Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.
Walter Pater - Keyword(s):

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
P.J. O'Rourke - Keyword(s):

Never judge a book by its movie.
J.W. Eagan - Keyword(s): , Cinema

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
Mark Twain - Keyword(s): , Life , Friendship

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
Francis Bacon - Keyword(s):

Luminous quotations, also, atone, by their interest, for the dulness of an inferior book, and add to the value of a superior work by the variety which they lend to its style and treatment.
Christian Nestell Bovee - Keyword(s): Quotations

For friends... do but look upon good Books: they are true friends, that will neither flatter nor dissemble.
Francis Bacon - Keyword(s):

Books are embalmed minds.
Christian Nestell Bovee - Keyword(s): , Mind

Scriptures: the sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.
Ambrose Bierce - Keyword(s): Religion , Faith

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
Mark Twain - Keyword(s):

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.
Walt Whitman - Keyword(s): Beauty , Flowers

A good book has no ending.
R.D. Cumming - Keyword(s):

The wise man reads both books and life itself.
Lin Yutang - Keyword(s): , Life , Wisdom

When a new book is published, read an old one.
Samuel Rogers - Keyword(s):

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.
Voltaire - Keyword(s):

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Keyword(s):

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read and all the friends I want to see.
John Burroughs - Keyword(s): Carpe Diem , Friendship , Walking

Books are immortal sons deifying their sires.
Plato - Keyword(s):

Americans like fat books and thin women.
Russell Baker - Keyword(s): America

Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.
Samuel Butler - Keyword(s): , Writing

As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!
William James - Keyword(s):

When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.
Christopher Morley - Keyword(s):

I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it.
Woodrow Wilson - Keyword(s):

A book that is shut is but a block.
Thomas Fuller - Keyword(s):

A dirty book is rarely dusty.
Anonymous - Keyword(s): , Sex

Interestingly, I never thought I'd do an adaptation. I've also been quite against them. I think trying to translate one medium to another is wrong. I never really felt that books fitted into film.
Andrea Arnold - Keyword(s): Adaptation , Cinema

He fed his spirit with the bread of books.
Edwin Markham - Keyword(s):

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
Chinese Proverb - Keyword(s):

To choose a good book, look in an inquisitor's prohibited list.
John Aikin - Keyword(s): , Censorship

There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.
Henry Ward Beecher - Keyword(s): , Mind , Work , Laziness

Books are a uniquely portable magic.
Stephen King - Keyword(s):

TV. If kids are entertained by two letters, imagine the fun they'll have with twenty-six. Open your child's imagination. Open a book.
Anonymous - Keyword(s): , Television

Reading means borrowing.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - Keyword(s):

The truth is that I know very few novelists who have been satisfied with the adaptation of their books for the screen.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Keyword(s): Truth , Adaptation

It's the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Keyword(s):

I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go into the library and read a good book.
Groucho Marx - Keyword(s): , Television

Books are the glass of council to dress ourselves by.
Bulstrode Whitlock - Keyword(s):

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
Henry Ward Beecher - Keyword(s): , Beauty

To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend; to read it for a second time is to meet an old one.
Chinese Proverb - Keyword(s):

It often requires more courage to read some books than it does to fight a battle.
Sutton Elbert Griggs - Keyword(s):

You can't get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.
C.S. Lewis - Keyword(s): , Tea

I adore book-to-film adaptations when they're done well, and I'm more lenient than many readers when it comes to what counts as 'done well.' For me, the most important thing is that the film maintains the spirit of the original book.
Maggie Stiefvater - Keyword(s): , Cinema , Adaptation

The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one's encounter with it in a book.
Andre Maurois - Keyword(s):

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
John LeCarre - Keyword(s): , Cinema

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint.... What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
Henry David Thoreau - Keyword(s):

A large, still book is a piece of quietness, succulent and nourishing in a noisy world, which I approach and imbibe with "a sort of greedy enjoyment," as Marcel Proust said of those rooms of his old home whose air was "saturated with the bouquet of silence."
Holbrook Jackson - Keyword(s):

If you read a lot of books, you're considered well-read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well-viewed.
Lily Tomlin - Keyword(s): , Television

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.
Franz Kafka - Keyword(s):

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.
Abraham Lincoln - Keyword(s):

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.
Elbert Hubbard - Keyword(s):

Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me, in terms of my development - an insight came from that book.
Robert Reed - Keyword(s): , Adult

Our passions shape our books; repose writes them in the intervals.
Marcel Proust - Keyword(s): , Passion , Writing

The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.
Christopher Hitchens - Keyword(s): Humankind

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.
G.K. Chesterton - Keyword(s):

The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.
Andrew Ross - Keyword(s): , Television

There is a wonder in reading Braille that the sighted will never know: to touch words and have them touch you back.
Jim Fiebig - Keyword(s):

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time: the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
Thomas Carlyle - Keyword(s):

Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity.
George Steiner - Keyword(s):

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.
William Hazlitt - Keyword(s):

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Henry David Thoreau - Keyword(s):

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
Samuel Butler - Keyword(s):

There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book; books are well written or badly written.
Oscar Wilde - Keyword(s):

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
Richard Steele - Keyword(s):

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 - Keyword(s):

So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.
Roald Dahl - Keyword(s): , Television

Nothing is worth reading that does not require an alert mind.
Charles Dudley Warner - Keyword(s):

Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book.
John Ruskin - Keyword(s):

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counsellor, a multitude of counsellors.
Henry Ward Beecher - Keyword(s): , Gardening

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.
W. Somerset Maugham - Keyword(s):

Old or new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that malignant booksellers attach to the backs.
Alberto Manguel - Keyword(s):

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.
Ross MacDonald - Keyword(s):

From my point of view, a book is a literary prescription put up for the benefit of someone who needs it.
S.M. Crothers - Keyword(s):

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.
Mary Wortley Montagu - Keyword(s):

Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution - such call I good books.
Henry David Thoreau - Keyword(s):

What holy cities are to nomadic tribes - a symbol of race and a bond of union - great books are to the wandering souls of men: they are the Meccas of the mind.
G.E. Woodberry - Keyword(s):

This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication.
Logan Pearsall Smith - Keyword(s):

The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.
James Bryce - Keyword(s):

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
James Russell Lowell - Keyword(s):

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away.
Marina Tsvetaeva - Keyword(s):

"Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are" is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread.
Francois Mauriac - Keyword(s):

A house without books is like a room without windows.
Heinrich Mann - Keyword(s):

He who lends a book is an idiot. He who returns the book is more of an idiot.
Arabic Proverb - Keyword(s):

The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practised at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness.
Holbrook Jackson - Keyword(s):

A good book should leave you... slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
William Styron - Keyword(s):

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.
Oscar Wilde - Keyword(s):

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.
Bern Williams - Keyword(s):

Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life.
Jesse Lee Bennett - Keyword(s):

The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived.
Howard Pyle - Keyword(s):

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.
E.P. Whipple - Keyword(s):

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.
Gilbert Highet - Keyword(s):

I divide all readers into two classes; those who read to remember and those who read to forget.
William Lyon Phelps - Keyword(s):

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
Edmund Burke - Keyword(s):

No person who can read is ever successful at cleaning out an attic.
Ann Landers - Keyword(s):

A blessed companion is a book, - a book that, fitly chosen, is a lifelong friend,... a book that, at a touch, pours its heart into our own.
Douglas Jerrold - Keyword(s):

A good book on your shelf is a friend that turns its back on you and remains a friend.
Anonymous - Keyword(s):

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.
George Robert Gissing - Keyword(s):

There's nothing to match curling up with a good book when there's a repair job to be done around the house.
Joe Ryan - Keyword(s): , Housework , Procrastination

You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.
Paul Sweeney - Keyword(s):

Always look on the bright side of life. Otherwise it'll be too dark to read.
Anonymous - Keyword(s): , Optimism

Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled "This could change your life."
Helen Exley - Keyword(s):

The things most worth reading are precisely those that challenge our convictions.
Anonymous - Keyword(s):

When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before.
Clifton Fadiman - Keyword(s):

No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Keyword(s):

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death hath no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.
J. Swartz - Keyword(s):

Far more seemly were it for thee to have thy study full of books, than thy purse full of money.
John Lyly - Keyword(s):

One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind.
Ishmael Reed - Keyword(s):

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold Bloom - Keyword(s):

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.
Charles W. Eliot - Keyword(s):

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is a pleasure beyond compare.
Kenko Yoshida - Keyword(s):

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
Harper Lee - Keyword(s):

My imagination doesn't require anything more of the book than to provide a framework within which it can wander.
Alphonse Daudet - Keyword(s):

Let your bookcases and your shelves be your gardens and your pleasure-grounds. Pluck the fruit that grows therein, gather the roses, the spices, and the myrrh.
Judah Ibn Tibbon - Keyword(s):

Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books - even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.
William Ewart Gladstone - Keyword(s):

One benefit of summer was that each day we had more light to read by.
Jeannette Walls - Keyword(s): , Summer

Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book.
Anonymous - Keyword(s):

If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
Toni Morrison - Keyword(s):

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
Anna Quindlen - Keyword(s):

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
Groucho Marx - Keyword(s):

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
E.M. Forster - Keyword(s):

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
Logan Pearsall Smith - Keyword(s):

Book lovers never go to bed alone.
Anonymous - Keyword(s):

The book of the moment often has immense vogue, while the book of the age, which comes in its company from the press, lies unnoticed; but the great book has its revenge. It lives to see its contemporary pushed up shelf by shelf until it finds its final resting-place in the garret or the auction room.
Hamilton Wright Mabie - Keyword(s):

My test of a good novel is dreading to begin the last chapter.
Thomas Helm - Keyword(s):

A book is to me like a hat or coat - a very uncomfortable thing until the newness has been worn off.
Charles B. Fairbanks - Keyword(s):

If you have never said "Excuse me" to a parking meter or bashed your shins on a fireplug, you are probably wasting too much valuable reading time.
Sherri Chasin Calvo - Keyword(s):

The mere brute pleasure of reading - the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
Lord Chesterfield - Keyword(s):

An ordinary man can... surround himself with two thousand books... and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.
Augustine Birrell - Keyword(s):

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But a book is never just a book.
Anonymous - Keyword(s):

I'm a bookaholic on the road to recovery. Ha, not really. I'm on the road to the bookstore.
Anonymous - Keyword(s):

Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves.
Jeremy Collier - Keyword(s):

I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage.
Charles de Secondat - Keyword(s):

In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation.
Stephane Mallarme - Keyword(s):

Borrowers of books - those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.
Charles Lamb - Keyword(s):

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.
Oliver Wendell Holmes - Keyword(s):

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 - Keyword(s):

Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
William Styron - Keyword(s):

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy.
Edward P. Morgan - Keyword(s):

If the book is second-hand, I leave all its markings intact, the spoor of previous readers, fellow-travellers who have recorded their passage by means of scribbled comments, a name on the fly-leaf, a bus ticket to mark a certain page.
Alberto Manguel - Keyword(s):

A man may as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading.
Jeremy Collier - Keyword(s):

A good book is always on tap; it may be decanted and drunk a hundred times, and it is still there for further imbibement.
Holbrook Jackson - Keyword(s):

We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.
Henry Miller - Keyword(s):

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
Ray Bradbury - Keyword(s):

That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.
Amos Bronson Alcott - Keyword(s):

Many persons read and like fiction. It does not tax the intelligence and the intelligence of most of us can so ill afford taxation that we rightly welcome any reading matter which avoids this.
Rose Macaulay - Keyword(s):