Bookish Quotes

I love to lose myself in other people's minds. Books think for me.

- Charles Lamb

Oh, it is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

- Oscar Wilde

A good heavy book holds you down. It’s an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.

- Roy Blount Jr

A special feature of the structure of our book is the monstrous but perfectly organic part that eavesdropping plays in it.

- Vladimir Nabokov

This book is not written in anger. It is written in fury.

- Peter Blake

There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest, “I want you to love her, too!” It is a jealous passion also. He feels a little indignant if he finds that any one else has discovered the book, too.

- Christopher Morley

My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)

- Elizabeth Bishop

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

- S.I. Hayakawa

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

- Franz Kafka

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

- Don Marquis