Welcome to the second part of our blog about books and reading quotes. You can read part 1 before this if you want to see A-L quotes. Reading those quotes resonated with me, so sharing it felt like the perfect thing to do.
Quotes about Books - M
“I spent my life folded between the pages of books. In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.”
“I love walking into a bookstore. It's like all my friends are sitting on shelves, waving their pages at me.”
“A house without books is like a room without windows.”
“I was burning through books every day - stories about people and places I'd never heard of. They were perhaps the only thing that kept me from teetering into utter despair.”
“... a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”
“I have lived a thousand lives and I’ve loved a thousand loves. I’ve walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read.”
“Sleep is good, he said, and books are better.”
“Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.”
“A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.”
“I am simply a 'book drunkard.' Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee. I cannot withstand them.”
“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
Quotes about Books - N
“I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.”
“Books are to me as homemade tattoos are to an inmate. Can't get enough of them.”
Quotes about Books - P
“I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.”
“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
“We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.”
“If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you.”
Quotes about Books - Q
“Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.”
“In books I have travelled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.”
“I can imagine no greater bliss than to lie about, reading novels all day.”
Quotes about Books - R
“There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”
Quotes about Books - S
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."
“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.”
“That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It's geometrically progressive - all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.”
“We lusty bibliophiles know that reading, unlike just about anything else, is both good for you and loads of fun.”
“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
“There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.”
“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”
Quotes about Books - T
“′Classic′ - a book which people praise and don't read.”
“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.”
Quotes about Books - V
“Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.”
“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.”
Quotes about Books - W
“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”
“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well-written or badly written. That is all.”
“Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.”
“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
Quotes about Books - Y
“Sometimes I reread my favourite books from back to front. I start with the last chapter and read backward until I get to the beginning. When you read this way, characters go from hope to despair, from self-knowledge to doubt. In love stories, couples start out as lovers and end as strangers. Coming-of-age books become stories of losing your way. Your favourite characters come back to life.”
“I only want power so I can get books.”
Quotes about Books - Z
“So many books, so little time.”
“They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?”
Conclusion
With Gabrielle Zevin ending this journey beautifully, I hope you enjoyed reading these quotes as much as I did! What was your favourite quote? I can’t choose!
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