A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is...

I gave him my best cryptic smile. He did not fall down to his feet, kiss my shoes, and promise me the world. I must be getting rusty.

She folds the pages of the books she reads when she wants to remember something important. Her favorite books are accordions, testaments to an endless search for meaning.

I read, and underline, anything I can get my hands on, but I have a particular weakness for self-help books. I love these books, though I dislike the term “self-help.” For one thing, it’s not...

Jack’s marketing books had been a part of her life for so long that she had ceased to register their presence, simply moving them from the couch to the coffee table, from the bed to...

I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

Only a few days earlier he had explained to her that he did not merely read books but traveled with them, that they took him to other countries and unfamiliar continents, and that with their...

Books are both our luxuries and our daily bread.

Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book.

I think serious readers of books are 5% of the population. If there are good TV shows or a World Cup or anything, that 5% will keep on reading books very seriously, enthusiastically. And if...

When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages – a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly...

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

I’m obsessed with zombies. I like watching zombie movies and I read zombie books.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

Books took, in her young life, the place of companions and childish games. She read a great deal without guidance or discrimination, and gained all her ideas on life, all her faith, all her ideals...

I had a cousin once who lived in your dictionary, inside the binding, and there was a tiny hole which he used for a door, and it led out between trichotomy and trick. Now what...

Writing for children is bloody difficult; books for children are as complex as their adult counterparts, and they should therefore be accorded the same respect.

I certainly couldn’t have survived my childhood without books. All that deprivation and pain–abuse, broken home, a runaway sister, a brother with cancer–the books allowed me to withstand. They sustained me. I read still, prolifically,...

In the past few years I’ve assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people — people who supposedly want to write...

…too much time spent with books had not fitted her to be easy with herself, and other people.

She knew where she stood, when she stood among books.

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

Echo looked around at her sea of tomes, and a single word came to mind: tsundoku. It was the Japanese word for letting books pile up without reading them all.

To read too many books is harmful.

Writers fly with imaginary wings.

What amazes me is that most days feel useless. I don’t seem to accomplish anything-just a few pages, most of which don’t seem very good. Yet, when I put all those wasted days together, I...

Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem. In fact, a city is nothing more than a solution to a...

The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer.

It is the mess that readers love. The fact that sometimes the people who love us the most aren’t people we’re related to, but people who join our family later. The book acknowledges how difficult...

The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself. After which...

You could write a book about things that you can’t find on-line.

Books matter. They are an inspiration, an escape. Something bigger than we are…

When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.

Our great mistake in education is, as it seems to me, the worship of book-learning–the confusion of instruction and education. We strain the memory instead of cultivating the mind. The children in our elementary schools...

Hay veces en las que alguien confía lo suficiente en ti como para contarte sus secretos y eso hace que sea más fácil confiar en él.

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

Opportunity may knock only once but temptation leans on the door bell

One life to read!

Besides, Fi was convinced that instinct could determine a body’s literary needs, just as physical cravings pointed to dietary shortfalls. She’d experienced it herself more than once among the library’s dense shelves; not knowing what...

Writing is the voice of the heart’ Julia Suzuki

Thus it had come about that she had read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely, than most of her kind.

The pages of a book are given life only as they are opened

And for the next long years of my life, I tried to remember only the reading, not the terrible things that happened to me as I came and went up and down the stairs. The...

It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don’t have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables...

How about a man?” she retorts.

OK, publishing a book and releasing a movie is all very well, but Tottenham beating Man. U. 3-2… priceless.

No encounter occured that day, and I was glad of it; I took out of my pocket a little Homer I had not opened since leaving Marseilles, reread three lines of the Odyssey, learned them...

And if you are a parent, introduce your children to their neighborhood library. It will give them a real sense of independence to have their own library card and enjoy borrowing books.

It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.

Millions of pages cloaked in dust and inspiration and wisdom.