18. “Bookish people, who are often maladroit people, persist in thinking they can master any subtlety so long as it's been shaped into acceptable expository prose.” - Carol Shields

19. “Books are love letters (or apologies) passed between us, adding a layer of conversation beyond our spoken words.” - Donalyn Miller

20. “Sections in the bookstore- Books You Haven't Read- Books You Needn't Read- Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading- Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written- Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered- Books You Mean to Read But There Are Others You Must Read First- Books Too Expensive Now and You'll Wait 'Til They're Remaindered- Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback- Books You Can Borrow from Somebody- Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too- Books You've Been Planning to Read for Ages- Books You've Been Hunting for Years Without Success- Books Dealing with Something You're Working on at the Moment- Books You Want to Own So They'll Be Handy Just in Case- Books You Could Put Aside Maybe to Read This Summer- Books You Need to Go with Other Books on Your Shelves- Books That Fill You with Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified- Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time to Re-read- Books You've Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It's Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them” - Italo Calvino

21. “Edward genially enough did not disagree with what I said, but he didn't seem to admit my point, either. I wanted to press him harder so I veered close enough to the ad hominem to point out that his life—the life of the mind, the life of the book collector and music lover and indeed of the gallery-goer, appreciator of the feminine and occasional boulevardier—would become simply unlivable and unthinkable in an Islamic republic. Again, he could accede politely to my point but carry on somehow as if nothing had been conceded. I came slowly to realize that with Edward, too, I was keeping two sets of books. We agreed on things like the first Palestinian intifadah, another event that took the Western press completely off guard, and we collaborated on a book of essays that asserted and defended Palestinian rights. This was in the now hard-to-remember time when all official recognition was withheld from the PLO. Together we debated Professor Bernard Lewis and Leon Wieseltier at a once-celebrated conference of the Middle East Studies Association in Cambridge in 1986, tossing and goring them somewhat in a duel over academic 'objectivity' in the wider discipline. But even then I was indistinctly aware that Edward didn't feel himself quite at liberty to say certain things, while at the same time feeling rather too much obliged to say certain other things. A low point was an almost uncritical profile of Yasser Arafat that he contributed to Interview magazine in the late 1980s.” - Christopher Hitchens

22. “We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.” - C.S. Lewis

23. “Book lust forever!” - Nancy Pearl

24. “People don't read any more. It's a sad state of affairs. Reading's the only thing that allows you to use your imagination. When you watch films it's someone else's vision, isn't it?"[Interview in The Independent, 15 October 2005]” - Lemmy Kilmister

25. “I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.” - David Foster Wallace

26. “The finest music in the room is that which streams out to the ear of the spirit in many an exquisite strain from the little shelf of books on the opposite wall. Every volume there is an instrument which some melodist of the mind created and set vibrating with music, as a flower shakes out its perfume or a star shakes out its light. Only listen, and they soothe all care, as though the silken-soft leaves of poppies had been made vocal and poured into the ear.” - James Lane Allen

27. “The worst book imaginable has a redeeming quality if it gets a young person to read.” - Tiffini Johnson

28. “Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own; it's the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it.” - John Waters

29. “I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books, and more people--men and women alike--could go on to happier, more productive lives.” - Richard Ford

30. “He had no money and no home; he lived entirely on the road of the racing circuit, sleeping in empty stalls, carrying with him only a saddle, his rosary, and his books....The books were the closest thing he had to furniture, and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.” - Laura Hillenbrand

31. “I go downstairs and the books blink at me from the shelves. Or stare. In a trick of the light, a row of them seems to shift very slightly, like a curtain blown by the breeze through an open window. Red is next to blue is next to cream is adjacent to beige. But when I look again, cream is next to green is next to black. A tall book shelters a small book, a huge Folio bullies a cowering line of Quartos. A child's nursery rhyme book does not have the language in which to speak to a Latin dictionary. Chaucer does not know the words in which Henry James communicates but here they are forced to live together, forever speechless.” - Susan Hill

32. “And tell them all about the books you've read. Better still, buy some more books and read them. That's an order. You can never read too many books.” - P.B. Kerr

33. “On a day like today,there's no friend like a book.” - Laura Purdie Salas

34. “My plan is to continue teaching many more years than the 32 years I've already enjoyed and continue writing, and promoting my books and websites if it's God will.” - Ana Monnar

35. “The book's always better than the movie.” - Richelle Mead

36. “The lack of power to take joy in outdoor nature is as real a misfortune as the lack of power to take joy in books” - Theodore Roosevelt

37. “Jack reads too many books. He thinks we're going to drive all year and have great adventures.” - Steven Herrick

38. “Working together as a team helps build a cohesive organization.” - Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

39. “Hate will cause you to "catch a case". Release yourself from your own personal jail before you are put in the real one for life! It ain't worth it!!” - Anita R. Sneed-Carter

40. “I libri la rincuoravano quando era triste e scacciavano la noia mentre Mo tagliava, rilegava, incollava pagine ormai logore, rese fragili da anni e anni d'uso sotto le innumerevoli dita che le avevano sfogliate.” - Cornelia Funke

41. “In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.” - George Orwell

42. “Literature is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it.The value judgement concealed in distinguishing one novel as literature and another as genre vanishes with the distinction.Every readable novel can give true pleasure. Every novel read by choice is read because it gives true pleasure.Literature consists of many genres, including mystery, science fiction, fantasy, naturalism, realism, magical realism, graphic, erotic, experimental, psychological, social, political, historical, bildungsroman, romance, western, army life, young adult, thriller, etc., etc…. and the proliferating cross-species and subgenres such as erotic Regency, noir police procedural, or historical thriller with zombies.Some of these categories are descriptive, some are maintained largely as marketing devices. Some are old, some new, some ephemeral.Genres exist, forms and types and kinds of fiction exist and need to be understood: but no genre is inherently, categorically superior or inferior.(Hypothesis on Literature vs. Genre)” - Ursula K. Le Guin

43. “We built tall buildings, but we have not become any taller.” - Dejan Stojanovic

44. “Now that we are all so smart, we don’t easily find resolutions.” - Dejan Stojanovic

45. “The light teaches you to convert life into a festive promenade.” - Dejan Stojanovic

46. “I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.” - Dejan Stojnaovic

47. “Electronic books live out of sight and out of mind. But printed books have body, presence.” - Will Schwalbe

48. “In my tradition, God revealed Himself in words and lives in stories and, no, you cannot touch or even see Him. The Word, in Judaism, was never made flesh. The closest God came to embodiment was in the Temple in Jerusalem...But the Temple was destroyed. In Judaism, the flesh became words. Words were the traditional refuge of the Jewish people - Yochanan ben Zakkai led a yeshiva, my father became a professor. And little boys, in the Middle Ages, ate cakes with verses inscribed on them, an image I find deeply moving and, somehow, deeply depressing. This might help explain a certain melancholy quality books in general, for all their bright allure, have always had for me. As many times as I went down to my parents' library for comfort, I would find myself standing in front of the books and could almost feel them turning back into trees, failing me somehow.” - Jonathan Rosen

49. “I am reading The Lord of the Rings. I suddenly wanted to. I almost know it by heart, but I can still sink right into it. I know no other book that is so much like going on a journey. When I put it down to this, I feel as if I am also waiting with Pippin for the echoes of that stone down the well.” - Jo Walton

50. “Historically, dust jackets are a new concern for authors; you don't see them much before the 1920s. And dust jacket is a strange name for this contrivance, as if books had anything to fear from dust. If you store a book properly, standing up, then the jacket doesn't cover the one part of the book that is actually exposed to dust, which is the top of the pages. So a dust jacket is no such thing at all; it is really a sort of advertising wrapper, like the brown paper sheath on a Hershey's bar. On this wrapper goes the manufacturer's name, the ingredients--some blithering about unforgettable characters or gemlike prose or gripping narrative--and a brief summation of who does what to whom in our gripping, unforgettable, gemlike object.” - Paul Collins

51. “There is no mistaking a good book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.” - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

52. “It is impossible for a Parisian to resist the desire to flick through the old volumes laid out by a bookseller.[Il est impossible, pour un Parisien, de résister au désir de feuilleter de vieux ouvrages étalés par un bouquiniste.]” - Gerard de Nerval