79 Book Quotes

There's something uniquely magical about the right combination of words—how they can evoke powerful emotions, inspire, and stay with us long after reading. Whether it's a line that captures the essence of love, a thought-provoking reflection, or a moment of sheer beauty, book quotes have the ability to resonate on a deeply personal level. In this post, we’ve handpicked a collection of 79 standout quotes from literature that have left an indelible mark on readers worldwide. Prepare to be inspired, moved, and perhaps even find a new favorite line that speaks to your soul.

1. “And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.” - Kurt Vonnegut

2. “Books, the children of the brain.” - Jonathan Swift

3. “You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.” - Pat Conroy

4. “We are made wholeBy books, as by great spaces and the stars” - Mary Carolyn Davies

5. “We live for books.” - Umberto Eco

6. “Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.” - Anatole France

7. “it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.” - Gertrude Stein

8. “Books do furnish a room.” - Anthony Powell

9. “Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.” - Christopher Hitchens

10. “But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence. ” - Alberto Manguel

11. “What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?” - Virginia Woolf

12. “I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages... and fell into it as into a pool during dry season.” - Janet Fitch

13. “Each of them is a book through which other books dream. (referring to Nodier's SMARRA and TRILBY)” - John Clute

14. “Not being the sort to throw a book, she pounded her fist on her cushion.” - Ellen Kushner

15. “There were two sets of double doors leading out of the antechamber, one marked STACKS and the other TOMES. Not knowing the difference between the two, I headed to the ones labeled STACKS. That was what I wanted. Stacks of books. Great heaps of books. Shelf after endless shelf of books.” - Patrick Rothfuss

16. “She reads a lot of books. Good things, books.” - Thorne Smith

17. “Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.” - Stephen Fry

18. “It was also a room full of books and made of books. There was no actual furniture; this is to say, the desk and chairs were shaped out of books. It looked as though many of them were frequently referred to, because they lay open with other books used as bookmarks.” - Terry Pratchett

19. “When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "One word at a time," and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.” - Stephen King

20. “Remember, the past need not become our future as well.” - Brandon Sanderson

21. “Worst of all, the inner vault is guarded by a live dragon, attended by fifty naked women armed with poisoned spears, each of them sworn to die in Requin's service. All redheads.-You're just making that up, Jean.” - Scott Lynch

22. “Perhaps a book becomes a classic in proportion to how broadly its characters can be scavenged, how many readers find within it something they experience as desirable or even intimately necessary.” - Janna Malamud Smith

23. “The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one's soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule.” - Mark Helprin

24. “Writers shouldn't fear criticism. Instead, they should fear silence. Criticism is healthy. It gets people thinking about your work and, even better, it gets them talking and arguing. But as for silence -- it is the greatest killer of writers. So if you hate a book and want to hurt it -- don't talk about it. And if you hate my books -- please, for God's sake, shout it from the hills! ” - Robert Fanney

25. “...I am still librarian in your house, for I never was dismissed, and never gave up the office. Now I am librarian here as well.''But you have just told me you were sexton here!''So I am. It is much the same profession. Except you are a true sexton, books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!” - George MacDonald

26. “We human beings build houses because we're alive but we write books because we're mortal. We live in groups because we're sociable but we read because we know we're alone. Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one's place but that no one can replace either. It offers no definitive explanation of our destiny but links us inextricably to life. Its tiny secret links remind us of how paradoxically happy we are to be alive while illuminating how tragically absurd life is.” - Daniel Pennac

27. “You can't judge a book by it's cover but you can sure sell a bunch of books if you have a good one.” - Jayce O'Neal

28. “. . . she read with undifferentiated glee . . .” - Sebastian Faulks

29. “What are you doing with all those books anyway?" Ron asked, limping back to his bed. "Just trying to decide which ones to take with us," said Hermione. "When we're looking for the Horcruxes.""Oh, of course," said Ron, clapping a hand to his forehead. "I forgot we'll be hunting down Voldemort in a mobile library".” - J.K. Rowling

30. “It turned out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.” - Anna Quindlen

31. “Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?” - Gustave Flaubert

32. “Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.” - Jeanette Winterson

33. “We are thickly layered, page lying upon page, behind simple covers. And love - it is not the book itself, but the binding.” - Deb Caletti

34. “Ahhh. Bed, book, kitten, sandwich. All one needed in life, really.” - Jacqueline Kelly

35. “The truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.” - Gabriel Zaid

36. “Steadily, the room shrank, till the book thief could touch the shelves within a few small steps. She ran the back of her hand along the first shelf, listening to the shuffle of her fingernails gliding across the spinal cord of each book. It sounded like an instrument, or the notes of running feet. She used both hands. She raced them. One shelf against the other. And she laughed. Her voice was sprawled out, high in her throat, and when she eventually stopped and stood in the middle of the room, she spent many minutes looking from the shelves to her fingers and back again. How many books had she touched? How many had she felt? She walked over and did it again, this time much slower, with her hand facing forward, allowing the dough of her palm to feel the small hurdle of each book. It felt like magic, like beauty, as bright lines of light shone down from a chandelier. Several times, she almost pulled a title from its place but didn't dare disturb them. They were too perfect.” - Markus Zusak

37. “Now that his children had grown into their lives, their own children too, there was no one who needed more than the idea of him, and he thought maybe that was why he had this nagging feeling, this sense that there were things he had to know for himself, only for himself. He knew, of course he knew, that a life wasn't anything like one of those novels Jenny read, that it stumbled along, bouncing off one thing, then another, until it just stopped, nothing wrapped up neatly. He remembered his children's distress at different times, failing an exam or losing a race, a girlfriend. Knowing that they couldn't believe him but still trying to tell them that it would pass, that they would be amazed, looking back, to think it had mattered at all. He thought of himself, thought of things that had seemed so important, so full of meaning when he was twenty, or forty, and he thought maybe it was like Jenny's books after all. Red herrings and misdirection, all the characters and observations that seemed so central, so significant while the story was unfolding. But then at the end you realized that the crucial thing was really something else. Something buried in a conversation, a description - you realized that all along it had been a different answer, another person glimpsed but passed over, who was the key to everything. Whatever everything was. And if you went back, as Jenny sometimes did, they were there, the clues you'd missed while you were reading, caught up in the need to move forward. All quietly there.” - Mary Swan

38. “The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it. As long as they are allowed to read the books 'any old time they have a mind to,' libraries will remain the nurseries of heresy and independence of thought. They will, in fact, preserve that freedom which is a far more important part of our lives than any ideology or orthodoxy, the freedom that dissolves orthodoxies and inspires solutions to the ever-changing challenges of the future. I hope that your library and mine will continue in this way to be dangerous for many years to come.” - Edmund S. Morgan

39. “People talk about books being an escape, but here on the tube, this one feels more like a lifeline...The motion of the train makes her head rattle, but her eyes lock on the words the way a figure skater might choose a focal point as she spins, and just like that, she's grounded again.” - Jennifer E. Smith

40. “It would be curious to discover who it is to whom one writes in a diary. Possibly to some mysterious personification of one's own identity.” - Beatrice Webb

41. “Denn ich ohne Bücher bin nicht ich.” - Christa Wolf

42. “Fiction is very, very important," he said, his voice is rising. "Storytelling is how people learn. You get people to understand new cultures and other lives through stories. Made-up stories. Fiction.” - Kristine Grayson

43. “My parents would frisk me before family events. Before weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, and what have you. Because if they didn't, then the book would be hidden inside some pocket or other and as soon as whatever it was got under way I'd be found in a corner. That was who I was...that was what I did. I was the kid with the book.” - Neil Gaiman

44. “Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar. You have to hold it, you have to read it.” - Ben Elton

45. “Books are a finer world within the world. (1863)” - Alexander Smith

46. “A doctor is advertised by the bodies he cures. My business is advertised by the minds I stimulate. And let me tell you that the book business is different from other trades. People don't know they want books. I can see just by looking at you that your mind is ill for lack of books but you are blissfully unaware of it!” - Christopher Morley

47. “In my living room there are two large bookcases, each one eight feet tall, and they have about five hundred books between them. If I step up to a shelf and look at the books one by one, I can remember something about each. As a historian once said, some stare at me reproachfully, grumbling that I have never read them. One may remind me vaguely of a time when I was interested in romantic novels. An old college text will elicit a pang of unhappiness about studying. Each book has its character, and even books I know very well also have this kind of wordless flavor. Now if I step back from the shelf and look quickly across both bookcases I speed up that same process a hundredfold. Impressions wash across my awareness. But each book still looks back in its own way, answering the rude brevity of my gaze, calling faintly to me out of the corner of my eye. At that speed many books remain wrapped in the shadows of my awareness--I know I have looked past them and I know they are there, but I refuse to call them to mind.” - James Elkins

48. “God be thanked for books! they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.” - W.E. Channing

49. “They were steaming out of the station before Maia asked, 'Was it books in the trunk?''It was books, admitted Miss Minton.And Maia said, 'Good.” - Eva Ibbotson

50. “When the writing is good, a book becomes a mirror. The reader will see an uncanny familiarity and respond accordingly.” - Jen Knox

51. “Ich las das langweilige Buch, schlief darüber ein, im Schlafe träumteich, weiter zu lesen, erwachte vor Langeweile, und das dreimal.” - Heinrich Heine

52. “What we find in books is like the fire in our hearths. We fetch it from our neighbors, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.” - Voltaire

53. “Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.” - Virginia Woolf

54. “Please bury me in the library With a dozen long-stemmed proses” - J. Patrick Lewis

55. “Getting all emotionally wrapped up in made-up people's lives gives me a chance to take a break from my own life [...].” - Arlaina Tibensky

56. “I tell you this because books for young readers are so often written about that very moment: the moment of the fork. The moment the old man cannot return to.” - Virginia Euwer Wolff

57. “As I quietly stare off into space, eyes glazed over and brow thoughtfully taut, know that I am going about my business.  I am a storyteller.  Daydreaming is the best part of my job.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

58. “The parrot had a range of phrases. His own name ('Niko, Niko'), the name of his original owner and now 'Stavros'. Occasionally he would also say 'Panagia mou', which could be an expression of piety but also a gentle expletive, depending on how it was said. With the parrot it was hard to tell. It did not sound pious.” - Victoria Hislop

59. “You make me love books and the words inside them, because they talk about you. I know they do, they tell me that I love you, not as cliché as I write it, but in the warmest, deepest, calmest words I could ever read. I love you, like the books say it. And I'll find a better way to say it one day.” - Nema Al-Araby

60. “A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.” - Jeanette Winterson

61. “Maybe Heaven will be a library and then I might get to finish my ‘to-read’ list.” - Kellie Elmore

62. “Wrong' training can be a very innocent thing. Consider a father who allows his child to read good books. That child may soon cease to watch television or go to the movies, nor will he eventually read Book-of-the-Month Club selections, because they are ludicrous and dull. As a young man, then, he will effectually be excluded from all of Madison Avenue and Hollywood and most of publishing, because what moves him or what he creates is quite irrelevant to what is going on: it is too fine. His father has brought him up as a dodo.” - Paul Goodman

63. “Plant trees. They give us two of the most crucial elements for our survival: oxygen and books.” - Whitney Brown

64. “To librarians, booksellers, and collectors there is nothing limited in the subject of books about books.” - Leona Rostenberg

65. “Dad is looking at the bookshelves, deep in thought, deciding which book should go where. Once, Mom came home from work and discovered that he had turned all the books around so that the bindings were against the wall and the pages faced out. He said it was calming not to have all those words floating around and "creating static." Mom made him turn them back. She said it was too hard to find a book when she couldn't read the titles. Then she poured herself a big glass of wine.” - Rebecca Stead

66. “You not only are hunted by others, you unknowingly hunt yourself.” - Dejan Stojanovic

67. “Say No! Accept the burdens of revenge.” - Dejan Stojanovic

68. “They blossomed, they did not talk about blossoming.” - Dejan Stojanovic

69. “There is a moonlight note in the Moonlight Sonata; there is a thunder note in an angry sky.” - Dejan Stojanovic

70. “One bright day in the last week of February, I was walking in the park, enjoying the threefold luxury of solitude, a book, and pleasant weather.” - Anne Brontë

71. “The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer.” - John Steinbeck

72. “I do not read for I have renounced life, I read because one life is just not enough for me.” - Abbas Al-Akkad

73. “Books" - Snell smiled - "are a kind of magic.” - Jasper Fforde

74. “She'd absolutely adored the library-an entire building where anyone could take things they didn't own and feel no remorse about it.” - Ally Carter

75. “The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men’s hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead.And even the books that do not last long, penetrate their own times at least, sailing farther than Ulysses even dreamed of, like ships on the seas. It is the author’s part to call into being their cargoes and passengers,--living thoughts and rich bales of study and jeweled ideas. As for the publishers, it is they who build the fleet, plan the voyage, and sail on, facing wreck, till they find every possible harbor that will value their burden.” - Clarence C. Day

76. “What makes a book memorable is the message it etched in the readers’ minds.” - Tista Ray

77. “I told him. We got a library here. Got plenty of good books, too. -Larry Brown, Dirty Work” - Larry Brown

78. “Deciding what to read is also a matter of filtering.” - Jean-Claude Carrière

79. “This is the Self-Esteem Looking-Glass. You have to look in the mirror and compliment yourself.” - Malia Ann Haberman