Books
Absolutely Love Books? Check Out These Quotes
I love books. (Are you surprised?) Seriously, though: I love the way they look, I love the way they smell, I love the feel of a book in my hand, I love those little notations in the very back that describe the history and style of the typeface — I love it all. More importantly, I love the stories that books contain — the ability a story has to transport me to any place and time, to make me think from different characters’ perspectives, and to make me think about my own life differently. Turns out, a lot of writers love books as well. (I know, also shocking.) Some writers love books so much that they even wrote about how great they think books are in their own books.
Now, before I get way too meta for you, I’ll get to the point: books are great, and nobody knows that better than the people who write them themselves. So, here I’ve compiled some expressions of major book love, straight from the pages of some of your favorite titles.
Here are 12 book quotes for book-lovers that describe exactly why you love books so very much — like you could ever forget. Check ‘em out.
1. “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
―J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
2. “Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.”
―Alberto Manguel, A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader's Reflections on a Year of Books
3. "Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book."
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
4. "What is this heaven? What is it we desire from the hours, weeks, lifetimes we devote to books? What would you sacrifice to sit in that comfy chair with perfect light for an afternoon in eternity, reading the perfect book, forever?”
―Audrey Niffenegger, The Night Bookmobile
5. “And people tended not to bother a woman with a book.”
―Cherie Priest, Dreadnought
6. “What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore it knows it's not fooling a soul.”
―Neil Gaiman, American Gods
7. "Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home."
―Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life
8. “Take some books and read; that’s an immense help; and books are always good company if you have the right sort.”
―Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
9. “I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me.”
―Dorothy Parker, The Collected Dorothy Parker
10. “For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”
―Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
11. “You know that feeling,” she said, “when you are reading a book, and you know that it is going to be a tragedy; you can feel the cold and darkness coming, see the net drawing tight around the characters who live and breathe on the pages. But you are tied to the story as if being dragged behind a carriage and you cannot let go or turn the course aside.”
―Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess
12. “I do things like get in a taxi and say, 'The library, and step on it.'”
―David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Image: Kate Ter Haar(3), Sarah Browning(2), Alex, Anne Adrian, Jens Schott Knudsen, Rob Faulkner, Daniel Go(2), Thomas Hawk, Rosmarie Voegtli, Several Seconds/flickr
