Book Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

In his commerce with men I mean him to include- and that principally- those who live only in the memory of books. By means of history he will frequent those great souls of former years. If you want it to be so, history can be a waste of time; it can also be, if you want it to be so, a study bearing fruit beyond price.

Michel de Montaigne

When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.

William Faulkner

Eagerly I wished the morrow,—vainly had I sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Nameless here for evermore.

Edgar Allan Poe

Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned—in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?

Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers.

The book written against fame and learning has the author's name on the title-page.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties.

Agatha Christie

History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by language and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is with nations as it is with individuals. A book of history is a book of sermons.

Arthur Conan Doyle

I have heard by round about channel that Herschel says my book 'is the law of higgledy-pigglety.'

Out of monuments, names, words, proverbs, traditions, private records and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of books, and the like, we do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time.

Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure.

Friedrich Nietzsche

You gave me Christopher Robin, and then You breathed new life in Pooh. Whatever of each has left my pen Goes homing back to you. My book is ready, and comes to greet The mother it longs to see — It would be my present to you, my sweet, If it weren't your gift to me.

Have you thought of an ending?" "Yes, several, and all are dark and unpleasant." "Oh, that won't do! Books ought to have good endings. How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily ever after?" "It will do well, if it ever came to that." "Ah! And where will they live? That's what I often wonder.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Happy the people whose annals are blank in history-books!

Let the trumpet of the day of judgment sound when it will, I shall appear with this book in my hand before the Sovereign Judge, and cry with a loud voice, This is my work, there were my thoughts, and thus was I. I have freely told both the good and the bad, have hid nothing wicked, added nothing good.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything.

Which is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

In company with people of your own trade you ordinarily speak of other writers' books. The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves. Joyce was a very great writer and he would only explain what he was doing to jerks. Other writers that he respected were supposed to be able to know what he was doing by reading it.

Ernest Hemingway

When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.

The Penguin books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.

People disagreeing everywhere you look makes you wanna stop and read a book.

A book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Where is there any book of the law so clear to each man as that written in his heart?

Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about.

Ernest Hemingway